FSE

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Chapter 14

Mack crashed through the final wall, took one more charging ground-pulping step, and smashed into something rock-hard with both knees. Pitching forward, he slammed into the meaty, slick floor and skidded a half dozen feet before crashing up against a heap of wet, gooey chunks that steamed and stank of cooked rotten meat. Thankfully, his knees didn't give him any pain from the hit, though he wouldn't think to wonder about that until later.

The sound of something heavy and moving with meteoric speed presaged the sickening crunch of an impact on flesh and bone and blood, and he was pulling himself upright as he felt the wind of something heavy flying past him at great speed. Then his eyes alighted on a glowing crimson silhouette, demonic in aspect as red light shed from its blunt-toothed maw. A maw that was grinning and panting, and venting steam that looked like burning smoke thanks to the light that blazed behind it.

"Hold it, I'm friendly!" the lion yelled out, as the shape he'd tripped over took a threatening, ominous step forward, hefting a dark, massive shape up in both paws. Then it slowed, and tilted its head. And laughed out a hard, sudden neighing bark of a laugh.

"Hah! Fuckin' finally! Been lookin' for you assholes! Thought you pussies were all dead or some shit!"

Mack couldn't help but just stare at her for a few seconds, as his eyes tried to acclimate to the sudden appearance of that dim ruddy light, and as his brain tried to reconcile the foul language spilling from the filly's lips.

"You uh...Have a pretty foul mouth."

"Heh. Yer damn straight. I'm also a badass," she commented, grinning and spreading her arms expansively to show off the pile of dead enemies she was so proud to have created. "Which way?"

"What?"

"Which way to the others?"

"Fuck if I know!" Mack growled back in growing aggravation.

To your left, then ahead. Your jaguar friend is about to light your path.

Cutting off the filly's response, Mack grunted and pointed to his left. "Or...Maybe this way. C'mon, we got no time to waste, we can bitch on the way." Which spilled out of his muzzle just as the fleshy horror of the walls began to sizzle and then glow, as electrical current began arcing through it in ways it wasn't meant to.

"Heh. A'ight."

Through a storm of bickering as they limped and occasionally fought their way through the labyrinth, Daimon had come to the conclusion that he despised Eve Hightower. Mostly, it was because she had an aggravatingly unswerving dedication to her ethics that struck him as entirely childish and idiotic. Still, she was powerful, that much he had no choice but to acknowledge, as she turned a half-dozen charging flesh monstrosities into a rapidly-scattering cloud of gory pink gas by sucking them into one of her black holes and then blasting it apart.

Also, every time she moved, her lithe and petite vulpine body showed off its fine, delicate but powerful and well-practiced muscle and dexterity. The fact she was wearing only a tattered hospital gown that was closed in the rear by a single tied string at about mid-back kept teasing his imagination with glimpses of the athletic form beneath. Her big bushy tail kept showing him the lower curves of her rump when she rushed forward ahead of him, to fling her paws out and splatter enemies that could have slowed them or done further harm to the already-wounded black cat.

Daimon growled to himself and shook off the temptation to fantasize, or outright stare. In a place so festooned with demonic energies, he could suffer no such temptation or distraction. Unfortunately, his 18 year old body didn't seem to care what his iron-bound disciple thought. However, even teenaged hormones were little match for the oh-so-familiar snarling pain that wracked through his body from broken ribs and battered limbs.

The pain from having lost Father Dover, the first fur he'd ever talked to that had cared about him without selfish motives, was one he tried to keep out of his mind. To break down crying when his father was so near at paw would be just plain foolish.

He consoled himself with the reminder that Dover would understand. The kindly old priest wouldn't begrudge him the delay in well-deserved grief. Something bitter in Daimon muttered that the old fool would be angry that revenge was being had at least partially in his name.

A much less familiar, newer side of the young black cat reassured him that this wasn't about revenge. This was about doing what had to be done. While Dover wouldn't condone the killing and violence, he'd honor the reason behind it. Defending Earth from a demonic horde wasn't something the Catholic Church had done publicly since the middle ages, but it was certainly part of their doctrine, after all.

A shot of pain from his ribs reminded Daimon to keep his mind in the present, though, and he shook off rumination while forcing his body to take just one more step, then another just one more step, despite its cries of agony. They were getting closer to his father with every footfall, and Daimon could feel the wicked old bastard in the very fibers of his being as a throbbing, rotten, aching sensation behind his teeth and in the pit of his gut.

Then another, very different sensation of energy began to rise. While Daimon could sense magical energies most other metas couldn't, this one Eve felt too, evidenced by her lithe body whirling around with eyes wide.

"Do you feel that?" she barked out, paws held up in case she had to direct another gravity sphere.

At first, the black cat sorcerer felt like there was static on the back of his brain, itching, tingling, giving him a sensation of anxiety that made him want to clench his paws till his pads bled. Which wasn't a terribly alien feeling to a cat who'd lived a life of being raised among the Shadow Congregation, then escaping and running from them the last few years.

