Chapel of Chains Part 3
Flayed Nerves and Numb Wits
In Part 2, the Primus and his hobgoblin cohort had a grand old time letting the Tijakim think he and his were trapped with them--proving the hobgoblin love for tea meant they only performed stronger when being kettled in tight spaces. With the Tijakim willing to pour much blood for those tunnels, the Primus brewed a plan to exact a steep price from the invaders.
Meanwhile on the surface, Runt wanders the city, now a twisting gallery of Fate's more masochistic period of art: soldiers, abyssal thralls, demons, and worst of all civilians of every age in every state of dead ingominy. Her grim jaunt became a chase when an inverted demon gathered a mob of animalistic thralls to chase her and she only evaded them by an accidental fit of fiendish magic.
03:00 Palicas, 15 Moiraios 14389
All but two doors to the shaft were closed behind controlled demolitions. Now the hobgoblins waited as a cadre of auditorily-gifted sappers and praecantors held their ears to the black-and-white marbled stone wall. Differentiated for their non-sparking brass breastplates left tarnished from their reagents as a matter of pride, and the workers' bandannas under the brass masks of those inducted in the order, they listened with ominous body language and muttering among themselves as the karst around the Morningstar's shaft settled in looming rumbles.
Priestesses and praecantrices sat in circles divining the proximity of demons and mobs, powerful mutants and gifted vicars of decay throughout the tunnels. Movements were tracked; halting, scattering, shifting, sometimes disappearing as a distant tunnel's collapse was felt and heard. Junior priestesses observing the divination recounted what they saw with hushed whispers, percolated more excitedly through the ranks.
An unbroken mass of grey, slate, and charcoal armor; of many shades of blue clothing and golden and bronze silk. The final century--the Primus' own unit--to be evacuated through the one of the two final open doors. Seven previous evacuations through seven other doors before their shaft-doors shut and their approach-halls demolished.
These and the fifty-five other doors, all demolished in a specific order to undermine the surrounding tunnels. Years ago, Arc Royal mined all those tunnels to detonate in the event of a compromise in structural integrity, to isolate any cave-ins. When the Tetsubos were given responsibility of the Morningstar, the engineers altered the explosives to burn hotter and detonate on more-severe cave-ins--of the sort they could produce--and the greater maintenance of them only served to train in the art, so many of the hobgoblins knew how to cause havoc with chemicals at this time when their talents were sorely needed.
The other door, on the highest level, next to the stairs that led to the above-surface keep: a slipshod outline on every map of the undercity the Primus and his cadre saw in the eight months they held responsibility of the Morningstar, and the outlines were never consistent. Governor Whalen and Lady Bochra described the… thing as an unopened and frankly unsettling entrance to ruins that even predated the avian natives. With no connection to the rest of the undercity, it held no martial value and as an antiquitant ruin, was best left alone.
This sentiment the Primus came around to when, months ago, he walked the hallway past the shaft door, made a few turns at intersections, descended a spiral staircase, down a widening corridor that shed condensation like molted centuries, and took several turns that opened up to the head of stairs in a large chamber--all made from the same impervious marble as the shaft--and found his yojimbos rustled at a wall of all things.
Back in the present, the Primus stood front-and-center of a phalanx of Infernal Knights given some space by the rest of the hobgoblins. From many helmets rose coils of smoke--that self-indulgent brother of incense that helped soldiers cope the world over; the Primus himself inhaling the last fraction before spitting out a stump of rolled tobacco. Ahead in the darkness, the longest hallway away from the shaft, leading to a tight cluster of intersections and smaller side-halls; darted by low moving shadows sometimes, nothing dangerous enough to deserve a word from the diviners. He stole a backward glance at the sappers covering the branching scaffold at the center of the shaft, working like the majority of their compatriots were not about to leave them.
A senior priestess looks up with tired eyes from her meditations and tells something to an acolyte, who quickly brushes aside everyone, including armigers and warrior-vassals and seasoned Knights old enough to be her father. "Incoming horde, between one and one-hundred fifty, then a ten-minute lull," she tells the Primus after jostling herself to the front alongside him. "Several priests, about a dozen mutants. And a demon." The Primus flashes her enthusiastic excitement even under his mask.
"I didn't know today was going to be special!" he roared. The phalanx gave a cheer with swords raised, and everyone behind them followed suit--except the sappers on the scaffold. He let her bestow a token ward on him while he fastened his somen before shooing her away, and strode down the hallway. Ahead something paused as it crossed the opening, and scurried away, calling for help.
Behind the phalanx was a formation of junior sappers with bombs and strong arms, then priestesses to protect everyone and impede their enemies; then the musketeers, each knelt on a shield held by four vassals. Only the front phalanx of inducted Knights were homogeneous; each was split into smaller squads mixed with Knights, warriors, priestesses, bombers, and gunners so each would be ready to face any threat.
The hallway ahead of them was exactly one-hundred three feet long, from shaft-door to outer-door. He did not remember all the dimensions of all the halls connecting the shaft, but the longest with its twenty-foot span stood out in his mind as a fitting place to sunset their stay in the Morningstar.
[The following was roughdrafted on a typewriter.]
