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Chapter 11

Outside the heavily reinforced steel door to the under-basement, a tentacle beast of monstrous size even for its own kind raged and lashed and wrenched, mindlessly tearing at the steel with claws hard enough to peel scraps off its surface in a torrential rain of punishing strikes. It howled and raged, knowing only one thing in the swirling black-redness of its roaring consciousness; whatever its master wanted lay beyond this infuriatingly solid door. A solid door it was ever-so-slowly chipping through.

Behind it, a half dozen more monstrosities swarmed, lashing at the walls in futile wrath that they, too, could not seek their master's prize that was so very close. They could smell it, though not with their noses, the feeling of rage and hatred, violence and darkness that boiled behind that door, trapped and prevented from rejoining their cult's most-worshipped god.

They knew what was needed; for their master to be reborn, the great glyph of destruction had to be completed, and their many brothers and sisters were about that business in the city above, burning police stations, assaulting major highrises, causing violence and death and mayhem. In addition, their master's Power had to be released. A Power that slumbered unquietly in the soul of the young male behind that very door.

Maric's superspeed carried him around the corner and straight into their midst before the creatures even knew he was coming.

The arctic fox knew he had only instants before these monsters reacted, and their sheer number of flailing toothy limbs would block his path and render the super-speed useless. So he focused first on cutting down their number and opening himself a path.

His first slice, with the matte-black combat knife he liked for fighting up close, took the throat of his enemy's rear guard, its blood gushing forth in a slow-motion fountain as the monster's greasy black eyes widened in shock. As its tentacles tried to converge, moving slow as wintry molasses, Maric leapt up and over the lower ones, giving the thing a slash to the back of the neck for good measure, and was on to the second before the first had halfway reached the floor.

His knife came in once, twice, a third time, all before the thing could blink, slicing its throat in an x-shape and planting another bone-scraping blow into a sternum that felt close enough to that of a fur despite the thing's horrific appearance.

Super-strong but not super-tough. Right.

_ _

The creature twisted and wobbled as he jerked his blade free, pivoting on the ball of his foot to smash his foot into the side of it's head, sending the be-tentacled beast reeling in slow motion towards the wall. Knowing it was already dying, Maric continued his spin and flung the bloodied blade into the right eye of the third foe, spitting its skull and killing it instantly as his paws dropped with mechanical precision to his sidearms.

With three demon hosts down and three to go, paws so fast they diddled the sound barrier yanked the textured grips of his twin .45 USP pistols, drawing both and leveling them in a smooth and deadly motion. The fourth tentacled beast was roaring forward, tendrils flowing out around it like the medusa's hair, when Maric blurred to one side and crisply fired four shots from each sidearm into its forehead and chest. High-caliber rounds, combat-stacked with armor piercing, hollowpoint, and incendiary loads, smashed into the creature and blew it backwards in a spray of blood and smoke.

He turned to the fourth, and with his footpaws still carrying him in a weaving arc around the limited space of the chamber, blasted off another series of shots from each pistol, some caroming off the thing's carapace and others slicing or burning flesh to gory chunks. Unfortunately, he hadn't thought that the monsters might be smart enough to sacrifice themselves, a fact that came to him just as the sixth and largest monster finished sucking in breath and bellowed out a gut-churning blood-curdling squeal of rage so powerful that it blasted the sound barrier and blew out both of his ear drums, gouting blood from the fox's all too tall ears and causing him to slam into the wall as his sense of balance and equilibrium were shot to hell.

The fox threw himself flat, knowing gravity would carry him to the ground whether or not he could orient himself. He rolled to the side quickly, knowing the mighty behemoth would be on him before he could get his footpaws back beneath him, and that maintaining his speed would be just as lethal to him as the enemy when his balance was so far gone. The sound of massive, muscular tentacles pulverizing cracked concrete didn't hit his ruptured ears so much as make his gut shake from the shockwave, and patter his fur and skin with flying concrete powder.

Maric hurled himself directly away from the vibration, then rolled again, blurring to the monster's sight as his super-speed made his motions lightning-fast when re-directed away from sheer miles per hour movement. A second blow landed, and he judged the angle, knowing how far and fast he'd moved himself. Now, he calculated, there were only two places the monster could be, and one was unlikely given it was a solid bedrock wall. His eyes couldn't be trusted, as blurred and double-visioned as they were. Nonetheless, he raised the pistols and emptied them as he came to a knee

Bullets scythed through the air, impacting stone walls, floors, richocheting in white streaks or exploding in slow-moving balls of phosphorescent flame as his vision came back into focus. The monster wasn't where it should have been, and the arctic fox knew he was in trouble, as a shadow passed in slow-motion over a light that hung flickering overhead.

