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Chapter 12

Xolotl laughed, and moved, crackled, and danced, to the pounding beat of drums only he could hear. And as he danced, the lightning flowed, the thunder roared, and the demons died in their shrieking droves as the unleashed Lord of Lightning whirled his cadence of death through their midst. Arcing wattage and amperage that shattered plaster from walls, melted copper piping to slag, and burst demon spawn like rotting watermelons, the black god of death and thunder let out rolling, booming laughter as he paw-stomped and hopped, whirled and threw his bolts of fulminous light into his weakling foes.

Somewhere in the back of his head, Jeff Castillas watched in detachment, as his naked, piss-stained body whirled and stamped and killed, as lightning arced in cerulean blue and scarlet over his sable fur. He could feel the tickling of that drug he'd been pumped full of, that had made all stimuli resolve in his brain as sensation so powerful it sent him into screaming paroxysms. Now, it felt more like a dance of pure sensation, untinged by fear or suffering, instead filled with a strange ecstatic exultation that made him feel strangely like laughing and dancing and wriggling in every way his body could manage.

Which, strangely, it seemed to be doing all on its own, as if animated by some possessing force and not the sort of dissociative episode Jeff detachedly judged he was now suffering. Prolonged torture and sleep deprivation, he guessed, were the likely culprits, paired with a trembling terror of death and writhing rage at foes who had incapacitated him. He was also, he registered detachedly, scared as hell for his friends, whose fates he still didn't know.

All of this seemed to play out before him, in the murderous spiral of destruction his body and power wrought on the demon spawn that swarmed toward him in an inexorable tide of claws and black chitinous flesh, chittering and shrieking and exploding like popped pimples when the weight of the swarm's passage pushed them too close. Meanwhile, his body kept belting out rolling laughter, a now hoarse-throated boom that rolled through an almost musical crescendo to the beat of his slaughter-soaked song.

Just ten feet behind him, wrapped in the concealment of adaptive camouflage that played through fiber-optics that replaced most of his natural fur, Gyro crouched low and kept back just to be safe as he observed and made use of this trail of destruction. The red panda's chill, mostly emotionless mind looked on in calculation and surprise at the sheer destructive capacity of his former captive, creeping along behind him while waiting for orders from Obliterator.

Though his mostly-artificial body was fairly well-armored, and he had a half dozen weapons systems either mounted in his flesh or carried on his person, Gyro had never much relished the unscientific chaos of combat. The chance of being filleted by one of these betentacled monstrosities was too high if he engaged directly, so for the moment he was more than content to stay low, keep his magnetic rail pistol ready to paw, and let the walking reactor take all the heat.

Then his built-in sensors picked up some very odd readings, and the red panda tilted his head while trying to make sense of them. He saw air motion, a sudden drastic shift in barometric pressure, followed by a backlash in the same, all in the span of instants, pulsing repeatedly as if multiple explosions were going off somewhere nearby without any sign of explosive residue in the air.

The demons seemed to notice it too, though it did them little good against the rampaging jaguar and the seemingly endless reactor his body inexplicably embodied. Rarely in his life had Gyro ever encountered a meta whose abilities could not be explained via altered genetics or a body with unusual structures. Jeff Castillas, it would seem, broke all of his rules. A perplexing problem to the red panda cyborg. Almost as perplexing was why the demonic entities kept turning their heads, looking off down the hallway behind them that was filled with their own, as if they sensed something he couldn't, or perhaps had some information he lacked about what he was sensing.

Jeff Castillas' body, dancing a strange stomping, sliding number, arcing with more electricity than Gyro's sensors could immediately measure, whirled one more time and let off a bellowing roar that dug up a strange neck-tingling sense of terror Gyro didn't know he still possessed. Some atavistic instinct from deep inside the still-flesh part of his brain told him to run, to hide in a dark place and hope some nightmarish unknown night-stalking beast didn't find him. More stunned by the sudden emotion than the fear itself, the cyborg stayed momentarily still, and Xolotl moved that much further away up the hall.

Jeff watched, as if he were a stranger gazing out through the window of his own eyes, as he whirled a corner and hurled another fulminous, hissing thunderous blast, blowing demons apart in a wave of death and snake-writhing power. At its other end, just past where the lightning diverged and grounded itself out in the smoking, cracked walls, another shape made itself evident to the rampaging jaguar. One that made his detached, strangely calm thoughts shiver strangely, as some well of emotion managed to leak into a part of his mind that found his own feelings alien and frightening.

Reacting to that same fear with what Jeff supposed was furious rage, his body, Xolotl, twisted and roared, and hurled a bolt of energy so potent the walls were left smoking and cracked by its passage. Floor tiles curled up like dead roaches, ceiling spackle shattered from the sudden shift in heat and pressure, electrical sockets smoked and let off the stink of burnt plastic and hot copper. The strange target stumbled back a step, but seemed utterly unharmed. Then it began to advance, slowly, waving its arms in some strange pattern that set off warnings in some part of Jeff and Xolotl's shared thoughts.

