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Chapter 13

"FUCK YEAH!" Tish roared, laughing maniacally as she plowed through rubble higher than her shoulders as if it was no more than piles of feathers, in a beeline towards Warlocke and John Silverstone's brawl. In her right paw, the Hammer of the Iron Horse seemed to hum with enthusiasm for the good hard workout it was about to get, and the good hard ass-beating it was about to give. Her nostrils streamed with live steam, hot enough to boil flesh off of bone, as the mystical steam engine that powered her roared on high.

This was the sort of fight she looked forward to, lived for even. A real battle against an enemy who could match her power wasn't something found on every street corner. Most of her time was spent slapping around street thugs trying to take advantage of the homeless kids that hung around her building. Hardly the sort of heroic feats her forebears had performed, though she knew they approved. This fight, though, would be one her ancestors would tell stories about, and maybe whatever descendents were unlucky enough to have her banging around in their head someday.

As if to tease the short-legged filly, she was all the way across the room from the brawl. Still, she reached it well before anyone but fast-food John, plowing straight through the obstacles that slowed Mack and Eve on their way to join the fight. She reached hammer-range just in time to see the Wolf in Black get slammed in the side with a huge chunk of flying masonry, hurled by some telekinetic spell of Warlocke's. The wolf flew sideways and landed in a sprawl on the floor even as Tish raised John Henry's hammer over one shoulder and bellowed out a wordless war-cry, charging straight into Warlocke's shimmering crimson protective field.

The destructive energy field danced along her steely skin, sizzling at metal far too tempered to be burned, as the filly brought her sledge up and around, off her shoulder and down toward Warlocke's cackling, bloody face. He was too quick at casting, though, and her hammer struck another shield that exploded into bloody crimson light with a sizzling crack that nearly tore the hammer from her paws with the force of its backlash. Warlocke followed it up with a laughing howl and an outthrust claw-shaped paw that jabbed at her chest, and struck her with a blast of incinerating magic that would have blown a smoking hole through the chest of most superheroes. In Tish's case, it merely flung her back a dozen feet, skidding her hooved footpaws through the debris-strewn floor, leaving furrows in her wake.

She tipped over like an upended teakettle when the backs of her knees hit a solid stone bench, sending her crashing to the ground with all the grace of a derailing steam locomotive.

Mack was on Warlocke before the sorcerer could try to pursue his attack against either John or Tish. The big footballer, leaking blood liberally from his mutilated tail tip, had grabbed a chunk of fallen masonry, and now charged straight at his foe with a leonine roar easily the match of any given by his long ancestry of great cats. The chunk of steel-ribbed concrete smoked and cracked down the center when it hit that mighty energy barrier, but then carried on through it, disintegrating only when he struck the second barrier with it, hard enough that even though the concrete and metal block never struck Warlocke, the evil wizard ended up down on one knee, snarling his rage at being assaulted in such a way.

Ever on her boyfriend's heels, Eve let out a yip as she vaulted up on top of a rubble pile, throwing her paws out to extend her mighty gravitic control. With Mack so close, she couldn't risk creating one of her lethal singularity balls, and as much as she wanted to dress him down for being so thoughtless, she couldn't fault his tactic - Distract the enemy to prevent him performing a coup de grace on any of their companions. So instead of trying to kill the sorcerer herself, the vixen focused her keen mind on control, and threw gravity spheres that appeared a half-inch beneath Warlocke's paws.

A spell the vicious villain had been forming fouled, as his delicate paw-motions were dragged downward just the slightest fractions of an inch. His eyes widened with anger, and he threw himself to the side, trailing Kolter's intestines from a great rent in his gut where stitches had split under the savage assaults of the Obliterator. Mack pounded the ground just where Warlocke had been, shattering already-cracked bedrock and powdering fallen masonry.

The lumbering behemoth turned and swatted out to his right, cutting the air with the speed of his fist as he narrowly missed Warlocke's face, the sorcerer ducking back, scrambling, tripping over debris as he struggled to cast another of his vicious magics in the face of such a coordinated assault. For a moment, he seemed to fumble with another spell, then ducked as Mack brought another arm around for a windmilling strike. When he came up, it was with a snarl of infuriated annoyance, and he eschewed the fine formulations of symbolic magic to simply exert a monstrous blast of energy, undirected but potent, straight into Mack's entire front.

He was flung back thirty feet, caroming off the cracking, crumbling bedrock basement wall, landing stunned but largely unhurt, though his shirt had burnt to a crisp of ragged cloth draped over his muscle-bulged golden shoulders. If anything, Eve howled in pain at seeing him flung like a rag doll, far more than Mack felt the hit.