He dropped his left-paw pistol, leaving it floating in midair as his fingers darted down towards his belt. At the same moment, he was tensing his legs, preparing to leap even as he palmed a conical object from his tactical mesh, twisted it, and dropped it to the floor. The thought that this was going to hurt flashed through his speedy mind, and was discarded as irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, as he dropped the coke-can sized object and threw himself forward in a roll with his paws going over his head.

His monstrous foe landed with the sound of a crumbling mountain, stone shattering and dust flying as it roared and flailed, lashing at empty air with psychotic fury while driving its thousand pound bulk into the blood-soaked stone. Maric's pressure mine went off instantly when the creature's knee came down right on top of its conical tip.

The fox was flung away by its blast, his somersault-in-progress helping him ablate the force of the shock. His foe, trapped in its epicenter, was not nearly so lucky, and the singed remains of its blasted corpse flew past Maric, some bouncing off his body armor before the misty remains of its torso washed over him in a wave, vaporized by the blast.

For a moment, nothing moved in the hallway but dripping blood and tumbling parts, the smell of cordite smoke blotting out even the nauseous taste of bile in Maric's throat. Weakly, he grabbed onto an outcropping in the rough wall, and began to pull himself upright.

Set up more proximity mines, he yelled at himself, willing his body to submit to his will, there will be more any second!

_ _

Sluggishly, one paw after another, he pushed his gore-splattered boots through the slop. One step, then another, brought him to the edge of the passageway, and he leaned against the wall heavily, peering around that corner into the darkness he'd come through to get here. All the way down, he'd been chased and harried by the monsters that had so swiftly assaulted their safehouse. Now, there seemed to be none present anywhere. But his orders weren't to extract their principal. They were to defend in place, and he had faith in Obliterator's judgment if not his ethics.

Palming two more mines from his belt, Maric set them up, then dug into his tactical bag for his pair of claymore mines. They wouldn't be much, but he hoped they'd thin the enemy's numbers. In an open-field fight, he could take these things on all day thanks to his speed. Now, concussed and dizzy from ruptured eardrums, trapped in a confined space with a stationary target to defend, he was at the severe disadvantage.

Squeals, echoing from somewhere down the dark halls, told him he wouldn't have long to wait before the enemy would test his position again. The fox calmly gathered his weapons, reloaded and readied himself, pausing to wipe at his aching ears only after the other preparations were set.

John Silverstone threw himself flat as he ran back around the corner, huffing, panting, heart in his throat and a grin on his lips. His dive carried him sliding forward on the concrete, as a shrieking horde of the imbecilic but ravenous and lethal demonic monstrosities chased him. The wolf covered his head with one arm and grabbed onto an exposed pipe with the other, as the mass of monstrosity came whirling and gibbering around just a few seconds away.

Eve sprung her trap, warping gravity in a single point of the hallway, just as the front-runner of the pursuing demons was about to reach John. Its claws flashed downward in an arc so fast she could barely see it, missing the prone wolf by a hair as the induced singularity dragged their opponent's greater mass back farther and faster than the relatively light and low-density wolf. All the same, he clung to that pipe until all four pursuers were squashed together, crushed into a ball too small to see by many-times magnified gravity.

John only failed to be sucked in because Eve had seeded the hall with other gravity fields, and the wolf had, as planned, leapt into one such just before the carnage began. Unfortunately, it didn't save either of them from the singularity collapsing and hurling out a wave of liquefied demon parts that bounced and splattered harmlessly around the chamber, losing their inertia too quickly to do real harm to furs twenty feet away.

Dripping with oozing gore, hospital gown glued to her slight figure, Eve growled angrily and stalked down the hall again.

"This is taking too fucking long. Bait and trap isn't going to get us there fast enough!"

John pulled himself upright by the crumbling wall, and consulted the strange arcane compass Dr. Theorem had sent him. It pulled forward, and upward at an angle towards a point that was now moving, albeit rather slowly if he'd judged right. The wolf's stomach knotted up like he'd been sucker punched, though he wasn't going to let Eve see it on his face - His fear that Jeff was dead and the body being dragged by one of these monsters wouldn't do anyone any good.

"He's moving, and it's the best trick we've got. You ain't immune to their tentacles, Eve, if they see you from far enough away, or we get sloppy, it's all over."

"What the fuck ARE these things anyway?" Eve demanded, growling as she kicked a corpse she hadn't personally made that was riddled with bullet holes. Its blank, staring eyes, focused on nothing, looked infurry even for being dead.