Xolotl's dance began again in earnest, stomping his paws on the floor, sliding his fingers over his frizzed, arcing fur, whirling his body in a circle as the strange foe came forward. He launched dazzling blasts of energy again and again, each time to no effect, and boiled with frustrated wrath and building terror of this foe that could not die. To Jeff's disconnected mind, the strange blurry thing seemed to be cackling as it approached, knowing it could not be stopped.

His body was preparing to exert one of his least creative and most brutal tactics. He would emit such a blast of current that the building's copper pipes would slag. Then he was going to direct the molten metal, through current and magnetism, to slam into his foe.

Patricia 'Tish' Henry, inheritor of the mantle of the Iron Horse, had just finished laying her two mostly-unconscious police furs down on the ragged sleeping bag she called home when the windows of her home, an abandoned apartment building where she'd been squatting the last few months, blew out with a thunderous burst and a chorus of tinkling shards. A horrific ear-rending shriek of a thousand whirling demons and blustering tornado-like wind followed through the hole. Growling under her equine breath, the Arabian filly first went about cleaning up the glass with a half a broom she'd scrounged from a dumpster the day before. Then she stomped over to what had been a blacked-out window just minutes before and glared outside, fully intending to give gun-slinging gang-bangers a piece of her rather infuriated mind. Which she intended to follow with a life-altering ass-whipping.

The whirling black vortex of tentacle-flailing monstrosities that descended from ink-dark night sky to the rooftop of the building across her trash-strewn street left the horse dropping that thought about her usual prey like a pair of dirty socks. A quick glance back told her the two cops would keep for a bit, hopefully long enough for the ambulance to arrive. Then she vaulted out the window, and dropped like a stone down four stories of apartment to land with a crashing crunch as her steely body shattered already-fractured pavement beneath her knee and hoof. The little black filly straightened with a smirk, as she un-shouldered her hammer, kissed it's work-worn surface, and took off at an unstoppable, enthusiastic stride towards the whirling chaos ahead of her.

In the back of Tish's mind, she could hear the angry songs of her worker ancestors, the many ghosts who spoke to her through John Henry's right-paw sledge. Many of them had been good Christians in their day, and were righteously infuriated by the intrusion of hell-spawn on their world. Many were worried for anyone trapped inside that hell-filled building. Some few, from the days before John Henry's heroic tale had transfigured the hammer from whatever it had been before him, whispered to her quiet truths and experiences about what she could expect from the things she marched towards.

All spoke to the young woman of encouragement, a heady susurrus of affirmation and whispered encouragement from her ancestors both physical and spiritual. Tish hefted the sledge, grinned, and walked right up to the front doorway, which she noted with a sense of disappointment had already been kicked in by someone who'd ruined her favorite entrance.

"Okay motherfuckers!" she yelled through that yawning doorway, at the noises of battle and death and warbling monstrosities beyond. "You fucked around on my doorstep! I'm gonna fuck around on your FACE!"

With a burst of steam that howled from her snout, the living locomotive, inheritor of the mantle of responsibility for protecting the working class, Iron Horse strode through the yawning doorway and into the monster-filled darkness beyond. Rather than feeling fear, she was filled with a sense of hopping anticipation.

Eve stumbled barefoot over a pile of smoldering demon corpses as she struggled to keep up with the sprinting, long-legged, booted wolf. The diminutive vixen winced, and rolled to her feet, feeling all too well the bruises that were going to be blossoming on her knees. What would be smoldering in her mind after seeing those blasted bodies was of secondary concern as she shouted out to him.

"John! Hff...Slow down!"

Something, she knew, was very wrong. The air stank worse than anything she'd ever encountered, and her whole nearly-naked body felt like someone had thrown her in an industrial clothes-drier. Every fur seemed to be fighting to stand on end, and every footstep made the soft pelt on her thighs rub together with distressing little zapping sensations. Skinny little Eve wasn't even used to her thigh fur touching in the first place.

With her radar-dish ears twisting back and forth in the charged and deadly air, she was starting to pick up the noise of metal vibrating, a high-pitched whine filled with low-toned noises like a bell being thumped with a hammer. This was why John was in such a rush, she figured. This smelled like Jeff's handiwork, only to a level well beyond anything she'd ever experienced him doing.

"John! Hff...Wait! It could be a demon or something!" she yelped after her sprinting partner, as her short legs pumped, struggling to keep up as they scrambled hell for leather down that charnel basement hallway. The normally calm, collected veteran hero ahead of her had his shoulders down, arms pumping, as he sprinted with all of his long-legged speed down one hallway, cornered into the next, and pulled up to a stop that had him straightening to his full six foot height.

John Silverstone straightened to his full height, gut churning with so many hours of worry that everything from his chest down felt like it was full of acid. He'd known, since before he'd even gotten out of that hospital bed, that tonight he would face metas far beyond his own level. Obliterator gave him the shakes, deep down in his knees, though he'd never let the others see a crack in his façade of supreme cool confidence. Such an eventuality was worth it, though, if he could just save his friend from this horror.