Then Tish and John were on the Warlocke again, filly sweeping low at his legs with great arcs of her mystical hammer that had the blood-soaked snow leopard leaping back to stay over the weapon that was swiftly smashing holes in his barriers as if they were balsa wood under a pile driver. John powered right through his wards as well, trying to get in close from the other side, intuitively using Tish's punishing, relentless assault to direct the monstrous supervillain's routes of escape.

In the midst of it all, Jeff sat painfully huffing, sucking for breath with a chest that felt as if it were trapped in a cinching vice. With his knees to his chest, arms wrapped around them, he rocked and panted, unable to fight past the fear of suffocation that rose inexorably in the most reptilian part of his brain.

One moment, Warlocke was on the retreat, dodging the Iron Horse's bone-mashing hammer and John Silverstone's flesh-pulping boxer's strikes. The next, he stepped over a mark on the floor he'd made during an earlier moment of his swirling, circling retreat. Tish Henry ran right into the wall of magic that mark emitted, and was flung backward with an echoing noise like a church bell being hit by a brick-laden semi truck. Knowing damn well how quickly the fight could end with them all dead if he gave Warlocke more than a few seconds, John redoubled his attack, throwing himself again and again at the most terrifying villain he'd ever met, relying on his own immunities to help him stay alive.

With Tish out of the way, struggling to get herself upright and clearly stunned, Eve was free to work. The vixen scrambled up on top of a rubble pile, gathering her strength for a maneuver much more complex than she'd tried before. She had to get it right, knowing that if she messed up, John would be immune, but his clothes wouldn't - and his garments were tough enough to drag him right into her gravity spheres and mangle him all to hell when denim and leather were dragged into a microscopic black hole with his body in the middle.

As she prepared and watched for the cues she needed, the vixen saw Mack start flinging small boulders of debris, picking his timing to throw whenever John wasn't in the line of fire. Each boulder crashed into Warlocke's defensive wards, exploding into slivers of shattered brick, stone, and metal. Each hit made script light up on his coat. It confirmed what the quick-witted fox girl had guessed. She just hoped her next trick would have the desired effect.

"John! Get back!" she belted out at the top of her voluminous cheerleaders' lungs.

The wolf responded instantly, with all the precision and quickness of a grizzled veteran. Throwing himself back, he fell into a backward roll just in time, as Eve's plan went into motion.

First, she summoned a small gravity sphere just in front of Warlocke, gut high, pulling him forward against it with a grunt as his lungs were nearly crushed. Then, a much larger but less intense sphere erupted into being behind him, bending the air with a crackling sound as rubble flew this way and that in the conflicting gravity wells. The smaller, denser sphere pulled heavier weight towards it, dragging Kolter's hundred and eighty pound frame forward against Warlocke's snarl of fury. Then the larger, more diffuse sphere yanked at his coat, whipping the snow leopard's arms back as they suddenly, desperately struggled not to let the sleeves slide off and take the garment away.

Eve let out a yell, though her chest had pinched tight with the effort of maintaining such careful control of her powers.

"When the coat comes off...Hit him with everything!"

"Next time, do that shit IN his guts, dumbass!" steamed Tish Henry, as she shook her head sharply, finally having retrieved her balance, though her ears still rang like churchbells after the magical pounding she'd taken. Any lesser meta would have been killed by the blast she'd received.

"Heroes don't kill!" Eve roared back, suddenly more furious at the girl than frightened by the villain, as she fought the gravity spheres to keep them in perfect balance. The vixen held out hope to save detective Kolter, unable to quite register the spaghetti-like mess that hung from his rent gut. She didn't have time to explain to the bloodthirsty filly that she also couldn't seem to get the gravity spheres to appear quite that close - something in Warlocke's wards stopped them from forming.

Then the jacket made a noise like a metal zipper coming undone, as a series of stitches gave way along its seams in a sudden and steady wave. The duster-like trenchcoat tore free of its sleeves, flaring scarlet text all over its surface like a dying sun made of foul calligraphic words as it hurtled away from its owner's possessed body.

"NOW!" Eve trumpeted, even as she fell to her knees, gasping and sweating as her gravitic spheres vanished in a puff of shed dust and tossed light.

The Iron Horse had bent herself backward, and now rolled her shoulders forward, a howl of superheated steam exploding from her muzzle and snout as she hurled herself and her hammer at Warlocke, swinging with all her strength. John Silverstone leapt off his rubble-pile perch, aiming a vicious kick for the villain's head. Mack rushed at the same moment, smashing aside rubble piles with mighty swings of his bullish arms as he lowered his head and made to smash Warlocke flat.

Roaring in rage, Warlocke brought his arms up over his head, and clapped his paws together once, the moment before they hit. A thunderclap of power exploded from his palms and eyes, and with it a wall of roiling blackness that made Eve's heart nearly explode in her chest with suddenly remembered terror of that dark place beyond everything.