"Energy...A lot of it," he answered in a hiss, while shoving at the vixen's shoulder. "Keep moving, damnit!"

When the floor started lighting up, Daimon glared at it, trying to process what he was seeing. Surely his father could do such a thing, if he so pleased...But why would he? It wasn't like Warlocke to light the way for his opponents. He was far more the type to prevent foes ever reaching him if at all possible. Warlocke hadn't conquered and destroyed an entire dimension by being a monologuing fool.

"Hey," Eve said, in a voice of dawning recognition, as she turned her head up towards Daimon, even as the cat was shoving her forward. "That's electrical current. Jeff's up and fighting!"

Daimon scowled down at the chipper little vixen. "Oh good. The one who blew me through a stained glass window the last time we met. Wonderful."

"You were trying to kill us," she retorted with a glaring scowl full of accusation. When Daimon didn't see any real hatred behind it, more a sense of disbelieving incredulousness mixed with garden-variety anger, he snorted and pushed at her shoulder to keep her on track. The fact she didn't hate him for that whole mess was almost endearing.

"No, I was pretending to try to kill you. I couldn't have held on to Steamroller's services if I had 'wussied out.' If I'd wanted to kill you, you never would have woken from the nightmare."

"Well thank you so very fucking much for your kindness," she spat, aiming an elbow at his side, hard, as she moved to follow his pushed direction.

When Daimon sucked in a breath at the truly stupendous pain of that light impact and fell to the floor, Eve spun, gasped, and ran over to the fallen sorcerer. As he laid there, curled up around the spot where the corner of her elbow had struck his broken ribs, struggling against a burning tide of pain for breath, Daimon heard her babbling out a string of apologies as she tried to get him rolled onto his back.

Just as her guilty panic was reaching explosive proportions, his breath came rushing back, and Daimon's split lips uttered a coughing laughter that had Eve's vulpine ears perked up and her big, pretty eyes staring at him with a perplexed expression. It hurt like hell to laugh so much, but the situation had tickled him with its irony.

"With reactions like that," he gasped out, grinning bloodily up at Eve's shocked, worried face, "Don't you ever lie to me about hating anyone...You don't even know how."

For a few seconds, the worry stayed there, firmly in place on her pretty features, as her paws danced a few inches off his body, uncertain where to touch him or how to help. Then one paw balled into a fist, and her look shifted into a scowl she had to struggle to drag up from the depths.

"I'd hit you for that, but I don't know where to touch that isn't broken or bleeding."

Snickering really, really hurt. Her sour-faced, offended pout in response to his mocking laughter did make it worthwhile, though.

John saw the trail of light worming its way through the floor, and for a moment wondered if it was evidence that Warlocke's spell was nearing its completion. He only considered it for a moment, though, because almost that quickly, the meaty earth began to sizzle and fry, just before a bolt of lightning blasted its way out of the floor and smashed Warlocke's defensive shield so hard it popped John's ears from the shockwave.

The evil sorcerer supreme staggered, surprised by the force and fury of that attack, even though it had struck an invisible shield and burned the very air in a suddenly-blackened column around him rather than searing his borrowed flesh. With his stolen eyes widened, Warlocke struggled to regain his feet, opened gut refusing to flex for him.

John made to rush toward the momentarily stunned villain, only to be stopped by a suddenly-aware meat statue, the thing almost swiping his head clear off his shoulders as the dexterous wolf dodged back on the balls of his feet, then ducked low under a sweeping haymaker.

More of the monstrous beasts were coming awake too, and the wolf cursed his luck. If he'd had another second or two, he might have ended this quickly in a volley of savage kicks to a downed opponent. Now, he was in desperate straits, bobbing and weaving, ducking and dodging as the monstrosities tried to catch him, bear him down, tear him apart with their fleshy appendages and roaring mouths.

One whistling arm surged over his head, almost clipping the tips of his pointed ears, and the wolf launched himself forward on battle-trained instinct, dodging the double-fisted slam that had been aimed toward his back by an unseen foe. Tucking his tail down and back narrowly saved it from being grabbed by a third, as he sprinted between two sets of meaty thighs and tried to find some way to get where he needed to be.

"C'mon guys, I could use some fuckin' help here," he growled under his breath, through a gut-churning prayer that they were all still alive, nevermind on their way. Meanwhile, from the corner of his eye as he bobbed and weaved, he saw Warlocke grab onto a slight rise in the meaty floor and pull himself halfway upright, using his other paw to hold in guts that tried to spill out of the open rent in his gut. The magician was grimacing, all laughter and mockery gone as he stared hatred at the wolf who'd very nearly interrupted his spell.