Just then he was giving thought to the fact that Obliterator would never summon a swarm like this. He would never truck with the demonic hordes that lingered outside the walls of reality. From what he'd read of the mighty archvillain, he would never even do business with something so unpredictable and insane. Nevermind aid something whose stated purpose was to unmake the very world.

Then he rounded a corner, and saw what he'd been racing towards, and the wolf's heart leapt from its usual place straight into his throat.

Down a hall strewn with the steaming, lightning-scorched remains of dozens of demon spawn, a shadow black as night stood mid-beat in a strange dance, wreathed in the corpse-smoke of the charnel battlefield. Its eyes glowed an azure blue mixed through with flashes of light, and zapping chitters of seething electrical power danced along its umbral form. It was male, by the silhouette he saw, and bent forward with one knee raised up, arms paused as if frozen in mid-pump.

John recognized the image, from an old Aztec painting he'd seen printed in a book somewhere. The sense of sickness and vertigo in his gut ratcheted for a moment, then died down as he called out, in a soft voice.

"Jeff?"

The howling lightning bolt struck him straight out, dead in the chest, but John knew damn well it wouldn't hurt him. That intense, body-frying surge of current simply passed through him harmlessly, grounding out through his boots. He knew in that moment that Jeff was traumatized, likely high on interrogation drugs, unable to recognize his friends and differentiate them from the howling, blood-thirsty beasts invading Obliterator's lair.

So, the wolf put one foot in front of the other, held his arms out wide with his palms showing, and started to walk forward speaking in a calm, soothing tone.

"Jeff, it's me, John. John Silverstone. You remember me, right?"

The shadowy form blinked once, and just stared with baleful lack of recognition. The wolf raised his paws higher, and waved them, hoping to catch the black leopard's eye, remembering from somewhere that cats saw motion better than just shapes.

"Jeff! C'mon man, snap out of it!"

Rough panting, almost hyperventilation, answered him, as the wolf started to slowly, cautiously step forward through the charnel house of a hallway. As he walked, his gut roiled and churned with fear for his lover, and a desire to let out a wracking sob of anger and helplessness. John refused himself the luxury. Then he felt his fur starting to rise, and registered that such a thing shouldn't happen just from Jeff's usual use of power.

The walls were humming, shivering, plaster chipping and cracking away as he realized something was very, very wrong.

"No," the shadowy form whispered, as the walls began to quake and shiver, steam and crunch. "No!" it yelled again, and thrust its arms forward as John took another step, heavy work boots crunching in the growing carpet of debris.

"Jeff," the wolf said, his voice wavering as he came close enough to pick out detail. The jaguar's fur was matted with sweat and blood, and though the meta's intense electrical field had cooked all the moisture out, John could smell the stink of fear urine rank on his erstwhile lover's body. One more step brought his jaguar fully into view.

Jeff Castillas' all-black fur was splattered with gore, bits and chips of gristly bone and slagged, carbonized flesh from the monsters he'd waded through. Beyond that, his fur was matted down, glued together in places, especially down his thighs where the cat had clearly soiled himself repeatedly. His wrists were raw, and one of the footpaws on which he'd been wildly dancing looked bent, broken, and had left bloody pawprints behind him down the hall. He wore not a stitch of clothing.

His eyes were the worst part. The dark orbs reflected all the energy his jaguar emitted, seeming to dance with a thunderstorm within them. They also stared, wide and horrified, into John's own brown ones, and shifted about as if seeking a route of escape. There was no recognition in them John could see, and as he heard the walls begin to groan, and Eve start to yelp at him in furious warning, the wolf realized that Jeff was preparing to attack him in order to defend himself from what he saw as a threat. The only threat here that seemed to phase him in the least.

The jaguar was terrified, John realized with a start, because he was now standing in front of something that wasn't here to kill him. His fight or flight reaction was running so strong that something that didn't fit into it wasn't computing. Backing off would be the smart thing to do - it would give Jeff time to come down from what amounted to a major-league panic attack mixed with super power. Super power strong enough to bring the whole building down around their ears, if this went on long enough.

With a quick motion, John gambled, walking straight up to his shaking, arcing boyfriend, and grabbed onto the crunchy-furred filthy jaguar, pulling his short muzzle down against the leather of his duster's shoulder. One paw on the back of Jeff's head, the other around his naked waist, he held tight to the younger fur's quaking body, as a sudden, wracking, painful sob tore from the youth's chest, up through his throat, and out his chattering jaw.

"Y-you c-c-came...I kn-knew y-you would..."

"Shh, Jeff. Babe, it's gonna be alright. You'll be okay. We just gotta get outta here. Think you can hold it together that long?"

"I'm afraid," a dull, monotonal voice spoke from somewhere in the blacked-out hallway, causing Jeff to stiffen up all over again and then break into wracking cries of terror as he clung to John with all his strength, "that leaving is simply no longer an option."