Then, to her dawning horror, a wave of that same black rolled out over her and her companions, swallowing them whole before they could so much as blink.

Tish hit the spongy 'ground' in a roll, swiping her hammer out on pure instinct and muscle memory of her training, thinking at first that Warlocke had somehow blinded her, despite her body's near-invulnerability to damage. The petite filly's powerful swipe failed to hit anything, and when she didn't even hear the whoosh of cut air, Tish blew a gust of steam-thick air from her lips in aggravation.

"Fuck. Rope a dope, straight through a portal, huh?"

The voices in her head consulted one another, in their odd ways, debating and clamoring for a few moments until the more knowledgeable ones found their ways forward. They confirmed what she guessed; Warlocke had opened a door somehow, to somewhere so utterly black her eyes were starting to make up flashes of color just to have something to see.

"So, grandpops, you got any bright fuckin' ideas what to do next?"

Find yer team, echoed through, to be answered with a snort of derision.

"They aren't my team."

They are now, little filly. Don't never let pride get in the way of getting' yer job done.

_ _

Any other authority figure, Tish would have argued. The voices of her ancestors, though, always had a damn fine point, even if she didn't always listen. So, the Iron Horse knelt down, and with her free paw felt for the floor beneath her. It was there, albeit spongy, squishy, almost fleshy, as if the ground of this strange dimension was cobbled together of discarded flesh.

She also gathered in a breath to test the air, and found it fetid, strange and clammy, but breathable. Then she let loose that lungful of air in a powerful, screaming howl of steam and pressure, a great train horn blaring off through the darkness to signal her erstwhile 'team' that she was still there. If they'd appeared alone, as she had, they would need the encouragement...And the echo-location to help them find her.

When no immediate answer came except for echoes, and distant warbles she hoped were something more fun and killable than just distortions, Tish straightened her legs and held out the great sledge as a feeling stick, walking until she finally found a wall. Then, keeping it to her left, touching her left paw to it, she started to walk.

"Okay, bitchfaces...Demon motherfuckers, come on out! I wanna play! This shit's gonna get boring otherwise!"

Mack was mid-swing when the darkness overtook him, and smashed his fist into a wall of fleshy darkness in that place of pitch blackness, carried off the same momentum that had dragged him right into the roiling cloud of black. The material under his paw squelched and gave only slightly, in a way not dissimilar to what it felt like to punch a very muscular fur in the gut. Only he'd hit it hard enough to punch straight through most very-muscular furs, hard enough that under normal circumstances he would have just shattered his own arm to the elbow.

This time, though, to Mack's surprise, he felt no pain at all, beyond a vague sense of pressure against his paw. Looking down, he saw nothing in the pitch darkness, but quickly realized his massive fist was imbedded in the fleshy muck to his wrist when he yanked himself free and took a good chunk of goopy crap with it.

"What the fuck?" he elucidated, twisting his head back and forth, hoping to see some sign of light. With none forthcoming, and no sounds of battle around him, Mack growled a rumbling leonine snarl that echoed dully in the dark, and drove his fist into the wall again. Once more, it squelched, resisted, then pulped beneath the impossible might of his super-strength.

Yet, unlike all those times before, he didn't suffer any pain from his use of such crushing pressure. In the past, he'd always found himself far more super-strong than super-tough. Now, he was seeing signs that this constant had changed. Or, rather, feeling them, in that sightless darkness.

It is because you have acted selflessly, to defend your friends.

_ _

"What the...Who's there?" he called out, spinning in a slow circle with his arms raised in a pose vaguely like a boxer's guard position. The voice seemed to come from all around him, yet had none of the echoes his own words called into existence.

It was as soft as before when it spoke again, in rumbling resonant tones he could identify as female, but with all the strong, self-assured strength Mack had long associated more with the males of his species. Or with his mother.

You are the scion, Mack. Your mother has fallen from grace, but you haven't. At least...Not yet.

_ _

"Who the fuck are you to talk about my mother!" Mack roared out, turning again in a slow circle, ready to be attacked at any moment. Anyone who knew the truth about his mother could be here to hurt him for so many reasons.

I am the one who knew her best.

_ _

"The hell does that mean? Mom doesn't HAVE any friends! That doesn't answer my question!"

No answer came, and for a few moments, Mack waited, glaring at the darkness, furious at this disembodied voice. For all he knew, it could have been Warlocke playing with his senses, he realized. So Mack finally turned on his heel and started to stomp his way forward, right up until he smacked straight into another fleshy wall.

"Unf...Fucking shit..."

Smashing his fist into it again, then dragging his paw along the surface after he'd pulled it free, he followed the wall, growling at himself for being such an idiot as to walk straight into a wall in the pitch black. Mack wondered, as he walked carefully in the pitch black, how that strange voice had found him here, and then found himself asking just where 'here' was. After all, he couldn't think of anywhere that the walls felt like squishy flesh, and smelled of dust and old death, that was utterly black and yet had air to breath.