"My guess? Obliterator's mask and gauntlet are finally coming for him."

"What?"

"They're a pair of demons grafted onto his body. It's a long story." Then he spotted stairs, ahead of them down the hall they'd turned into. John's snout caught the acrid stink of burnt flesh and ozone, and he wordlessly broke into a sprint.

"Hey! What happened to being careful?!"

Twenty years ago, the cougar now known as Obliterator, the scourge, the mercenary mastermind, had been an unassuming archaeological digger. A proud 'Shovelbum,' who spent his days living in tents all over the world, and digging very small trenches at snail-like paces, looking for potsherds and remnants of the ancient world. He'd been content with his lot in life, had always felt his small contributions to a growing understanding of the ancient world had been significant enough to feel as if he were a contributing member of society.

Then, one fateful stormy day in central Iraq, he had uncovered something truly significant. A tomb, fully sealed and un-defiled, unlike so many ancient burials. In excitement at what could have been the find of a lifetime, a career-making chance to make a real contribution to the archaeological community, he dug through the night with excited paws and tools.

Now, as he rose through the night on a column of demonic power, firing off lances of infernal energy that disintegrated whatever shadow beasts and tentacle monsters they touched, Obliterator wished for nothing more than the power to turn back the clock, to stop himself from opening that stone box, from touching the strange and beautiful golden half-mask that had ruined his life.

The Mask cackled into his mind, and raged, as the mighty warrior laid down a rain of destruction on his foes. These creatures had no defense against his attacks, bottled in as they were by the sheer mass of their compatriots. They descended in a column from the sky, a great tornado of carnage and warbling madness, and so many of them met his beams and were blasted to particles, or rendered to arms and legs where a torso was struck and vaporized.

They scratched and screamed, clawing at his energy shields, causing the half-mask to shriek cacophonously into Obliterator's mind, grabbing and scrabbling at his iron-like will, trying to take control of him. Yet the Void Gauntlet resisted it, fought it, demanding control for itself as it reveled in the massacre of its ancestral enemies in the great demon wars. It was in this way that Obliterator had resisted so long, had managed not to become a thrall owned through-and-through by the demon lords whose relics had melded to his flesh and bone.

He had touched the mask only once that day, and before even realizing what was happening had pressed it to his face. The burning, searing agony as it boiled through his flesh and affixed itself to his skull would later make the small pains of bullet wounds, blades, and super-powered punches laughably meaningless. It was the pain in his mind that truly registered, as he let off another terrible burst of power, shattering a dozen and more of the swarming enemy to fast-fleeing particles.

Yet still more came, funneling down and past him into the building, though he'd thinned their numbers significantly. He knew, without bothering to wonder how he'd come up with the information, that they were here for Daimon, the boy who'd paid him so very well to help destroy the Shadow Congregation. The boy who'd informed him that Warlocke had never truly died, and paid him a stupendous amount of money to assist in destroying that wicked world-shattering wrongness once and for all.

But most of all, the boy had paid with a promise - That once Warlocke was dead, he would talk to Doctor Theorem, and help to find a way to remove and destroy the Void Gauntlet and the Mask of Agonies, that which Obliterator had done everything in his power to accomplish for the last two decades. Every dirty job, every jewel heist or hero beaten down for money, every ridiculous little bush dictator killed in his bed, had all been to get the money, resources, connections he needed for one simple goal; to get the damnable things that gave him his hated powers removed, destroyed, once and for all.

So that maybe, just maybe, he could re-learn what restful sleep felt like.

For now, there was no time for such things. Now there was no time to think, only to fight, and fight he did. A swooping monstrosity three times the size of most others slammed into his shield, setting off a flash of strobing blue light that momentarily blinded its dozen faceted insectoid eyes. Obliterator blasted it, whipping the Void Gauntlet's beam across its body in a spray of disintegrating particles as it was cut in half. Another crashed into his side, breaking through the stuttering shield just long enough to grab at his face with reaching ebony claws. He twisted and forced the Mask of Agonies to bend to his will, and direct its absolutely blinded rage toward a target of Obliterator's choosing. The Mask's scarlet eye lit up, and melted his foe's iron-hard bones to jelly, sending it falling away wobbling like a boneless chicken cutlet flung into a tornado.

Another and another came at him, as Obliterator tried to force his way towards the densest part of the swirling column of foes. He broke the neck of one with a thunderous punch to the jaw, kicked its sagging corpse away, only to have two more leap on him, grabbing his potently muscled arms and yanking away from one another, trying to rip them from the socket. Undeterred, the Void Gauntlet blasted one creature's whole head to atomic ash, even as Obliterator tolerated the other one's toothy maw on his paw and smashed its skull to pulp up against the inside of his newly-regenerated shield with brutal force.