John's spine stiffened, and the growl that tore from his throat spoke of blood and slaughter, gristle and murder, as he gazed balefully for any sign of where Gyro's voice issued, only to find none. The droning cyborg continued to speak.

"Warlocke is here, Silverstone. Obliterator is headed to the basement to confront him, before he can re-take his full power from our principal. You should not have interfered...But now we need your help."

"And if I refuse to help you, you torturing fuck?"

"Then I will have no choice but to detonate the bombs that riddle this structure, and kill us all in the hopes it will crush Warlocke before he can retrieve the source of his power out of Daimon Locke. His son."

Warlocke stood, Kolter's body holding him up with admirable muscle strength, as he clenched his paw around Daimon's throat and held the struggling, slender boy aloft while choking the life and magic out of him. With every passing moment, he wrenched more and more of his old power from the child, streamers of pure magical energy tearing free of Daimon's tattered soul and hurtling into Warlocke's ears, eyes, and mouth in purple and black streams of dark power that made him laugh in ticklish viciousness at the sheer joy of their struggle.

The boy had surprised him, with his willpower. To survive the process so long was impressive, even as Warlocke's cruel power ripped its way free of Daimon's soul without a moment's gentleness or care for his condition. Such a potent store of magical energy couldn't be easily controlled. Such a waste, Warlocke mused, and only exacerbated by his wayward son's struggling.

"Be still, Daimon, and you might just live through this. If you do, I will teach you to master the Power, so that one day when I die, you can inherit my place!"

To his surprise, the boy managed to marshal enough energy to open his eyes, though his limbs remained slack, drained of energy, dripping blood that seeped from his very pores as the magic tore its way through his body. Daimon kicked his feet, where they dangled off the ground, and managed just barely to choke out words around the paw that nearly sealed off his airway.

"Go...To hell!"

With a snarl, Warlocke slammed his son's back against the cracked stone wall, enjoying the crunching noise of cracking ribs Daimon seemed to not even notice. Infuriated by the insult, the disrespect, he howled into the child's face from Kolter's blood-flecked lips.

"Idiot! Do you even know what power and majesty you are denying? Do you?! You would be a king, and I an emperor! Our people would rule this world beneath us forever! Anything you could want would be yours!"

Daimon's eyes, glittering red in the light of their hellish magical environs, tilted downward at the crumpled corpse of Father Dover, then slid slowly, shakily up to met his father's with a baleful hate-filled glare.

"I...Want...you...dead...!"

Warlocke was old beyond believing, so much that he remembered the Burning Times firsthand. He'd helped instigate them, to cull his competitors for the limited amount of dark magic available in those days. He had witnessed slaughter and hypocrisy, greed and plague, yet nothing had made him so furious as this. To have his own son, blood and flesh of his blood, reject his offer of power in such a way was anathema, and he nearly made the mistake of crushing Daimon's throat like a grape in his clenched fist.

Red fury clouded his vision, and he leaned in closer to the boy, glaring hatred and wrath into the boy's bloodshot eyes. They stared right back at him, fearless, daring him to act. The ancient monster, master black wizard of a foreign and dark dimension, simmered with broiling rage at the flippant dismissal of an offer he could not ever conceive of having refused himself.

Then Warlocke clucked, and chuckled, realization sliding over him, the anger fading away as if it had never been, replaced immediately with an odd sort of amused pride. He began to chortle, gutturally, as he massaged the boy's struggling throat with his fingers, enjoying the play of pain such a motion must have caused to the paw-shaped bruises already purpling there.

"Clever boy. You would have me kill you before I'm done transferring power. What's left of it inside you would go with your soul when it fled. Clever clever."

A shiver worked its way down the sorcerer's throat, as he swallowed the largest gulp of his old power yet, and as it formed into a burning sort of euphoria, he watched the misery it caused in his son and reveled in the symmetry. Whether Daimon liked it or not, he was dying so his father could live, suffering agonizing pain for the pleasure Warlocke experienced retrieving his power.

"Victory...Is MINE!" the sorcerer crowed.

The hulking figure that stepped silently over Mack's half-conscious form would have retorted with a snappy line, if he had been anyone but the Obliterator. 'You haven't won yet,' might have been an appropriate entrance for some. Perhaps 'over my dead body!' from others. Obliterator's opening snappy line was a terrible, air-ripping explosion of murderous hellish energy that tore from the Void Gauntlet and blasted toward Warlocke's bloodied, muddied, trenchcoat-covered back.

Warlocke dropped Daimon, who flopped bonelessly to the floor, as the disintegration ray hit his wards and empowered coat, and launched the sorcerer across a chamber that suddenly reeked of brimstone and chattered with distant shrieking of damned souls. Twisting in mid-flight, the snow leopard body he wore like a suit threw out its right paw, and sent a surge of arcane energy outward to turn that wall's solid stone to slithering beetles and bleeding flesh, softening the blow enough that when he slammed into it, the wall absorbed the impact more than his fragile shell, with a horrible crunching splatter.