Then again, Mack thought, he wasn't the brightest or most-educated lion around. In fact, he judged himself rather idiotic for getting involved in this foolish situation. It would, to his mind, be only fair if he didn't make it out of this alive.

That is enough, the voice said, it's tone hard but bereft of anger. Mack jumped what felt like a foot into the air, spinning around again.

"FUCK! Don't DO that!"

Your language could use work.

_ _

"So could your manners!"

I am trying to help.

_ _

"Then why'd you leave instead of answer my question before!"

Because it was not an answer that would have helped.

"Oh yeah? Well if you want to help, tell me where to find my friends and the way out of this...Fucking hell-hole!"

Your assumption about this place is fairly close to correct. Move quickly, Mack. The demons that sleep here aren't awake yet, but they already smell your presence. It won't be long before they start rising to hunt. Proceed in the direction you are going. When I tell you, be ready to smash through the wall.

_ _

Growling, the lion began to trot, praying the floor would stay clear of obstructions, and that this ephemeral voice who claimed to know his well-hated mother was true to her word. To the world, Meera Franklin was a powerful corporate leader, socialite, and philanthropist. Though Mack's father was wealthy, his mother was the real source of his money and troubles, having callously puppetteered his life for years, sending him to the best schools and forcing him through sports programs and extra-curriculars he'd never really wanted for himself. Not because she cared about him, he'd realized at a young age, but because she couldn't tolerate anything less than perfection in anyone associated with her.

Full of bitter anger from a long and loveless childhood, and an adult life ruined by super-powers he'd never asked for, Mack kept stomping along as he always had. His only real choice had always been to either let himself be manipulated or do nothing. He'd long ago decided it was better to play along than be a total loser. Not that it made him feel any better about things, really. In his own mind, the former football star and superhero could never shake the idea that he wasn't smart enough to make good decisions in any case.

"So...Who are you anyway? And what'd you mean by 'scion' earlier?"

For at least thirty steps, there wasn't an answer, and for a while Mack wondered whether the voice had just buggered off again, gone away to wherever hallucinatory voices went when they weren't pestering the sensory-deprived or completely-insane.

When it spoke again, the voice was softer, less forceful, almost wistful.

In a short while, the bearer of the Paladin's Sword will pass on, and it will return to our family again, as it always has.

_ _

"Wait," the lion said, coming to a stop in the seemingly endless fleshy darkness. "OUR family? As in..."

Your mother never told you that you have an aunt?

_ _

"I can count on two paws how many times mom and I have actually said more than 'hi' to each other...And I don't need both thumbs. Uh...Aunty?"

I...Am sorry. I should have been there for you, while I was still alive.

_ _

"W-wait...You're dead? Am I...?"

No. You are still very much alive, Mack. If you do as I advise, you will likely survive this, though the fight will be a difficult one. My name, for your knowledge, is Aisha.

"W-wait...Aisha? Paladin's Blade? You're Paladin? You...Died years ago!"

Death is an impediment only to the living.

_ _

"...You don't sound like a fundamentalist Muslim..."

Talk-show media publishes what they think will sell, only occasionally seasoned with truth.

"Uh...Okay, I guess."

In fifty more paces, you will need to turn right and begin demolishing walls. That will bring you to the girl bearing the Iron Horse's hammer. Please count the paces, Mack. I do not know how long I can maintain this manifestation.

"Are you...In pain?"

Corporeal pain is inconsequential, swiftly forgotten. Think of your friends, Mack, not of me.

_ _

With a frown, Mack slowed to a stop, reminding himself to resume count at the ten paces he'd already counted. He felt as if a great weight was being pressed on his shoulders, by this sudden set of revelations. All his life, he'd been ignored by his family, barely known at all by friends too shallow to look beneath the letter jerseys and football helmets. Even the girls he'd dated hadn't really cared about him so much as what he represented about their own status. Even Eve, who meant well, was too lost in her own world half the time.

Now, a disembodied woman claiming to be a member of his own family was trying to help him, and he couldn't help but feel a spike of suspicion mixed with a warring reminder of old, familiar feelings of abandonment and new-found feelings of curiosity and the inexplicable desire to break down crying.

Bringing a big, meaty paw up to his face, he rubbed at aching, sightless eyes, and let out a ragged sigh.

"I...Can't just take it on faith you are who you say you are. Please understand...I've never had a member of my family talk to me like this, and the circumstances are just...Suspicious..."

He was about to continue speaking when the soft yet steely voice interrupted.