So many of them, he pondered. Obliterator knew of only two infernal summoners who could manage so many at once, and even so suspected things had gotten out of paw even for whichever one of them had started this. Such a swarm couldn't be controlled, and that would not be to the Shadow Congregation's advantage. They needed Daimon alive, at least long enough to complete their ritual. This horde had nothing but murder in their eyes. The other demon binder would never allow this many into the world, not for any reason.

A demon lord has become involved. This is not just Warlocke. The dimensional wall is breached.

_ _

For most that truly understood what such a thing could mean, that realization would have been like a stone hitting glass. For Obliterator, even with all his power and strength of will, it made his heart take a few faster thuds, as he spun and blasted out with the Void Gauntlet, clearing back a moment's worth of space in the wave of demonic evil.

Then he cut the gravity-nullifier Gyro had made for him, and dove toward the building. Whatever a demon lord wanted Daimon for, Obliterator would keep from him out of spite if nothing else.

Mack prayed silently, under his breath, that none of the monsters he was plowing through at that moment suddenly realized they weren't in fact up against a top-tier super they couldn't tear into little bloody globs. Their fear was the only reason he had any chance, the lion told himself, as he plowed a massive fist through a demon's skull as if he were punching a blob of jello. The way he smashed them aside like ninepins, Mack couldn't help but realize they must be luring the big, dumb super-strong into a trap.

Behind him, Kolter followed, walking as calmly as he would through a mall or his own office. The carnage was like window dressing, gobbets of flesh in the place of lush velvet, broken shattered limbs clawing up toward the sky like bare planter trees in winter. Robert Kolter pounded on the insides of his own head, screaming, trying to wrestle control over his body back from the laughing thing that had seized the reins.

Memory of his little conversation, with that strange black cat inside the cathedral a few days back, had rushed back in at the very moment his will had lapsed, and the cat had seized control in a blitz of overpowering force.

Now all he could do was watch, as Mack steamrolled lesser demons with furious football-esque hits of his shoulders, and massive swipes of his stone-crushing paws, all the while unaware that his true foe was standing just five feet behind him, looking at his shoulder blades and the back of his neck with laughing intent.

_How delightful all this has become, eh my boy? _ The monstrous cat snickered into his head, with a voice dripping purrs and malevolence.

Sourly, Kolter glared, forcing every bit of his rage at being so very used and violated, wishing his wrath would coalesce into a single point of purifying fire and slag his own body, just to stop what he dreaded was to come.

Fuck you, you bastard! Give me back my fucking body!

_ _

Tut-tut, my boy. You'll have your body back soon enough. I just need to get little Daimon free of this place...Back into my loving paws.

_ _

The only thing you love is yourself, Warlocke!

_ _

The cat laughed, hard and sharply, and for the first time in minutes, it came from Kolter's lips, instead of in the form of simple mental chuckles not mirrored on his form. Mack didn't notice, immersed as he was in all the mayhem his massive, powerful body was dishing out.

How ironic. The only member of this little band that could be a real threat to me, and he thinks himself the most useless, the least powerful. How amazing it is, how children are shaped by their parents, eh?

_ _

Realization hit Kolter like a bolt of lightning from the sky.

You...Daimon's your SON?

_ _

I knew you would get it eventually! Well done, my boy! You've almost entirely un-spun the riddle and determined my real purpose!

_ _

FUCK you, you FUCKING MONSTER!

_ _

All the raging, furious, bodiless voice of Kolter got in response was a laugh and a shake of the head. His own head, that he no longer controlled.

Why do you want him, Warlocke? You want to wreck his life like you've ruined mine? Is that it? You hate your family so much, you'd ratfuck every last one of us?

_ _

You're a distant and much-removed cousin, Robert, but you are still my blood. Enough so that I haven't left you utterly ruined, as you so erroneously believe. Not close enough in blood, however, for my ultimate goal.

_ _

Which is what?

_ _

Why, to be reborn! Little Daimon will live on, of course. Inside me. Some small part of me. Perhaps a bit of fat on my rump. Much like a digested donut!

_ _

Shock and horror filled the snow leopard's heart then, as he struggled around that meaty lump of terrible knowledge. He, a cop who'd always fought to stay honest, to live the good fight in his everyday life, had brought about the rebirth of Earth's most feared and terrible villain.

In that moment, he wanted nothing more than to die.

All of this...You spurring me to look into the murder at the cathedral...Getting me to contact Silverstone and his team...All of this was to help you get your body back! So you can come back to this world and send it spiraling to its destruction?