Obliterator knew he was up against the Warlocke, a vicious cunning creature of divine might and Chthonic magic, and strode into the room unleashing a terrible blast of power from the Void Gauntlet, even as the half-mask of demonic entity grafted to his face began to chatter and glow from his covered eye in a baleful bloody light. His next blast seemed to drain what color there was in the underground light, as it hurtled forward only to slam into a black, blood-dripping spectral shield Warlocke threw from his left paw.

The shrieking of lost and stolen spirits had intensified instantly upon that thunderous impact, and with a dour note, Obliterator learned that Warlocke was powering himself off the very stuff of lost souls. That their expenditure ended their torment was little consolation, for only oblivion awaited such unfortunates. In glimmering, hellish lettering that slithered across the snow leopard's trench coat, Obliterator's demonic eye read the words 'Torquemada's Inquisition,' in the Abyssal tongue, even as parts of the phrase were burning up, their energy expended. Another was already lighting up, scribbled half-superimposed upon that previous one.

If he had any sympathy for those souls, likely stolen from Torquemada's death toll and not its sum total, Obliterator showed it not for an instant. Nor did he show the slightest ounce of hesitation as he pressed his assault, storming towards Warlocke's crouched form. Another punishing blast of his gauntlet scythed forward, only to be deflected with a yelling grunt of effort by the backpedaling, chanting, circling wizard. He followed it immediately with another and another, praying inwardly that he could keep Warlocke on the defensive, overwhelm the arch-mage before he could martial a counter-attack.

For in a battle between foes who were even close to nearly matched in power, the only way to calculate the collateral damage would be to multiply their powers together and extrapolate for the sheer chaos of a battle in which either of them could die at any moment. In other words, he knew such a fight could wreck half the city, not to mention kill countless people who were far more useful to the Obliterator alive.

He could spare barely a single moment to evaluate the battlefield, but it was just barely enough. Daimon was clearly down, though alive, breathing, bleeding from every orifice as the tormented black cat crawled one-pawed toward the crumpled body of his priest friend. Maric had been unconscious in the hall, covered in muzzle foam from a seizure. He also saw what Warlocke was doing just before the mighty evil sorcerer unleashed his counterattack.

The snow leopard body had been tracing a circle with the backpedaling of its feet, a common containment ring for the energy buildup required for powerful spellcasting. Warlocke's great age, guile and potency, however, showed with what he'd already placed in its heart. In an instant, lines of crimson light exploded from nothing, filling that simple circle with a complex arcane diagram that shimmered and writhed with power and cyclopean, wriggling whorls and patterns. A formula, the archaeologist in Obliterator's past said, though he had no time to determine for what. A formula whose midst he was now standing in.

Not before it was suddenly and fully powered by a burst of energy emitting from Warlocke's muzzle as it slithered through a howling incantation that caused those lines to light up with the sullen savagery of fresh magma. Obliterator forced his will on the mask, reflexively crushing its snarling, maddened demands with one inexorable command of his own.

Warlocke's formula snapped together, and the suddenly bloody-lipped leopard wracked his face with a vicious, sinister smile. Obliterator didn't have enough time to dodge, as the circle hummed, crackled, and then exploded in a column of hellfire and magical energies designed to tear apart anything unfortunate enough to be in their midst. Obliterator had eschewed the chance at an open shot in order to cover his face with both of his arms, crossing the Void Gauntlet over his powerfully muscled other one, just in time for the Mask to open its half of his maw and make a most horrible sound.

As if shattering glass, a thunder burst, and a sonic boom had made some unholy baby, the mask shrieked not outward but inward in its native tongue. Air exploded into a roar as it was superheated by the hellfire blast Warlocke had summoned, only to be dragged inward at speeds well beyond any wind the world had ever seen. The mask shrieked in its anger, from the air and overwhelming power that burst past its curved, barbed half-maw of fangs, on its way downward to the spiraling pit from which it had been born.

Even with the terrible Mask's aid, Obliterator was unable to divert the entire blast. In a rising column of destruction and purpling flame, the spell rocketed outward and upward, disintegrating bedrock and masonry, plaster and metal, tearing through the already-savaged building in a roar of exploding matter and obliterated demons.

Then, before the blast had even ended, Warlocke was weaving his paws through his next spell, while shrieking out for all to hear.

"You have demons grafted to you! I am the master of the Abyssal Magics! I am the greater among us! Die, fool!"

Smoking, his once-golden fur burnt to blackened crisp, his skin reddening with the heat he couldn't quite stop, Obliterator nonetheless strode forward, and slammed a fist powered by mighty muscle and terrible will through Warlocke's magical defense, shattering the shielding spell to a thousand cutting pieces before smashing into the sorcerer's borrowed chest.

"You talk too much," the cougar snarled, shrugging off a half-powered blast as Warlocke dug himself out of the crumbling wall. Masonry was slamming to earth all around them now, as the building groaned and wobbled like a wounded drunk, bits of its structure crumbling away as it battled gravity, its central support structure almost completely ruined by the apocalyptic blast of earlier.