With a sneer, the vicious creature leaned a hip against that fleshy lump and raised his right paw toward a half-formed, see-through and wobbly ripple in the air. His fingers hooked into a claw-shape, and plunged forward, penetrating the strange shape and digging into it, as if he were tearing a hunk of flesh out of space itself. What he tossed aside was transparent, a gelid liquid of some sort, that hissed and sputtered as it landed on the meaty floor, blackening the meat and then carpet of interlacing bones that revealed themselves beneath it a moment later.

As that piece of torn space rapidly decayed, John realized, it was taking the floor with it. The next piece wasn't just dropped. Instead, it was flung right for the wolf, who kicked off the floor in a backward hop that saved his face from being quite truly rotted off by that unstable bit of physics.

"It's too late to stop me!" Kolter's body wheezed out, its voice full of gurgles from the blood John glimpsed dribbling from the snow leopard's maw. Then the wolf was dodging again, weaving in to make quick, sizzling hits against his fleshy foes that seemed to barely slow them despite the potent magic in his fighting gloves.

Just as he was about to retort, another surge of energy lit up the floor, and lightning arced so powerfully from it that shattered bone exploded up into the air as what could only be Jeff's power blew through it's resistance. The energy arced toward Warlocke in a bolt of ball lightning thicker than John's torso, and hit the sorcerer's protective ward with bone-jarring force.

Then the blast of crackling energy danced backwards, deflecting off the shivering, suddenly-visible bubble of a barrier, and lanced into the beasts bearing down on John in greater and greater numbers. The one directly in front of him burst like an overripe plum hit with a baseball bat, showering the wolf in blobby, instantly-cooked gore. He'd never been so happy to be soaked in offal, when that offending enemy's disappearance revealed Jeff Castillas, matted-fur and limping, leaning against an archway not more than fifty feet from John's spot.

Someone less experienced might have yelled out in joy at such a sight, at the confirmation of his hopes. John was too experienced, and merely grinned ebulliently, laughing as he duck another of the charging flesh beasts, snapped out a boot that broke its knee and sent it crashing down, then began to work his way through the mob towards his injured but grimly rictus-grinning lover.

From another passage not ten feet from Jeff's, Eve Hightower became visible. The diminutive vixen's athletic body wasn't left much to the imagination by the splatter of enemies that had soaked the hospital gown to her body like a glove. For all that, the normally squeamish and goody-good idealist had a bloodthirsty snarl across her face, paws held high like a composer as she dished out death in a swarm of balls of gravity-warped space. Behind her, the very villain that they had confronted just days ago limped along, bent almost in half, blood dripping from the mask that was still wrapped around his face. His right paw was wiggling in strange gestures, and John immediately spotted what he was doing. Eve wasn't bothering to dodge because she didn't have to - the young sorcerer was generating a deflection field of some kind that knocked aside the ham-fisted swings of their foes.

He'd expected Eve would panic the next time she saw the creature that had put her in a nightmarish coma. The wolf felt a burst of pride in her fortitude.

"Eve! Left ten! Link up with Jeff!" he howled out, while baseball-sliding through the spread legs of one opponent before popping back to his feet like a spring to dish out a dozen lightning-fast hits to another. The dextrous little vixen was just as quick to respond, yelling out "Right!" before grabbing onto the black-clad cat next to her and dragging him to Jeff's side even as the black jaguar was releasing a blast of lightning thicker around than John's thigh.

It hit Warlocke's shield hard enough to knock the archvillain down again from the concentration needed to keep the bubble of magic active. The hit didn't seem to hurt him however, or slow him down much, as he grabbed another glob of destroyed dimensional wall and chucked it hissing to a floor that was now rotting at visible speed in circles around wherever bits of that stuff had landed.

"I can't...Break through!" Jeff snarled out, as his lightning struck the ball again and again, lancing out of the ground and distant ceiling, pulverizing and flash-cooking fleshy statue-monsters as it went.

"Stop trying!" John yelled out, as he threw a brutal gut shot that dropped one of the monsters by bursting its spine with a flare of emerald enchantment. "Eve, Jeff! Start clearing these flesh things! When Mack and Iron Horse get here, I have an idea!"

"Is that a portal?!" Eve yelled out, even as she began converging her spheres together into larger, more potent event horizons. They began rolling out in an expanding semi-circle from her position, cutting swathes through the enemy that were utterly un-slowed by the bulky physical powerhouses that tried to stop them. When they got too close, they were simply torn to bits by the immense gravitational vortex created by their presence. Those that went through the thickest sections were already exploding from being over-packed with crushed foes by the time John could yell out a response.

"Yeah! We've got about a minute before it opens!"

"No," Daimon husked against Eve's ear, leaning on the vixen for support as his legs wobbled and his head swam from injury and blood loss. "He's wrong. We have about thirty seconds..."

The cat wondered if her shiver was real, or just his vision going out from anoxia, when his mask traced along the shell of her big, pointy red ear. He wanted badly to tease her about it, that snide sense of amusement rising in him only to be drowned out by a wave of dizziness and nausea.