_ _

Destroy? Dear heavens no. Why would I want to destroy the world I live on? No, dear boy. I intend to OWN it.

_ _

And how the HELL are you going to do that?

_ _

Simple! My cultists will be killing Doctor Theorem as we speak. With him gone, there is no Archmagister, and thus no one to stop me from opening the Gate of Ways. That fool thinks his little pocket universe is dead! Hah! My army is hiding in it, as it has been for hundreds of years, waiting for me to have the means to open that damnable warded bronze door.

_ _

Then you're the one who brought this horde of monsters into the world? Why don't you just tell them to get out of Mack's way?

_ _

You give me too much credit, my boy. These aren't mine. Or perhaps you think me fool enough to unleash so many demons even I couldn't control them?

_ _

Then whose are they?

_ _

Haha! Who knows! That's the fun of it!

_ _

Mack's mighty paw slapped one of the demonic beasts aside, crushing its skull like an overripe melon, and bits of blood and bone splattered across Kolter's favorite longcoat. The hunting cat flinched inwardly, an instinctive desire to brush the gunk off his coat stymied by the utter paralysis placed upon him by Warlocke's control.

"Fuck...Kolter, if we don't get a break soon, I'm gonna stop getting lucky...Which way do we go from here?" the lion huffed out, as he shook gore from his fur and grimaced fearfully, as if for all the world frightened he'd be overrun at any moment by all the piles of gore he'd left in his wake.

Damnit, kid, you aren't getting lucky! You're a fucking wrecking ball with feet!

_ _

"Kid," Kolter's lips drawled, with his trademark coffee-deprived half-smile plastered across his face, "you're not getting lucky, you're a fucking wrecking ball with feet. That staircase up ahead looks promising. Pretty sure we're headed down, based on what Silverstone said."

The lion, if anything, looked embarrassed more than proud of the compliment. Mack hunched his shoulders, turned away from Kolter's stolen body, and marched for the stairs in question.

Gyro's warning rang out over Maric's earpiece just as the ground beneath his paws began an ominous rumbling that set off the vibration detector he'd slapped against the wall to warn him visually of coming threats. With his ears almost useless, ruptured by the earlier demonic shrieking, he'd had to get creative in keeping overwatch. Now, he heard a fuzzy, tinny rendition of Gyro's already-metallic voice buzz painfully into his pulsating ear drum.

Tapping a remote attached to his belt, he re-set the red LED that flashed warning on his motion detector, telling it to wait for new stimulus.

"Warning, all team: Spotter is wounded and has retreated. Obliterator is moving into the building. Lesser demon spawn appear to be retreating, as mid and high-level demons prepare for entry."

These were 'lesser' demon spawn? Oh great.

_ _

"Metas have entered the structure. John Silverstone and company, I believe."

The fox frowned slightly, as he straightened up to re-check his weapons. He didn't want to face down a bunch of amateur superheroes again, and the only veteran on that team was Silverstone himself, whose powers would be worse than worthless against an enemy of this type. The Wolf in Black's vaunted immunities would mean jack and squat against flesh-ripping demonlings.

Worse, he was probably pretty pissed about his captured teammate, and looking for revenge. Maric wasn't entirely sure, given how severely the poor kid had been tortured, that his team didn't deserve just that. Still, he wasn't planning to go out quietly.

The red light on his sensor went off again, and the arctic fox's tail twitched low to stay out of the way as he crouched, one shoulder against the wall, ready to spring off against whatever new opponent had come for the door he guarded. He didn't have long to wait. First, he felt more than heard the thudding of his claymore mines going off, flinging ball-bearings at bone-shattering velocity down the hall towards his foe.

Then, a massive golden lion bulled around the corner, footfalls heavy with mighty strength that shook dust from the walls and floor of the dilapidated basement. Covered in green and black gore from balled fists to coat-covered chest, the massive male's eyes burned with a wrathful intensity that would have made a less-experienced fur falter and fail in the face of such an aggressive rush. Maric recognized that tactic instantly, the intimidation factor most relative amateur brutes and football linemen used, to frighten their foes into non-action for that fraction of a second it took them to close. He also recognized that his claymores had utterly failed to harm the fur, only shredding his pants to scraps.

Fractions of seconds were all Maric needed, though, to stay ahead of the bruiser. As the furious behemoth stormed towards him, mouth moving in rage-filled words that sounded like slowed-down record player lyrics to the fox's still-ringing ears, Maric zipped past like a gusting breeze. Maric's left paw flew out in a blur as he blew by the surprised feline, jamming his combat knife upward at an angle towards the meaty underside of Mack's shoulder blade. The wound he intended wouldn't be lethal, just intensely painful and incapacitating.