Once again, Obliterator led with a blast from the Void Gauntlet, purple-red and black ray of disintegrating power blasting from its palm toward Warlocke's outstretched paws. Once again, the ancient sorcerer deflected it, laughing, though the exertion strained even his mighty eldritch power, making the veins in his forehead stand out starkly, capillaries in his eyes bursting and filling the viscera with scarlet even as the ethereal script wreathing his body flared and faded in streams and statements of his ancient evils. The massive cougar followed his opening attack immediately with two strides, and a balled fist that drove towards Warlocke's borrowed skull with all the might of Obliterator's gathered will and control over the two demon princes that had grafted themselves to his flesh.

His mighty fist passed through Warlocke without resistance, and crashed into the wall with all the power of a wrecking ball, smashing stone to flying shrapnel and powder, even as Obliterator kicked out behind him and connected with the wizard's real body, sending him flying backwards with a burst of expelled breath and the crunch of broken ribs. A simple illusion wasn't enough to trick the master strategist, most especially not when he was dealing with someone so vicious and deadly.

The horrible, ear-splitting hiss that answered him as he spun told the mighty demon host that his foe still wasn't down. Warlocke had already regained his feet, though his stolen body was a bloodied wreck, flesh torn where Obliterator's combat boot had caught him. A certain very specific pink shape peeked from underneath the sweaty, torn, blood-soaked shirt beneath, but for all that his intestines were now starting to expose themselves, Warlocke showed no sign of registering pain as he wove and twined his paws into more and more powerful arcane glyphs.

Obliterator concentrated a moment and drew upon the Mask's less known powers, and when Warlocke's next spell burst from his paws in a coruscating blast of purple lightning, the cougar dodged it by zipping up toward the ceiling on a column of burning brimstone air. Then he lashed out his un-gauntleted paw, and sent his combat knife twirling through the air, imbued with the destructive energies of the Void Gauntlet's lesser power.

Warlocke twitched his left arm, lashing out with un-crafted magical force, turning the blade to molten metal and sending it splashing away from him to hiss against the crackling stone. Then he looked up, just in time to see Obliterator dig his powerful paws into the building's structural joists, wrenching loose a support beam and several tons of concrete, and bring it swinging down like a massive flyswatter.

Eve, Jeff, and John had just reached a stairwell in the building's northeast corner when the entire structure lit up like an all-scarlet Christmas. Bloody light so bright it bled straight through the walls gave John just enough warning to yell out wordlessly and dive on his two companions. Jeff, naked but for John's protective overcoat, let off a startled, nerve-broken shriek as he fell, and Eve in her bloodied paper hospital gown covered both of her big vulpine ears with her paws, quick mind already aware of what that kind of light-bleed meant.

The vixen also had just enough time to fling a couple of gravitic 'points' up above them, places where the attractive force was intense enough to pull the sudden explosion of rubble up and away from them, even as the wall to their left turned from a solid structure of masonry and plaster into a flying blast of shrapnel. She'd timed them just right to pull the wall up and away from them as it disintegrated, and yet do no more than ruffle her and Jeff's borrowed clothing, as John had pinned them down and was clearly immune.

Then he was up, off her and Jeff's back, bawling out a command.

"Get moving! Before the whole damn place comes down!"

Eve had just made it to her bruised, battered knees when the wall to their front buckled, groaned, and came roaring in towards them like a tidal wave of brick and mortar and crumbling asbestos. The fox shrieked and threw her arms up to cover her face on reflex, even knowing there was nothing they could do to stop the battering that was to come.

Instead of the crunching of shattered bone and the squelch of crushed flesh, or the terrible burning cold of agonizing pain, her senses registered a strange, dull cacophony of clanging sounds, like a rock slide striking an utterly unimpressed building. Something hard and hot to the touch butted up against her side, and over the deafening noises of the building coming apart a voice loud as a train engine but high-pitched like a child bellowed.

"Get up, you dumbfuck! I ain't gonna hold this wall up forever!"

Blinking in surprise, Eve tilted her head upward even as she skittered away toward John, who was pulling Jeff away from the bowed-in, crumbling building façade. There, holding the collapsing wall up with a warped, bent security door she somehow held up against all that weight with a single paw, was an all-black Arabian filly in dirty cut-off jeans and a t-shirt spattered with dried brown blood.

And she was grinning a hellish smirk, as if a coal fire were burning behind her teeth, an idea suddenly supported by a strange, distant locomotive noise while steam billowed from her nostrils.

"Go on, git down t'the stairwell, it's more stable! I'll drop this fuckin' shit when you're clear!"

"You'll be crushed!" Eve yelled back. Then John grabbed her shoulder and yanked her back, laughing disbelivingly as he did.

"Look at her left paw, Eve!"