John started bolting through the field of carnage that Eve had just cleared out, taking advantage of the lack of foes between him and the others. When all three momentarily stopped and stared past him, though, the wolf hazarded a glance behind. What he saw chilled him from tail tip to ears.

The flesh beasts they had killed numbered in the dozens, maybe a hundred or more, splattered, blasted, fried to pieces, smashed by magic and meta-powered might. But the cavern contained many times that number, hundreds of hundreds, an army numbering in the tens of thousands...Or so he'd initially thought. Now, as the show of lightning Jeff had created was shedding illumination throughout the cavernous expanse, John saw he'd massively underestimated. They weren't in the center of Warlocke's army. They were barely a tenth of the way into that vast and cyclopean chamber of pulsating violence and half-wakened sleepers.

And the beasts were stirring in ways that made even the veteran lupine's stomach clench. They were staring to flow together like a vast tide of oozing grey-pink clay, conjoining and warping as an enormous form began to take vague protean shape amongst the wriggling stalactites and stalagmites of that horrible chamber of ghoulish splendor.

For a second, John's maw hung open, as his running steps slowed to a stop. He'd battled villains ranging from the silly to the terrifying for over a decade now, even gone dimension-hopping a few times with Dr. Theorem's little research expeditions. Some of the things he'd seen had been truly horrific, mind-bending atrocities against decency and science. This, though, hit him hard enough to stun the veteran meta, and fill him with a sense of sudden and expansive dread. As a cackling, gasping, bleeding archvillain kept tearing open the gateway for his massive monstrous army, John watched as said army formed up for transit. Warlocke intended to march it through that portal as a beast the size of Yankee Stadium, only filled to the middle with muscle, murder, and all the powers possessed by all of this dead dimension's long-ago-slain metas. And instead of marching in as a slow-moving, unintelligent army of dangerous but easily-destroyed monsters, it was going to go through as an enormous shape-shifting liquid death machine that he was fairly sure would start adding to its size as soon as it started killing.

The thing was arcing with conflicting energies, as if it was trying to re-learn their use. John saw portals open in mid-air, letting through toothy purple tentacles that grabbed hungrily at everything in reach. He saw enormous gouts of white fire burst into being and fade away in an instant. Bits of dead foes began to dance around on the floor, moved by some unseeable force, slamming into one another and bouncing off to fly across the chamber with whooshes of momentum. Sections of the flowing, molten-wax-like monster blurred with super speed and submerged themselves in other parts.

"What the FUCK is this shit?!" slapped its way across John's consciousness, in the booming but high-pitched voice of a certain filly he'd just met a few scant hours ago. "Seriously? The Blob? Who are you, fuckin' Ed Wood?"

Mack's voice cut in as soon as the Iron Horse was done, though her thundering laughter continued.

"What the fuck do we DO about that? John! C'mon dude, talk to us!"

The verbal slap was enough. John was belting out a plan before he even consciously registered having come up with one.

"Jeff! Remember that thing you did back in the apartment building? The rail gun thing!"

"Ngh...Yes?"

"Iron Horse's skin is made of iron. When I give the go, fling her at Warlocke's shield with all the force you can manage. Then hit that bastard with every volt you can muster. Hopefully It'll break his shield!"

"I'll need a...Half minute...To set up the magnetic fields to throw her with."

Tish 'Iron Horse' Henry grinned. "Fuck yeah, sounds fun! I'mma be a train that's faster'n a speedin' bullet!"

The wolf kept on calling out, yelling over the otherworldly howls of their regrouping foes. With every word, his resolve was returning, and the young eyes of his team turned to him with sudden reassurance in their de facto leader's projected confidence.

"Eve, I need you to keep the flesh shit off us! Keep that big bastard occupied, hit it with all you've got! Mack, as soon as Iron Horse hits that shield, I want you to plow in there with everything you got!"

Dripping blood from his face wrap, Daimon had to try twice before his wet, scratch voice became loud enough to hear. He sounded hesitant, combative, as if expecting to be rejected out of paw or perhaps even to be attacked. The cat glared challenge at John with bloodshot eyes.

"What...about...Me?"

John just grinned right back at him, showing all of his many sharp, white teeth, and a thousand times as much confidence as he felt. Figuring out how a villain played into all of this didn't matter - Said 'villain' was offering to help, in his own growly fashion, and had already passed the test of walking down a hallway with Eve and neither killing her nor being turned into a subatomic pretzel by her powers. The details could wait for explanation later.

"Shield Eve if she needs it!"

The cat seemed momentarily startled, then just nodded, as Eve looked over her shoulder at him, passing some message with her eyes perhaps. Mack noted it, and his brow beetled, before smoothing out a moment later as he hunkered down like a linebacker about to rush the line of scrimmage.