"Where have y-"

He needn't have troubled himself. His blade struck, and the tempered spring steel snapped in half, unable to tolerate being jammed against an utterly impervious object at near super-sonic speeds. Long experience on knowing when to duck was all that saved him from being smashed like an insect when Mack's arm whirled around in a slow-motion back-paw strike that tore a gouge from the stone that would have taken hours to make with a mining pick. His long white ears were buffeted by the wind of that meaty paw's passage, even as he was rained with slow-motion chunks of newly-broken gravel, while backing away to give himself space to use his speed.

"-ou bastards put-"

Maric wanted to slow down enough to hear the lion out, in the hopes he could convince the brutal meta that they had other, worse problems to face. An onslaught of ways to have his skull crushed by flying meaty fists prevented that, though. Maric could peace together the slow-as-molasses words, but there was just no way he could respond as anything but a zipping blur of noise. Paws fast as lightning shot to his equipment netting, even as he fired off his entire pistol magazine, sending a hail of lead and incendiary rounds off to bounce ineffectually off non-lethal hit spots on Mack's impervious hide.

"my friend?!"

The fox, ever professional, analyzed as he dodged the enraged, roaring, swiping lion. His weapons and tactics had proven ineffective, but nobody was entirely invulnerable. The eyes were vulnerable on some metas, in whose case it was their skin that was invulnerable rather than their whole body. Maric didn't feel right about crippling or killing an angry college kid, though, not when he was in the right. Choking him out might have worked, but he didn't want to get in close with someone who had that much experience in football grappling.

That left very limited options, which he would have to test before committing to. Maric palmed a device from his tactical mesh, and dove to the floor in a whirring somersault that carried him under Mack's wind-cracking bone-crushing swipe. A flick of his paw flung an object the size and shape of a marble up into the air, and splattered it across Mack's eyes as the little black paint ball exploded from the impact.

For a moment, Maric's heart jolted as he thought the tactic had failed. If Mack couldn't be poisoned and wasn't affected by irritants, he'd have no choice but to use far more lethal and dangerous tactics. Then the lion let out a roar of anger and agony, and staggered away a few steps, choking and grabbing at his eyes as they filled with tears and his muzzle with snot, his lungs seizing as the pepper spray filled paint ball's payload met with his mucous membranes and nerves.

"AUGH YOU FUCK!"

Maric's paws flew to his belt bag again, and he flung more of the balls. Despite the things being primarily a riot control technique, he'd found them invaluable over the years for incapacitating opponents he couldn't beat in a fair fight. Puff after puff of noxious, cloying capsaicin flew up off Mack's chest and face as the lion thrashed about on the ground, pulverizing stone and sending flying fragments into the air as he blindly tried to defend himself.

Finally, curling into a ball, the massive footballer just tried to keep breathing, rasping and gasping as Maric at last backed away, relenting when he realized he'd used half of a hundred-round case on the beast of an opponent.

Maric let out a gusty breath of relief, as his screaming, exhausted legs finally came to a standstill, and he slouched up against the wall, panting with exertion. Despite his intense physical conditioning and many years of experience, there was only so long the speedster could maintain his pace, and the arctic fox's lungs burned with the desire for more air to replace what his super-fast muscles had burned. Then his brain tingled with thought, and his eyes shot back behind where Mack had come from, realizing suddenly that there had been a second person there all along.

Stupefied that he'd missed someone for just a moment, Maric blinked and stared at the snowy-white leopard that stood there in his trench coat and hat, smirking as if he had just somehow won. Maric remembered this male, a police detective his crew had nearly killed not long ago. The smirk made his blood run cold, even as he raised the taser from his belt and settled its aperture in that leopard's direction.

"Stand down...Detective...I've no desire to hurt you..."

"Of course not," the detective responded, in a voice dripping with promises of pleasant, horrific things. "Then again, you couldn't if you wanted to."

Maric had just enough time to widen his eyes before the detective raised a paw, crooked it into a claw shape, and barked a shattered word that sent the arctic fox to the ground choking and foaming as a swarm of chaotic magical energy sent his brain into the terrible wracking thunderstorm of a grand mal seizure.

Daimon, the Nightmare Demon, could feel a sensation like insects burrowing through his brain, and it made him curl up on the floor, claws dug into his sides as he shook and snarled in furious, helpless rage. That sensation leapt through his body in intermittent surges, tearing up his nerves with that oh-so-familiar and hated knowledge. His father was near, and now he was trapped behind a door of warded iron, put up by the very meta who he'd hired to ensure his own safety and victory.