Your mother, my younger sister Meera, likes peanut butter and ham sandwiches, but only when the crusts are cut off. She loathes television but loves the cinema. Her birthday is the fifth of June. She has a birth mark in the shape of a crescent moon on her left hip, and a scar under her right eye. I gave it to her, when we were teenagers, in a silly fight over foolish things.

_ _

Startled by the sudden outpouring of information, Mack stared into the cyclopean darkness, jaw working as he half-formed a few argumentative words, only to realize he remembered about half the things this specter mentioned. His mother did indeed have a scar under her right eye, and he half-remembered seeing the mark on her hip once when he was very young and she was wearing a revealing dress for one of her social functions. He'd once been screamed at by his mother for fixing a sandwich wrong, after he hadn't seen her in six months due to a business trip.

"Alright...I believe you. I shouldn't, but I do."

Thank you. Now walk forty more paces, turn to your right ninety degrees, and hit that wall with all your strength. It is time to start breaking through the darkness.

Eve's flesh crawled with the urge to claw at herself, scream in terror, curl up on the floor and try to die so she wouldn't experience the terror any more. She was, once again, in a place of absolute black nothingness, that horrible hole she'd escaped only so very recently. Only now to find out she'd never escaped it at all. The vixen's hyperventilating lungs felt fit to burst, lanced with burning pain as she panted and made hysterical noises of terror while lying on clammy, fleshy floor.

When a steely paw abruptly grabbed her arm, hard enough to bruise, she let out an ululating shriek and lashed out, hitting something far softer and less insectoid than she'd instinctually expected. The noise of someone hissing out in pain and uttering curse words shocked her from the horrified emptiness far darker than the lightless place she sat in.

"Son of a bitch! I'm already hurt you dumb whore! Stop hitting and get up!"

That scratchy voice was one she immediately recognized, that was accompanied by bile rising in her throat. It had shrieked at her, the last time she was in the nightmare-place, nearly strangled her. It had been full of vicious rage and hatred then, dripping with bile and fury.

Now it was annoyed, strained, hissing imprecations that made her more angry than afraid for just enough of a moment to realize she wasn't back in the empty black, alone forever. Eve's paw shot out, and groped in the dark, until she found a muck-crusted foot that wriggled when clenched upon. With a snarl of frustrated anger, the voice came nearer to her.

"Get UP I said! The longer we lie around crying, the stronger he'll get!"

"Wh-wh..."

She whuffed, with wheezing lungs still half-paralyzed with fear, as a painful grunt emerged from the fur who both terrified and angered her, yet was somehow also her rescuer. He was trying to hide it, but her radar-dish fox ears could hear the pain in his breathing, as he grabbed her under the arm and hefted Eve upright. Trembling with terror, her knees immediately gave, and she fell up against him, straight into a blood-soaked garment that squelched stickily as he gasped and fell in turn against the wall.

"You're hurt..." she whispered, almost in wonderment. When last they'd met, she'd been utterly under his power, laid low by his force of will and evil magics. Now, from some strange twist of fate, she was pressed up against the sable cat's chest in some strange Chthonic realm of fleshy blackness.

"Yes, I'm hurt," he bit out sourly, through a reedy, wet growl. "Bastard near strangled me...Rocks fell on me...That doesn't matter. We have to find and finish him before he wakes the host."

"Wh-what?" Eve chirped, as her eyes twitched and uselessly scanned the pitch black, jerking at every flash of color her light-deprived brain showed her.

"This is Warlocke's home, or what's left of it...The army he used to destroy this universe is asleep here, inside this...Catacomb of meat. The longer he stays here, the more he'll heal and the more of them he'll wake. Now help me find the others, or do I have to slap you around first to get you thinking straight?"

Beneath her footpaws, the floor squelched as if on cue from Daimon's words, and Eve felt a sick horror in her gut at the sense of what she stood on. Something else commanded much more of her attention though.

Sniffling back tears that suddenly, inexplicably wanted to slide down her face, Eve choked on her next words, but forced them out nonetheless, even though her face was mashed into the bloody garment Daimon wore.

"Why should I trust you?"

For a moment, she thought he would try to hit her. Daimon's lithe feline body went stiff, muscles tensing up under that torn shirt of his. Then he exhaled, which blew hot air down the back of Eve's neck.

"Because I'm the only one who can see down here. This darkness doesn't blind me, because I...I'm half of your world and half of this one. What I did to you was...Necessary...I'm sorry, but it was."

"How the hell was THAT necessary? You stuck a DEMON in my nightmares! You fucking RAPED my brain!"

"How else was I going to show Dr. Theorem that his nemesis was back, and make him believe it?"

Eve just stared at him, gobsmacked, despite being unable to see the cat's face. His words rung of truth, and had shocked her deep to the core. He continued, while pulling her along painfully, limping with every step he took.