"Are you ready, kid?" Jeff shot over to the Iron Horse, who grinned and hocked a glob of roiling, oily spit into her palms, rubbed them together, and gave him the thumbs-up. Then she took her hammer in both paws, leaning its head back over her shoulder. If she had any fear of the giant and growing monstrosity that was looming grander and fouler every moment not a hundred yards from them, it didn't show. If anything, she seemed gleeful at the prospect of the desperate fight to come.

"I was born ready! C'mon, asshole, throw me like a week old condom!"

Jeff just sort of blinked at her, the bookish jaguar perplexed and disgusted by the comment, then bemused by the fact that it had grossed him out more than their horrid, stinking surrounding. Deep down inside, it reminded him of the urge to withdraw and hide inside the cool, distant darkness of catatonia. The others needed him, though, so he snorted, laughed, and raised his paws, which were crackling and arcing with electricity as he began forming the electro-magnetic toruses that would propel Tish like a rail gun round.

"Here they come!" yelled Eve. Then the wave of flesh beast started to flow towards them, a massive tsunami of meat and murder, bubbling with power and hatred directed toward annihilating them on behalf of its master.

As it came, the behemoth gained mass and speed, absorbing more and more of the once-individual flesh statues. Some were still fighting one another, fists pummeling away even as they were dragged into the greater whole, subsumed and their mass re-appropriated to the combined will of the beast. The crunching and rearranging bone and flesh gave it a horrifying sound, a wet cacophony of snaps and squelches that reminded John the ex-boxer of every snout he'd broken in the ring all rolled together into one massive, sickening tidal roar.

"Eve, slow that thing down! Okay, everyone, do what I told you and we have a chance! Jeff, throw her!"

"Twenty...Seconds!" the jaguar yelled out, hunching over and squeezing his eyes shut to concentrate over the din of battle. Tish danced from hoof to hoof, hefting her hammer, licking her chops with her eyes boring into Warlocke as the sorcerer redoubled his efforts to open the portal. Now it was both his path to victory and his path to escaping having his borrowed bones crushed to goop by a very enthusiastic bunch of very desperate and angry metas.

Eve leapt out in front, as was her habit in cheerleading and life in general, and flung her paws out, accompanied by a high-pitched shout of effort. The first ranks of flesh creatures were still under their own control, un-subsumed, and were sucked straight into the line of singularities the vixen summoned before their charge could get them closer than about fifty feet from the team. Already panting, having not even fully recovered from the fights in the hallways, Eve knew she didn't have much energy left. So, as the great tsunami of chthonic beast flowed toward the stalwart vixen, she grabbed onto her will with iron-like determination born of desperation and years of self-discipline. Her paws and ear tips were going numb with exhaustion as she pulled on the last of her reserves.

When the towering monster reached the line of singularities that had already absorbed about half their potential mass, Eve's muzzle split into a grin, and she tossed everything she had into one last much larger gravitic singularity. Suddenly eating the light around it, though it was microscopic in real size, the ball appeared as a black basketball-sized sphere so massive it started dragging the other micro-singularities in.

Just as she'd planned, the flesh beast flowed over the field of collapsing black holes with such mass that it at first looked as if her power had utterly failed. Meanwhile, the black holes were sucking in the massive thing's bulk from within, filling themselves up on rent, crushed flesh and bone until they could take no more.

When the last bit of her smaller black holes were sucked into the large one, the chthonic behemoth was already lashing down at them with a pseudopod that would crush them all to so much gorey ooze.

"Daimon," she rasped out, "shield!"

The black cat grabbed her by the shoulder with claw-tipped fingers, digging them in till blood dripped down her back. He needed the support, his own body barely able to stay upright even when he wasn't casting. Now, the diminutive vixen was all that kept him from sliding to the ground in a nerveless heap.

Words of power slithered from his lips, dancing painfully on her ears as Daimon called on otherworldly energies and ancient proto-words her mind seemed unable to grasp onto. As the room began to suddenly darken, Eve squeezed her eyes shut, praying she'd get the chance to open them again.

Eve knew there was a good chance the blast wave would hit them. A singularity that size was the largest she'd ever created, and the explosion when it reached critical mass would be immense. Even her background in theoretical physics didn't give her a way to figure out the blast. Energetic explosion would be exponentially larger with every gram of mass in the black hole, and she'd just smashed a dozen microscopic ones together.

A 'WHANG' sounded above her, and the vixen flinched, then winced when Daimon's claws clasped harder into her shoulder. The cat hissed painfully into her ear, even as her eyes opened, just in time for the singularity to detonate.

The descending pseudopod had whipped down to within an arm's reach of Eve's body, only to be stopped dead by a glowing orange and black-veined shield that seemed to emanate from Daimon's eyes like the light from a movie projector. That was all she had time to register before a terrible thud slapped her across the whole front of her body as overpressure from the singularity's explosion hit them from behind, bouncing off the walls.