He could feel as much as hear the demonic army that swarmed through the complex above, as itching, bubbling burns on his brain. Even through thick stone walls of the apartment building's bedrock-surrounded basement, their warbling keens called to him, reminded him of his long and awful childhood trapped in the care of the Shadow Congregation's cruel love. His only solace were the cool, withered paws that gently kneaded his shoulders, despite the awkward angle, the elderly priest respecting his desire for silence as Daimon struggled with his own hated helplessness.

Dover's eyes stayed to his charge, ignoring the door, which sat ominously silent despite the chaos Daimon had told him was above. In all his years, the elderly priest had confronted many demons, but none of them of the physical sort. He felt fear only for the poor boy that lay beneath his paws, struggling with an inner war Dover had only seen the surface of. That which drove the deadly, disturbed young male would take a long time to ferret out.

"When he comes," Daimon whispered in a harsh, hoarse whisper, at long last breaking the dripping silence of the damp under-basement, "I want you to hide. He will kill you just to hurt me, priest."

Father Dover, who had never been overly concerned about what would happen after his death, just chuckled softly and kept rubbing the tense young cat's shoulders.

"Daimon, the day I hide from darkness is the day I stop being any use to the world."

To that, the black-furred feline gave a grating, humorless laugh of resignation and bitterness.

"Then you'll be taken from me like everything else. Stupid old idiot."

"Never. I won't let that happen."

"He won't give you the choice."

"There is always a choice, Daimon, between light and darkness. Have some faith."

"Faith?" The word rolled from the youth's maw like a corpse dropped from a crashed hearse, riddled with derision, spite, the raw poison of anger.

"In yourself. In God, in me...Whatever. In something, Daimon, or you will never be free of him. Your hopelessness is his greatest weapon against you."

Like the perverse inversion of a tolling bell, silence blotted out the room's noises, as an aura beyond ominous, insidious and clinging to their skin with a clammy unpleasantness, slithered from behind that warded door. Daimon looked up, bloodshot eyes narrowing as he pushed Dover's paws away and began to slowly, laboriously stand. The old priest felt a strange sense in his limbs, like he'd once gotten in his younger days near the end of a marathon run, when he could see the finish line ahead. The certainty that something would soon be ending, a strange anticipation of relief mixed with the trepidation of knowing the hardest stretch of track was yet to come.

"Daimon, why does he want you so badly?"

"Because I have most of his magic, locked up inside my body. He needs it. He has the knowledge to use it...I just have the juice, without the training."

"So that's how you..."

"Make the nightmares. Yeah. I'm a doorway to another world...World full of evil and death. I was born to be this. I'm not even giving them nightmares...I'm opening the door that's already in their head, to see a place they should never go."

"Then...Creating nightmares isn't all you can do, is it?"

The Nightmare glanced back toward Father Dover again, and his eyes were dark with the weight of his responsibility, shimmering with tears borne of year of frustration and suffering, discipline and self-denial.

"It's the only thing I can do that's...Stable...I can throw power, but it's not...Not subtle. Or controllable."

"This world is lucky, Daimon, that you chose to restrain your power."

Daimon turned, just enough to show Dover one bloodshot eye. It was half-lidded, downcast, wet with a shimmering tear that looked no more likely to be shed than the sky seemed likely to fall.

"And when I am dead, the world won't even know," he said, in a hoarse whisper.

"Does that change anything?"

Daimon stared at the ground then, quietly for a moment, even as the iron door began to show signs of heat, a dark reddish tone becoming evident at its edges.

"No," he whispered quietly, even as he reached back a shaky, hesitant paw. Dover took it, just as the cat began to speak again. "I'd still oppose my father, even if I'd known from the beginning nobody would ever know."

Dover's smile firmed, along with his conviction on what to do.

One moment, they had been standing in the dimness of that dank underground chamber, watching a door turning cherry red along the edges. Then there was a noise like thunder, echoed a thousand times into a wave of pure sound, as the wards shrieked and gave way under the terrible assault of arcane horror beyond. It flew from the hinges, flying over the old priest and young cat's heads to slam into the wall with a horrible dissonant toll.

Daimon knew not to be surprised by any form his father wore. Warlocke had transubstantiated out of that inane cat body by now, he was certain. So, unphased by the exploding door, he shoved Dover back and rushed the bloody-mawed and laughing snow leopard without hesitation, snarling and hurling the full brunt of his nightmare-inducing power at the monstrous villain.