She did, and saw a beaten-up old sledge hammer hanging from it, easily a twenty pound sledge if it weighed an ounce. Its ancient, banged and dented shaft seemed made of wood so compressed it could have been iron itself. This girl, not more than 14 by her slender hips and diminutive height, held it like it weighed about as much as a feather pillow. Then recognition dawned for the girl who'd memorized the entire Meta Database, both for heroes and villains. That was the hammer of the Iron Horse, though to her knowledge it should have been in the paws of the government after its previous owner's death.

Nonetheless, she didn't stop to question. She got up with John's help, grabbed one of Jeff's quivering arms, and bolted for the stairwell, as the sounds of crumbling masonry and moaning, failing structure began echoing from all around them.

"She'll be crushed!"

"Hah! The hell she will. C'mon." He shoved Eve on ahead of him, and kept a paw on Jeff's shivering shoulders as the black-on-black hunting cat's eyes darted about in confused terror. John turned to look back at the steaming, smirking teenaged filly, as he ushered the other two into the stairwell. "You coming with us, or just gonna stand there all day?"

"Down's the last place we want to be when the building comes down!" Eve yelped, as she skittered down the stairs despite her own protests.

"Better'n bein' crushed up here, princess!" the philly retorted with a cavalier chortle, before twisting her arms and slamming the steel security door into the concrete floor. With a wrenching noise that made John and Jeff flinch, she punched it through the reinforced earth several inches, then bent the shrieking, protesting steel with her bare paws until it kept the collapsing section of wall more or less upright.

Then she turned toward John, twisted her smirk into an almost leering grin, and strode after the retreating trio. "I'm comin' with you. Someone's fuckin' with my neighborhood, and I'm gonna break a hoof off in their asses!"

"What if we tell you you're not welcome?"

"Then fuck you, I'm comin' anyway!"

Jeff trudged along with the others, trapped someplace between that comfortable numbness of his earlier dance of destruction and a trembling, gut-ripping sense of horror that made him want to curl in on himself until he disappeared entirely. He stood upon a knife-sharp precipice of searing, uncontrollable, magmatic emotional agony, struggling to maintain control long enough to keep from coming apart entirely.

Now he understood why Xolotl had attacked John. He'd known, and hidden from Jeff's more rational side, who they were seeing, and known the emotional rollercoaster that would begin if Jeff as a whole had been allowed to recognize him. Here, in a place of massacre and eye-ripping soul-tearing agony, the sheer dissonance of seeing someone he cared for reminded him of what it felt like to be vulnerable and possess emotions other than rage and murderous glee.

Even as the building rumbled and crumbled around them, Jeff could do nothing more than struggle, fight his inner battle for control, as swirling pain and agonizing laughter tried to rip their way up from his gut to his throat and outward. John's arm around his shoulder was the only anchor he had, and even it seemed to send a current of painful connection through his soul.

If the transcendent sense of misery that flowed through and overwhelmed him didn't abate and became permanent, Jeff thought, he'd have no choice but to try withdrawing again into that comfortable dimness of his fugue state. If he couldn't do that, his only remaining option wasn't to continue living.

All of this passed through his mind in insistent, inexorable waves of emotion and fractured thought, as he leaned into John's side and tried not to cry like a child, on their way down into some Stygian darkness that terrified him more than he could put words to. Something was down there, something deep inside the building, that he knew was far more deadly than any falling stone or broken girder. Something that was, ultimately, responsible for the endless dread that threatened to drag him down into its drowning depths.

As they descended the long spiral stair into blackened umbral silence, he felt it growing closer and closer, with a crawling sense of horror that made him want to turn back, fight free of John's grip, and run for the surface no matter the risks. At least that way lay only death, and not the ill-defined worseness that lay below.

When Eve let out a yelp and rushed off from the others, Jeff struggled to understand what his eyes were seeing. Blood, corpses, mounds of parts, all stacked high to either wall, but it was not towards those that the vixen sprinted.

Mack, he realized. That's Mack. Oh god...

Voices around him took on a strangely muted tone, as he was hurried forward. The ground was shaking, and the air felt hot against his skin in the tingling way that was more energy than anything actually thermal. Words were said that he couldn't quite understand, though the sounds were familiar, as John leaned him up against a wall and made sure he wouldn't fall before striding over to pry Eve off her downed boyfriend and start checking the curled-up lion over.

Jeff's eyes gazed past him, and saw the room beyond, filled with debris and smoke, blasts of purplish and red light zipping through the obfuscating mist of particles. He saw overlaid on it the lattice of electrical potential that surged through the place in storms invisible to normal eyes. The black jaguar also saw a very familiar electrical pattern, an aura unique to someone...Something...

He was striding across the cracked, blood-caked stone floor before he knew his limbs were moving. Deep inside, an anger he'd never given name to before boiled and seethed, and as his teammates failed to notice his movements thanks to Mack's downed form, Xolotl-Jeff padded barefoot and silent past them and into the chaos beyond.