04:00 Palicas, 15 Moiraios 14389
AN HOUR PASSED, Runt guessed, of a nerve-raking game of cat and mob against incoherent voices flecked with insensate malice.
She stalked through a church left intact for the sake of the overwhelming desecration committed--to the goddess of arts and beauty no less and she avoided gazing on the defilements committed on Her faithful--and barely heard the mob hunting for her. Different deity, different church, different feelings than grief--regret as impersonal as the stone altars of her divine patron, Korrohl of the Jotuns.
In the second floor landing of a brownstone fortified by the collapsed third floor, breath caught in her throat and knots in her chest, she spied them picking through the street right below her. She felt nothing so much as apprehension at the thought of dying--either in a fight or being rent apart after capture--in this unremarkable building.
Looking through an arrow-slit in a pillbox, she watched them approach down the debris-strewn road and break off into an open lot framed with the toppled buildings that once bordered it. Three thralls split from the mass and made for her location--seeing the glint of a large septum ring told her she let them get too close. She heard them searching the pillbox from where she hid in the concavity of a lone cornerstone to a building that was adjacent the fortification.
Until dealing with the mobs in that damn water conduit and the cistern with that runtish [!] hobgoblenne and the brannoch, Miss Sarlatova enjoyed the pleasure of burning these so-called Sidonians (or whatever they called themselves or the Arcadians called them) at a safe distance with her magics both studied and hereditary. No need to rake them with her claws or suffer their unsettling collective fixation to stab and swing at specific parts of their enemies.
So back to the game she was forced to play--or was the game playing her?--and her frayed nerves.
She, freakishly tall and they, freakishly stunted, meant she held an advantage for covering ground--not just distance traveled, but the ability to lope over rougher terrain than they. But her frailty would exert itself over her own exertion, and often needed short rests--compared to the mobs' sustaining individual pace with group momentum--once they got going, only hard fortifications and terrain that was functionally hard fortifications would stop them.
So she darted away from the carapace of a large draft animal, glimpsing bobbing lanterns and hearing clipped speech as she crossed a street, and danced over mounds of what she guessed was a parochial school to a hearth-deity last week.
She heard the rush of her goal over the unique noise of a city unforgivingly worked-over for a week by a horde of demons and two armies. A wide canal that followed near the outer-wall of the third terrace, used to move goods and sundries and building materials, fed by the mountains on the eastern and western sides of Thunder's Vale.
And, she imagined, fed the waterworks, cisterns, and subterranean caves that diverted her from the horrors of the undercity.
But the terraces were not perfectly flat. The final approach down an arterial, purpose built with room for every phylum of draft animal, every size cart, and pedestrians, dipped below a military crest to a square where two other roads together met a bridge over the canal, and she hoped, a wharf under the bridge.
Here she needed caution--noise discipline, so no sound would carry out of the bowl in the urbagraphy to ears alert for a renewed chase.
Ah, but her feet met ankle-deep water, the square flooded by an elaborate fountain in the center with a shattered segment of retaining wall. As she mounted the low rim, crossed the basin and looked back past the cover of the floral-and-fruit centerpiece, lights met the dip in the road. Sparks followed the adrenaline up her neck and down her back while she made the far side of the square to a low wall and the canal's edge. Think, Sarlatova.
Well, if the water betrayed her, make it work off the debt.
The fore of the mob splashed in the flooded square. She ignored their baying and knelt, steadying herself for a last push. And using blood magic, wild inherited magic, viscerally felt like pushing.
The fore of them were at the fountain. Here the push would feel more a huge cart than an open door…
Her eyes blackened and a blue-white light shone from deep within them, twin moons on a clouded night. She put both claws in the water. For a moment, thick arcs jumped from her body to the water, and for an instant white plasma cloaked her.
She dimly imagined inhuman heads turning to the direction of her lightning’s strobing hum or the muffled screams of the mob's taught necks, or perhaps the momentary dance of purple-white light. Mind and limbs fogged, she needed to get out in either case, and her exit presented itself as someone emerging from the stairs to the wharf under the bridge. "I need citrus and salt, Alyosha." Runt tripped from exhaustion before reaching the stairs.
[And now back to our regularly-scheduled writing.]
09:00 Palicas, 15 Moiraios 14389
As the mass of gray-skinned machismo made the tunnels roar with marching, a trickle of stooped thralls quickly turned into a mob with at least two screaming priests emitting skin-crawling radiance. At the far end the Primus saw waiting for him an individual he dubbed the Burnhander--large and muscular, face hidden by a corroded metal mask, forearms smoking with a profane gift that ate through flesh and metal; two black holes in the mask looking directly at him.
The mobs--far beyond doubt unseasoned dimwits in fighting--thoughtlessly rushed for the lone, easy-looking target having a drink afront the blue-and-grey formation.
The concoction took effect as he brought its vessel down and crushed face of the mob's first, embedding the shattered glass into the cranium of the second. He jerked the Order's namesake weapon from a scabbard on his back, bringing it down at an angle, sending two flying with at least broken arms and legs. His backswing sent another two into the waiting shields and lances of his Tetsubos.