A wave of atomized matter blew outward, banging off the shield Daimon had projected in front of the entire team, leaving it spiderlined and dented in. Blood burst from his mask in a mist, as the cat's grip on her shoulder loosened, and he slid to the ground in a heap, gasping weakly for breath after the massive exertion needed to keep that shield going.

For a moment, everything went quiet, as a mist of reddish-black ash filled the air too thickly to see. When it began to clear, Eve saw what she'd just achieved laid plain.

The flesh behemoth was rolling backward, howling in sudden and terrible agony as a hole half the size of a football field gouted gore and bones from where a good tenth of its body had been.

Then she saw only swirling darkness, as her exhausted body gave out on her, and she sagged down on top of Daimon's crumpled form. John rushed over to them, even as the fur all over his body began to rise up and tingle from static charge.

With a thrum of electricity the rest of the team could all feel in their fur and teeth, Jeff finally released a dozen bursts of energy, crackling little balls of light that took their places in the air on either side of Tish's short frame. In an instant, they spread, breaking apart into a dotted line of crackling energy fields, as Jeff Castillas streamed hot, sweaty bullets of moisture from the effort of such fine control.

When the Iron Horse's hooves lifted off the ground, Tish laughed and looked down, kicking her legs like she was trying to swim.

"Oh this is gonna be fuckin'-"

Then, mid-sentence, the magnetic fields pulsated in a brilliant rhythm and the iron-fleshed little Arabian filly shot off across the room, air splitting so hard that the particulate remains of Eve's blast burst into flame and whipped along in a tornado line behind her with a thunderous sonic boom, as she was fired like a rail cannon round at Warlocke's shield.

"SWEET!" she crowed, though no one else could hear it over the explosion of her shattering the sound barrier just before striking Warlocke's defensive barrier with what would have been flesh-splattering force for any creature less invincible than her.

The sound of her impact was like a train hitting a stone wall - A terrible crash of unstoppable force against immovable object. Then she hit the ground and slid right past Warlocke's footpaws, tumbling and dazed from the sheer force of the hit.

The sorcerer hissed in fury and threw his right paw downward, blasting Tish with a wave of telekinetic force that threw her the rest of the way across his the area within what was left of the shield bubble, smashing her into that wall hard enough to push her diminutive but multi-ton body halfway through it, leaving the filly kicking and swearing for all she was worth.

"Congratulations, idiot! You broke a hole in my shield! Now DIE!"

Warlocke's arm went up, grabbing another blob of that warped space that was eating away at the floor all around him, tearing the last bit of blockage from his portal, which snapped open like an eye long asleep suddenly awoken. Through it, Tish could see the streets of her home town, riddled with garbage and debris from last night's mess of demons and cultists. She could see police and fire teams working through the wreckage, groups of civilian volunteers helping them hunt for survivors in one of the downtown slums that had been torn apart in the fighting.

Dead demon hosts lay strewn about here and there, covered over with bloody sheets, National Guard troops with their automatic rifles bravely standing guard over them.

Looming like a mountain over her head, Tish saw the gigantic flesh monster, a Godzilla of corpse flesh, was starting to flow downward even as Warlocke was about to fling that disintegrating goo onto her. Iron Horse grit her big square teeth and glared, gripping her hammer with the intent to at least maim that damn monster before it flowed in through her mouth and smothered her steam engine out.

Mack Franklin had lived his whole life being ignored, or being second-fiddle to someone else. His own parents never had time for him; father was a wealthy wastrel, a corporate leech of the worst sort. His mother dodged allegations of super-villainry as she pirated her way across Wall Street, too busy gleefully skirting the law to pay attention to her only son. Even to his girlfriend, he was more a project than a person - She dated him, he'd realized recently, because she pitied him and wanted to help. Not because she cared for him as who he really was.

As a football player, he'd been a failure thanks to the damned hard-to-control powers. As a student, he was a flop, unable to pay attention long enough in the boring classroom environments to get anything well-learned.

Now, though, everyone else was down or occupied. Jeff was down on a knee, shaking like a leaf as he exerted what power he could, sending blasting arcs of power into the hole Tish's flight had created, only to have the energy hit a secondary shield and ground out instantly. Eve and the new kid were lying in a pile on the ground that made his hackles rise despite knowing it was due to unconsciousness. John couldn't do jack to someone like Warlocke, thanks to all the swarming flesh in the way. He couldn't let a feeling of helplessness take over now.

His aunt's voice rung in Mack's head, a gentle but powerful sound full of certainty and love he could barely recognize for lack of exposure to it in his life.

The only difference between a hero and a bystander is that the hero chooses to act. Now is your time, Mack. God be with you.

_ _

He felt a surge of strange warmth inside, as he bull-rushed down a ramp of dead enemies and gory debris. Something like pride, or confidence he thought, as he drove a fist through one of the remaining un-subsumed flesh beasts. It flew away as if hit by a freight train, ragdolling against Warlocke's shield.