"Fat lot of good it did, though...Seems the old bastard ran for the hills when he figured it out or something...I never took him for a coward, but so much for reputation..."

Instead of responding to his jab at her beloved mentor, Eve asked a question with a calm, quiet voice.

"What's your name?"

"Daimon Locke. Why do you want to know?"

"I don't like to hate people without knowing their name. You're a piece of shit, Daimon Locke, and I fucking hate you for what you've done."

He laughed, and it rumbled through his body harshly, like a glass chip scraped down a chalkboard, echoing oddly from the terrible fleshy walls that were just beginning to quiver around them.

"Good! You should! I deserve your hate," he responded with a sour, bitter laugh that choked her remaining vitriol at the source. "But you can wait to try killing me until Warlocke is dead."

"Defeated."

"Dead. You can't 'defeat' Warlocke, slap him on the wrist, and send him to prison. It won't work."

"But killing is what separates us from them! Or at least...Me and the others on my team. We don't kill! Unlike you," she growled at him, even as they were starting to walk, his paw grabbing bruising-hard onto her arm. "Also, ow! You're crushing my arm!"

"And you're hurting my ears with your fucking whining."

Any further back and forth was interrupted, then, by a sudden rumbling in the strange spongy ground beneath their paws. It roiled, pulsating, and Eve had a sudden and very unwelcome thought; the pulsations were like the movements of the esophagus trying to swallow food. Daimon seemed to be thinking similarly unpleasant things, by the way his already-too-tight paw clenched in her arm, sending a dull throb of pain through her.

"We are nearly out of time...The host is waking. You weigh what...Thirty pounds? Get on my back, I'll carry you so we make better time."

"But...You're hurt..." She wasn't going to mention she'd be embarrassed, too, given she was wearing little more than a torn, blood-splattered hospital gown that wasn't even fully closed in the back.

"I'll cry about it later." Then, unceremoniously, the slender cat dropped to his knees with a muffled grunt of suppressed pain, and grabbed her rump to pull the vixen against him. Gingerly, she put her legs over his shoulders, and tried to pretend her crotch wasn't pressed to the back of his head when he stood, bent down, and started to sprint through the darkness.

John never lost a second of consciousness to the wall of blackness that swarmed over them all, that tenebrous dark failing to faze the veteran meta despite the looming horror he knew waited beyond. What worried him far more was knowing that his team-mates, young and inexperienced but for the last few days of terror and violence, had been dragged into such a place for this sort of fight.

The sort of fight Dr. Theorem and the Nightsiders would have found worthy of their attention.

Unlike the others, John immediately found proof he wasn't alone; when his footpaws touched the spongy ground, something in the darkness gurgled, something like a death rattle but more energetic. He'd already raised his arms in a boxer's guard when a fleshy shape roiling with muscle swung awkwardly at him, bouncing a meaty fist off his damaged but still-functioning warded jacket.

The wolf retaliated instantly, lean but powerful muscles coiling and exploding into action as he threw himself forward, ducked down, and turned at the hips to drive a pair of punishing body blows into his opponent. His fingerless fighting gloves confirmed his suspicions when they flared a brilliant emerald green and burned into the flesh of the otherworldly entity.

They also lit the darkness with a glow decidedly less beautiful, and showed him just how screwed he was.

For John, there was no strange Chthonic hallway of meat and darkness. He stood on the same flesh-like stone as the others, but this chamber was massive in the way of galactic cores and the scope of the concept of ignorance. As the meaty behemoth he'd just burned holes in turned and brought its ponderous, corpse-colored flesh swinging around in a head-crushing swipe, the wolf's amber eyes spied hundreds, thousands, millions more just like it, standing silent guard for as far as the emerald glow could show them.

He didn't have time to waste on contemplating that horrific army, though. The monster he was fighting grew faster with every swipe of its massive, clumsy appendages, as if it were a dragon waking from suddenly-ended sleep. Just as he darted under its arm again, it spun to follow and hurtled towards him letting out a low looing roar that sounded somehow like a combination of an enraged and newly-castrated bull and a looming tsunami wave.

John narrowly avoided being flung across the room like a blood-filled rag sack, the wind of the monstrous flesh golem's passage ruffling his headfur as he rose up and slammed a fist into the thing's chin from the side. It's squarish, lumpy-skinned head snapped back and to the side as its own momentum kept it driving forward, the ratchet-like crackle-crunch of shattering bone telling John that the fingerless gloves Dr. Theorem had enchanted for him were working just as planned. It didn't die, though, despite the smoldering of its skin and shattering of its neck. With the thing's head dangling at an angle that made a less-professional part of John's gut want to shrivel up and hurl, it slammed its left arm backwards and struck him just above the navel.