Obliterator, in all his muscled glory, glowed with a ruby and amethyst light that limned his scorched flesh in magnificent and terrible light and power. His paws gripped a building girder studded with shattered concrete that could not have weighed less than several thousand pounds, and swung it like a mallet, crashing through the crumbling structure overhead in an arc down toward something Jeff couldn't see. On the ground beneath the flying tyrant, a pair of crumpled forms were huddled together, motionless and bloody, picked out in silhouette to Jeff's wobbling vision.

From deep inside Jeff-Xolotl, a boiling sense of expansion, like a coal burner about to explode, roiled upward through his chest. His scream of rage, indignation, violation and venom, didn't build to a crescendo so much as begin at one and then climb into a throat-tearing incoherent scream.

Obliterator turned his head even as his strike was nearing its target, his eyes glowing the cherry red of hot iron, even as they widened ever so slightly. Xolotl's catastrophic blast of energy dragged the very ionic charges from the air, tore static apart and drained it, blew the dust in the air to the walls in a wave of leaden smoke particles, and blew every electrical transformer in a four block radius.

With his shields dropped to give him more strength to pummel Warlocke, with his attention so fully focused on the evil arch-sorcerer he'd been battling with all his might, Obliterator had almost no defense left. The bolt of energy so bright it burned permanent shadows into the stonework, and made a newly-conscious Mack yelp and jam his paws over suddenly-blinded eyes, hit him dead in the chest, swatting aside the momentum of his flight as if it were a gnat in a tornado.

The fulminous explosion blew skyward, arcing up from Xolotl's entire body, as the black jaguar threw his arms up and back, arched his spine, and shrieked his wrath to the heavens. Obliterator was flung up through the collapsing building, shattering wooden beams, metal joists, masonry and stonework as if they were tissue paper, before being sent hurtling off into the night sky, all consciousness blasted from the potent archvillain.

The girder he'd been wielding slammed to the ground with a mighty clang that seemed pathetic next to the great thundering rush of Xolotl's assault. As Jeff crumpled to the ground, chest burning while he struggled to breathe through a wave of sudden exhaustion, he heard running footsteps behind him. Warm, strong arms wrapped around the cat, and suddenly Jeff found himself wanting nothing more than to nestle into those masculine-smelling arms and rest.

Eve rushed past the both of them, nimbly applying her cheer-squad training to get over piles of crumpled rubble. She'd seen the two shapes that lay half-covered in scree and debris, and now rushed to see if they were still alive. Throwing aside crushed bricks and timbers with a strength born of adrenaline and determination, she first found an elderly priest. He lay with his faded blue eyes wide open, dry and blank in death, though his lips were curved into a gentle, satisfied smile. With the still-steaming hole blown straight through his chest, she knew he couldn't possibly still be alive. When she noticed motion anyway, she grabbed the elderly creature's corpse by the arms and pulled, grunting gutturally before yelling.

"Mack! I need help! There's a survivor!"

"I can't fucking see! Fuck!"

"Follow my voice!"

"Oh great fucking plan! Yeah, let me get killed on all this sharp sh...OW!"

He reached her side in a small avalanche of broken building bits, as he blindly smashed aside the same piles she'd vaulted over. She tossed a rock to guide him, bouncing it off his massive pectoral muscles.

"Two more strides straight forward, then kneel down and help me!"

In moments, he was there, growling and fuming at her, his eyes swollen and weeping from all the pepper spray he'd taken straight to the face. Still, he helped, taking the priest's wrists and pulling him off what lay beneath without any sign of effort.

Underneath, Daimon's bloody, tear-streaked black furred face desperately sucked in air, as Eve summoned a gravity sphere and used it to pull a girder away that had landed across his chest. He'd been lucky not to be completely crushed. Yet he didn't waste his first precious words on thanks.

"The snow leopard! Make...Make sure it's dead!"

"What? He's a cop!"

"N...No! He's my father!"

"What? What are you talking abo-ACK!"

Daimon's paws grabbed onto her hospital gown, nearly tearing it off her otherwise naked body, as his eyes flew wide, and he screamed in her face.

"Listen to me you stupid bitch! He's Warlocke! He's WARLOCKE!"

Mack whirled, some strange tingling sense he'd never had before telling him to duck, and instead used that moment to tackle Eve on top of Daimon, even as a blast of power exploded past him, searing through the space he and Eve had occupied half a second before, and rendering the air to shrieking nothingness. With a spasm of pain, he realized that the bushy tip of his tail was gone, torn away by the nightmarish lance of energy.

A roaring, laughing voice permeated the chamber then, bawling out its victory for all the world to hear.

"Finally! I am free!"

John was up on his feet, stepping around his curled-up, crying boyfriend, before Warlocke's words had even finished leaving his shattered, bloody, stolen maw. Four strides took him up a rubble heap, and a flex of powerful legs sent him back down the other side of it, to drive a hard-hitting fist into the sorcerer's face with a crack that just had the snow leopard laughing harder and dancing away drunkenly, head wobbling back on his neck. The word "Verdun," glowed to life along Kolter's stolen trenchcoat, even as Warlocke gathered power to strike back.

"Over our dead bodies! UP AND AT 'IM, EVERYONE!"