The sensation grew, as he ate up the ground between himself and his target, and felt none of the morbid fear he'd first experienced upon hearing they were up against the Warlocke, one of his world's most terrifying villains. Monstrous bits from the great blobby horror tried to grab at him, pseudopods as thick as his neck wrapping around his midsection only to be torn off the vast body when his momentum failed to be altered. His super-strength carried him like nothing took any effort, not smashing aside enemies nor breaking free of what should have been a lethal grab.

As he raised his head, he saw Warlocke tear the portal wide, ripping open a doorway in the air that suddenly blossomed open like the dilating pupil of a giant transparent eye.

"Go forth my minion!" Warlocke crowed, "and destroy them all!"

The flesh beast warped and wobbled, and surged toward the doorway, as the top half of Warlocke's shield parted for it's passage. Mack put one foot on the boney dais, and without a sound launched himself up and through Tish's hole.

Warlocke turned toward him with a sneering laugh on his lips, a derisive condescension that made Mack's blood run cold and hot all at once.

The Warlocke's eyes went wide though, as the warmth in Mack's chest flowed down his arm and out of his paw, curving backward to create a blade, a slender arc of golden light like the sun.

With all of his righteous anger, Mack finally let out the great leonine roar that had been building in him. The warmth he'd felt came from his aunt's love and faith in him, and he channeled it into that blast of sound, and the scimitar that had materialized in his paw.

Warlocke raised an arm that glowed with scarlet light and tenebrous blackness. Mack's double-pawed leaping cleave carried the Paladin's Blade straight through it, parting flesh and demonic magic like cloth on a razor's edge. Then, his blade slammed home, thudding into Warlocke's borrowed chest with a meaty noise of impact and a sudden keening, as if a thousand flutes had all just been blown sharply into the world's largest megaphone.

Mack grabbed the blade with both paws as Warlocke did the same, grabbing around the hilt, paws touching paws. The big lion snarled into his enemy's face, and wrenched the blade, twisting it harshly as the gurgling monster kicked and thrashed, held up off the ground by the length of glimmering weaponry that protruded from his spilled-open gut.

Then he felt a warmth on his wrists, and along his side, and looked down. There, standing next to him, a head shorter than his six foot five height, stood a glowing golden lioness. She had her paws on his, helping direct the blade that shone with her same inner light. Aisha, the Paladin before him, looked up and smiled.

You have done it, Mack. You finished the strike I never managed to.

_ _

His eyes stung with tears he didn't quite understand, and forgot about a moment later when the body on his blade slumped, dragging it down infinitesimally against his mighty strength.

Then it jerked, once, and sucked in a ragged gasp of air, it's eyes opening with a bewildered, agonized expression. Mack snarled, baring all of his many teeth as he readied to kick the beast off his scimitar and strike it down again and again, until it was in tiny pieces for all it had done.

Aisha touched his arm, gently, and leaned up on tip-toes to speak into his ear.

Warlocke is dead. His host still lives. The Paladin does not kill the innocent and well-intentioned. Gather your friends, Mack. Your fight is not done until they are safe.

_ _

"Yeah...Easier said than done," he muttered, looking up to the still-glowing portal, which was filled at that moment with the sheer bulk of the great flesh monster that streamed through it.

All around him, the meaty maze began to shake and shiver, groan and crunch, as its life force began to give out. Without Warlocke to power it, it was dying, Mack realized.

"John! I'm gonna cut this portal wider! Get the others' asses over here!"

Tish fell out of the shattering shield with a clang, a grunt, and a stream of curse words Mack couldn't quite put sense to.

"You too, little miss foul mouth!"

She gave him the finger, and cheerfully grinned as she hopped down from the dais and went straight for Eve and Daimon Locke.

Then Mack turned, jammed the Paladin's Blade into the rent in space, and started to slice.

Streaming white-hot plasma from a dozen rents in his once-mirrorlike and now blasted and scorched armor, mighty Tokamak exploded through the portal's other side in a roar of superheated air and massive overpressure. The doorway to the shadow realm, in which he and Theo had just battled the Nightmaker, lord of the Shadow Pit, the Follower Behind, the very beast who's existence made children fear the dark, snapped shut in a final and ominous thunderclap of power.

He had known the fight was going poorly when Theo threw Paladin's Blade out through a dimensional rift. He had known things were about to end badly when the Archmagister took his own staff in both paws, let the Nightmaker grab him into a grapple, and then broke the great receptacle of power over his enemy's face. The battle had taken six hours.

As the ultimate battery and symbol of his power, Dr. Theo's simple stick-breaking had far greater consequences than it might have otherwise seemed. Such an act had torn the dimensional walls asunder, and blasted Dr. Theorem and the Nightmaker with a lifetime's worth of gathered magical energy. All the castoff power left over from Theo's decades of spellwork, all the absorbed blasts from his enemies, all released in one cataclysmic moment.