The jacket did its job, absorbing impact and spreading it out along the lines of magic that bled it back off into the air as light and sound. Still, the hit was forceful enough that even Dr. Theorem's skilled use of magical physics didn't get rid of it entirely. With a noise like a bell being hit by a truck, John was flung a dozen feet backwards, smashing into an as-yet unconscious flesh behemoth, before tumbling to the ground in a sprawl of limbs. Even stunned, the wolf got his feet under his butt almost instantly, and ducked behind the monster that was starting to grunt and shiver even as its colleague arrived swinging massive meaty fists with twin thunderclaps of cut air.

Its fist whistled toward John's face, and he hopped sideways to interpose the beast's meaty twin. The twitching statue shuddered from a titanic impact, its compatriot showing no sign of pulling the punch even when it became obvious it would strike an ally. Then the monster began to totter back, and John dodged to the side, circling like his feral ancestor would a staggering, flailing bear. A moment later, the monster he'd hidden behind let out a keening, throaty, utterly alien wail, and arrested it's backwards stumble to come forward flailing its gigantic, viciously powerful fists into the one who'd struck it.

Momentarily relieved of an opponent, the black wolf took off at a sprint away from the flesh-crushing brawl, ducking between the many ranks of fleshy foes to give himself time for a quick think. His gloves' glow was swiftly fading, turning a vision of a terrifying emerald-shadowed blobby army into far more ominous shadows, then into empty blackness punctuated only by the groaning roars and meat-on-meat thunder of his foes doing battle.

Quickly, the swift-witted wolf ran down a list of things he needed to do. First and foremost in his mind was finding his team; he knew the young, inexperienced metas could very well panic in this strange and horrifying place without him there to steady them. Second, he had to find Warlocke before the monstrous villain could summon the will to exert his control over this demon host.

After all, back on that fateful day when the Nightsiders had fought and bled and some of them died, the battle had turned out to be more diversion than main event, meant to buy Warlocke the time and sacrifices to summon this very army John now stood amongst. The army he'd used to destroy an entire dimension, and had wanted to use to destroy their own in turn.

All to gain himself power. All to give himself more lines of glowing infernal text for that damn cloak of power he carried around with him.

He knew that he'd get nowhere crouched there in the dark hiding, stewing angrily over what had been and what could still be. John groped about in the dark until his gloved paw found another of the monstrous fleshy war-machine statues. He held his glove against it until the magic began to glow again, and gave his eyes time to adjust as the meat hissed under his paw. Then he moved off into the rows of cyclopean monsters, waking a few with taps of his gloves and making sure they woke seeing another of their own, with burning pain their only guide.

Meanwhile, he looked for signs of something intelligent and sinister. Warlocke couldn't be far.

Niggling thoughts worried at the back of John's mind as he went. Had he led the Presidents to their doom? Was Jeff alive? Was this his fault?

He was veteran enough to suppress those thoughts after a minute or so of worrying. There was no time for that now.

One moment, Jeff had been curled up in the rubble of a tumultuous, chaos-rent battlefield, too traumatized, too trapped in his own head to act. Waves of nausea and panic had enveloped him, moments after he'd blasted Obliterator with that enormous, terrible surge of power. It was as if all the maddened laughter and sheer unadulterated power had fled him in one massive rush, leaving the poor nerve-addled jaguar to lie there alone and terrified in the flashing deadly dark.

The next moment, he was left alone in the darkness, a sort of thunderingly silent quiet that at first left him wondering if an errant blast had simply ended his miserable, cowering life. It felt good to be dead, he thought for a brief, delirious moment. All the clash and terror was gone, all the fear of pain vanishing as he settled on his side against a spongy, soft, welcoming floor.

A floor whose very presence came to remind him, after some time passed, that he wasn't quite dead. If he was, there would be nothing to feel, nothing to think, nothing to do.

The jaguar flexed the palm of his paw against the fleshy mass, and felt it squash beneath his fingers. It was clammy, cool and damp, and wriggled as if he'd just prodded living if sleeping flesh. For a tittering moment, he wondered if Hell were a place of darkness and meat. Then something shifted, a curtain pulled.

Jeff sat bolt upright, and sucked in a deep, fetid-tasting breath of realization, as fog drifted back from the corners of his mind. This was not death, and it was not safety either. He was certainly somewhere, as he could sense energy moving, ribbons of bioelectricity that glimmered silvery-white to his eyes. The bio-energy pulsed through the walls, floor, and ceiling around him, outlining what he assumed was a long, empty hall, that shimmered with power just beyond his fingertips.

It was moving, he noted, as the jaguar finally managed to get back on his feet. Then, thought of it vanished, as his right footpaw shrieked out in pain and he crashed up against a squidgy wall before sliding back to the floor, grunting loudly in broken-bone pain while grabbing impotently at the source of it.

"Ahh FUCK!" he yelped.