Warlocke staggered back a step, loafers sliding on the gore-coated floor, hissing out in cobra-like fury as he brought a paw up to his face in a reflexive block, before slashing his paws forward in a whip-like motion that sent a crackling blast of purple eldritch lights knifing for Daimon's face. Ready for them, Daimon threw his arms up and shouted a word that slithered across the air like burning grease on water, smashing the many-colored lights aside in a blast of black flame that narrowly missed Warlocke's stolen face.

It cost him the initiative, however, and Warlocke's superior study and expertise showed in his swift and potent incantation, as he hurled another blast of power at the swiftly-defending Daimon, then another and another. Warlocke's borrowed visage twisted into an unnatural rictus grin of fury and laughter, as he flung blast after blast and forced Daimon to focus his effort on defense, unable to win himself the time to counter.

"Is this all, my little boy?" he crowed, cackling as his paws curled into crackling claw shapes, limned in sickly purple light. "All that power! All that training, and all you can do is frighten?!"

Daimon's back fetched up against the wall, and the young cat made a noise somewhere between a grunt and a groan, the pressure of so much magic forcing the air unwillingly from his lungs. Planting a foot against the wall behind him, he physically pushed back against his father's overwhelming craft, crossing his arms with his palms facing outward as he hissed words of power and mystical will that he'd cobbled together from the fractal teachings of his youth.

"No, father," he hissed out, clenched teeth groaning from the strain, "I just refuse...To be YOU!"

Then he threw himself forward, kicking off the wall against that inexorable tide of power, even as he thrust his will forward with every bit of might he could summon from the core of hatred and misery that fueled his very being at that moment. He dredged up all the memories; the cold laughter of his 'loving' foster-parents within the Congregation, all the days spent enduring their cruel games and harsh teachings, the nights spent trying to hide his tears from those who would punish him for such weakness.

All of that, and his very current fears, he stuffed into the generator of magical power that dwelled in his body, converting it into pure uncontrolled energy that he flung from his paws in a sudden shriek of rage and air torn asunder by a current of otherworldly power that tore the laws of reality like a soggy piece of paper.

The magical might blasted through Warlocke's defensive wards, burning them off with fizzling cracks of failing power batted aside like so much dross in a hurricane. The stone of the basement floor shivered and wrinkled, growing cherry red under the sudden surge of volcanic heat and uncontrolled mystic rage. Brilliant light in colors the mortal eye couldn't define flared and blazed about the room, as Daimon unleashed the massive stored energy his body had been born for the sole purpose of containing.

When it was gone, there was nothing where Warlocke had stood in Detective Kolter's body. Exhausted, gasping, bathed in sweat, Daimon stared blankly at the spot where his father had been, before slouching back against the stone wall.

"Gods," he whispered, "It's finally over..."

"DAIMON, NO!" Father Dover yelled.

Before the black cat could turn, the elderly priest burst past him in a surprising display of athleticism for such old and withered limbs. Dread surged through Daimon's heart, a sick sense of foreboding terror, as he turned, time seeming to slow as he realized what had just happened.

Warlocke had summoned the simplest of illusion spells, and been funneling his magic through them; what Daimon had destroyed wasn't his father, but a simple magical simulacrum. Though he vastly outweighed Warlocke's current body in shear volume of contained magic, he realized in that moment just how much his father outweighed him in magical guile, trickery, deceit, and technique.

And cruelty.

The cackling, exultant snow leopard's eyes bled from the corners, as Warlocke's blast of magic, intended for Daimon, struck the elderly Father Dover straight in the center of his chest, sending him sailing like a torn piece of sail in a storm to slam up against the far wall.

"No," Daimon croaked, as he tried to raise his paws again, and found them to be boiled noodles, energyless after his massive expenditure of futile power. He sagged to his knees then, and turned his eyes away from the deadly Warlocke, to stare in helpless pain at the crumpled, bloody mess that had been Father Dover. The elderly fur lay bent at an unnatural angle against the wall's base, brittle bones smashed to pieces. He was smiling, a grim sort of determined look, mirrored by the fading light in his glimmering old eyes.

Warlocke's paw grabbed onto the back of Daimon's neck with vice-like force.

"You see, my son. Power does not come from love. Give me your body, and I will set you free of all this. You won't ever have to hurt again, I promise."

The black cat closed his eyes, as acidic tears leaked down freely onto his stinging face. Dover had been kind and good to him, and now lay dying in a moldy cellar in a building full of screaming devils. Worst of all, his ploy to end his hated father's plan had failed. In moments, the most horrific villain their world had ever known would be whole again, and free to wreak his very vicious brand of havoc.