Nightmaker would have to re-form himself, back in his hellish home dimension, which would take anywhere from a few decades to a few centuries. His legions, now temporary leaderness, had broken off their assault into the mortal world to fall back and regroup, and await new commands from their now-torpid lord and master.

Tokamak had only barely survived the blast by the simple expedient of outrunning it on Theo's command to get back to the open gateway, and even so his containment armor was torn to bits, streaming fusion radiation as he burned his way across the morning sky of the city he'd sworn to protect. He glowed like a second sun for a few moments, hanging in midair as he looked down, his alien energy senses telling him so much of the tragedy that had befallen his home.

Hundreds were dead, though the demon horde host belonging to the Shadow Congregation now lay slaughtered by the city's brave defenders. The police had rallied, the National Guard had already arrived, and were even as he looked clearing out buildings filled with be-tentacled monstrosities

Then he detected a spike in energy, a great pulsing sphincter of wave-forms that shouldn't have existed within this world's particular physical environment. Tokamak streamed toward it, trailing glimmering light in his wake as he maneuvered and kept himself in the wind such that his more dangerous radioactive shedding wouldn't land in the city.

The shimmering explosion of energy waves he perceived was destabilizing as he neared it, irising open to a vague oval shape in an enormous surge of extra-dimensional radiation that caused nearby trees to instantly begin mutating and dying. Moments later, the doorway wobbled and bloated out at the edges, and a terrible wave of flesh flowed out of it like a living tentacle from a gigantic soft-serve machine.

Down below, the once-orderly police and National Guard immediately began to scramble about in a fashion that put Tokamak in mind of ants; though panicked, they moved with swift industriousness as they became aware of the threat, pulling back any civilians they could find and making frantic calls for artillery strikes and meta-powered support. With his suit and energy form so badly damaged, he was having trouble interpreting the radio-wave traffic that blurred across his senses, except to know that it was frantic and multi-directional.

Six hours of battle had taken their toll on the mighty Tokamak. As a Brightling, he was a near-infinite source of energy, so long as he had access to more fusionable mass. Inside that dark dimension, however, he'd only had his own energy and personal reserves to draw upon. Now weakened by the thousands of demons he'd slain to give Dr. Theorem time to end the Nightmaker's threat, Tokamak quickly calculated that he didn't have enough left to stop the flesh monster through normal means.

As it wrapped itself around a skyscraper and began tearing the thing apart with a million flailing fists and gnawing acid-filled mouths, Tokamak altered his thrust and began accelerating in a burning arc of plasma down from the sky.

Down below, the furs of the city were looking up, pointing, flinching and turning their faces away as the light of his descent became blindingly bright. Tokamak poured on the power, converting his stable energy matrix into a fluctuating torrent of radiation and heat. After the arduous, brutal fight he'd been through, Tokamak knew he wasn't strong enough to fight the thing straight out, not with all the roiling power and energy he sensed spaced about its exterior and through its core. It would be like fighting all of the world's super heroes and villains all at once, only united under a single purpose; slaughter and mayhem. Tokamak had no choice but to kill the thing as swiftly and violently as he could.

For a Brightling, that meant destabilizing his own pattern, the very thing that gave him individuality and stable existence. The very word 'Tokamak' was a scientific term concerning the use of magnetic fields to contain and stabilize energetic fusion plasma. To destabilize would mean a powerful explosion of energy, and the cessation of his own existence.

In accomplishing his sworn goal of protecting the humans who had given him a new home after his banishment from the Brightling homeland in the Sun, the inevitable met with no hesitation. Besides, Brightlings had little native concept of death. It was seen as merely a shift from one wave-form of energy to another.

The monstrous enemy began to lash as he approached, sensing the impending danger too late to stop it. Tokamak felt the air burning as it touched his radioactive body, sensed his own self-reinforcing patterns breaking down. The very core of his existence, the mighty fusion spark that powered all of his thoughts and actions, began to burn like its own miniature star as he plunged into the suddenly evaporating flesh.

When he hit the giant flesh monstrosity, he was burning so hot that the flesh didn't burn or boil - It sublimated, converted instantly from a solid to glowing plasma, part of the chain reaction of Tokamak's growing explosion. Passing through it was no more difficult than flying through the Earth's atmosphere for Tokamak in that moment, and he felt a strange and exultant sense of freedom, even as the nucleus of his life force was preparing to expend itself.

His last conscious act of will was to divert some portion of the energy to maintaining a magnetic field that would stop the chain reaction from catching Earth's atmosphere on fire.

The detonation was intense, vaporizing almost precisely one city block in a sphere of sudden fusion. Beyond that edge, many furs were temporary blinded as a flash of light managed to escape the magnetic field, burning shadows into the concrete and searing retinas.

Luckily, no one had been alive inside the structure when Tokamak detonated. He would have hated to go back on his word to serve and save Earthlings.