Instead of swollen, ruined flesh, his paw encountered something hard and wrapped in cloth. A splint. Then, in a rush, he remembered his friends, the ones who had rescued him even though he'd tried to kill them in a moment of madness. He remembered John, the wolf's big, caring eyes shivering with fear for his lover.

Then, through the burning pain and gut-clenched fear for his adopted and dysfunctional family, the black jaguar's swift mind lit onto a few facts. One, if energy was moving, there was a reason for it. Two, he had no idea where he was or how he'd gotten there. Three, that lying on the ground trying not to cry over his broken foot wouldn't get him any closer to solving any problems.

So, with a growl that echoed ominously in the meaty darkness, he resolved to solve the second problem by figuring out the first. He jammed his fingertips against the meat beneath him, digging his claws in until the waxy stuff parted and began to leak a stickiness that stank of iron and rot. Then he wriggled those fingers, hooked the claws in, and tore until a meaty hunk ripped free with a sickening splorch. The energy thus exposed, he jammed his other paw in, and grabbed onto the electrical current, ordering it to his command.

For a moment, the power seemed to want to resist. It writhed in its vein-like channels, wriggled against his furious will, even surged up his arms as if attempting to blast the interloper. Immune, Jeff chuckled angrily, and stuffed his will into the use of his powers, hammering the recalcitrant juice into line.

Then, it began doing what he wanted. First, his senses danced into the energy through his arm and the link his powers created with that pulsating lightning. Then, he slid his mind down the coruscating, shivering stream, until his body's eyes closed and he saw the world only in shades of electrical potential and shivering energy waves.

He found the others quite quickly.

The filly he didn't recognize except in the vaguest of hazy fear-muddled recollections, but he recognized a powerful meta when he saw one. Though her energy source wasn't electrical, he could nonetheless see the outpourings of steam and mighty pressures from the static discharge they released into the air around her, as the bestial, laughing girl rounded a corner and walked smack into the middle of a swarm of fleshy monstrosities. With great enthusiasm, she un-shouldered her hammer, and slammed it straight through the skull of the front-running beast, felling it with a gore-splattering impact of enchanted steel on suddenly-dead flesh.

Mack was similarly engaged, though not with the walking monsters. The great lion was blasting through walls one after another on an intercept course with the filly though still a few minutes away from her. Around his paws, Jeff saw a strange light glimmering to his energy-seeking senses. To his knowledge, Mack's powers were purely biological, strength, stamina and toughness. Now, he saw, there was more to the lion than anyone realized. What exactly it was, he didn't know, though it seemed to be hazily resolving into the shape of a long, deeply curved blade that hadn't yet densified enough to become corporeal.

Little Eve Hightower was being dragged along by a whip-thin, limping wall of drippy blackness, where energy was being batted away by some sort of ward or restrictor. Perhaps, Jeff mused, the 'electricity' he'd seized control of was more based in magic than in physics, which could explain both why this person was a walking void of energy and why the juice had tried to resist him initially. Either way, they were on their way toward the same place that filly seemed to be meandering.

A place where he found John Silverstone ducking and dodging through a roiling mass of self-pummeling fleshy violence, bobbing like a butterfly to avoid being pasted to mush like a frog on a freeway. The wolf glowed with lines of much more recognizable magic that wreathed him in protective energy that emitted electrical energy whenever he landed a quick, probing, taunting blow. Jeff's lips curled into a grin as he saw the canny lupine driving his enemies to batter one another apart in a growing orgy of violence.

At the center of that chamber, limned in a scintillating bubble of power that fried the very air around it, Jeff found Warlocke's battle-damaged form standing, arms outstretched, sending out feelers of power that seemed like tentacles out hunting for the very power Jeff's senses inhabited. Here was the destination all that energy came from, and indeed in that very chamber is where the power returned to once it had completed its circuit through the strange and hellish dimension they somehow had entered.

It entered the bodies of the hundreds and thousands of meaty creations that were even now slowly coming to life. Here was Warlocke's army, which Jeff had read about in the villain's publicly-available file. An army he'd often spoken of in monologues to hero groups he'd killed, yet had never shown to anyone in all his years of villainry.

Jeff also saw a glimmering circle of energy suspended in the air in front of Warlocke, that the horrid villain was channeling a great deal of excess power into. Its strange energy signature boggled him for a moment, as the brilliant but pain and deprivation-distracted jaguar tried to parse its purpose.

The term 'wormhole' slithered through his mind with a shiver that made him feel his aching body again. The more general word 'portal' had him opening his eyes with a gasped inhalation of breath that hurt his smoke-raw lungs. Jeff dug his claws into the wall and yanked himself upright with all his strength, trying not to cry when pain exploded from his footpaw again.

He didn't have time for fear and pain now. They had to put Warlocke down before he woke the army and got that damn door open.