His own tetsubo followed his body, and then his body followed the tetsubo, his footwork like the current propelling a ship cutting arcs through the ocean. The tide before the Primus were beaten back and flowed around, the closest strikes of their axes and clubs glancing off his armor while the Knights behind him braced their flanks in the onslaught. He withdrew a pace and his backswings knocked thralls forward where they met the Knights' blades.
He knew this hallway decided the whole battle: the longest atrium to the keep's shaft. He raised his hand--a signal. Loud percussions and the air around him hummed, musket balls making the mob around the dread priests move like insects. From the gloom, missiles jet forward in turn; mostly mundane, but a few magical--green plumes and lightning lighting up fallen hobgoblin Knights in the black corridor.
Another raised hand, another signal, and the men advanced as their fallen were shifted back and the second rank filled the gaps. Necks and skulls of fallen enemy cracked with shield and boot. The priestesses behind them invoked a wall of force anathema and impassible to the Abyss' servants--even errant missiles were stopped, and an invoked gout hung midair like an amber and green campfire. The line advanced past this fallback, catching missiles with their shields. Silence fell over the horde in the dark as they regarded the lone hobgoblin in the front. Copious arrows were loosed on him, but they all changed direction.
He raised his club level with a figure in the back of the disorganized mob, never taking his eyes off the Burnhander's half-mask and acrid glowing skin. The beast in man-shape now focused on the hobgoblin, breathed smoke out its exposed mouth and stepped forward. Scorched leather plates and mail tarnished black clung to large muscles. So long as the Primus focused his unblinking gaze on this opponent, by the rites of the Order as an Infernal Knight Primus, interrupting sole combat would prove the devil's work.
Meaty bare forearms and hands steamed and hissed with a corrosive cloud that cast a colorless light. They flew in tight arcs, darting back and forth, the Primus's large studded club interrupting every barehanded strike but not landing any counterstrikes. Their duel amongst the combat oscillated like a wave crashing on a single sea-rock amidst a storm, the combatants changing roles of rock and wave with every strike and repost.
Finally the brute made an uppercut on the Primus' extended arm, striking on his unarmored tricep. The hobgoblin staggered back, and the priests must have been waiting--plumes of corrosive fire arced his way, one striking the shields behind him and another exploding on his armor.
Even with the sanctity of the duel, the cloud burned skin and shirt, and his armor smelled of a forge tinged with a sour note--acid, the ply and trade of those more simple-minded whom the powers of decay gifted. He gritted through the smelling fire on his skin and demanded "muskets, kill those heretics!" He lost all patience for caution with this beast, while he barely registered another volley fired from the shield-supported gunners into the enemy's back ranks.
The Primus condensed a warrior-monk's prayer into an instant of focus, every level of conscious and subconscious thought, of muscle-memory and deific dedication pointed in one direction. Cold sweat warmed as he perspired anew from the focus, the chill of wet clothes forgotten and the burns unnoticed. One swift hit cracked with lightning and the Burnhander withdrew a lame arm to his side--but he compensated with faster legwork, dodging away and out of the Primus' arcs. This too the Primus lost patience for and soon kicked the heretic in one knee, stumbling him long enough to strike the other, sending him airborne before landing on the floor.
The hobgoblins behind him made a disciplined, almost performative cheer as their war-leader brought his tetsubo down onto the head of the Abyss' masked champion.
[The following was roughed out on a typewriter and minimally touched on a computer…]
10:00 Palicas, 15 Moiraios 14389
"WHAT FRESH HELL is this!?" asked a soldier after he spat out a sachet. They were considering leaving the ancient cadaver--to Tiber's muted turmoil, given what Rattles showed him and which he felt he failed effectively telling his men. The discussion died when the paladin nearly died--an arrow grazing his neck, followed by his dive for cover.
"An emergent!" said the paladin, identifying the fresh hell. He growled behind a large statue, intact save the broken-off face, at an intersection corner. Surrounding them were the stone ribcages of buildings, innards of stone, timber, and metal piled in the centers. The rest of the team took cover, some closer than others to--
A civil administration building, judging by the offices, layout, and quality of the stone and tilework. This they saw through the open front, caused by a smoldering corpse, an iridescent-charcoal mass of arms and wings sent through the façade after the Spires half-melted it. Bodymass reacting like all the other slain demons and severed demon-parts, it was a bonfire of foul embers flanked by atrium-stairs on either side. They met a landing at the second story that spanned the width of the space, occupied by pioneers whose glossy black sharp-featured masks reflected the fire's light. From there they spat their clipped language and thick quarrels towards Tiber and his team. A last staircase led up the middle to a third story , where stood something that smothered the limits of description with its fleshy bulk. "A mutant or champion. Or whatever, striving for full demonic descendency!" explained the warrior-priest.
"And we can guess well down the path to deamonium," added Tiber with a hint of a slur as he settled next to the paladin after scanning the intersection. Like the rest, the sergeant sucked at all hours on coffee grounds wrapped in tiny cotton strips between his lip and teeth; anything to delay their losing race with exhaustion.
"The goons are to keep us pinned so the fat fuck can overrun us," called Joker from his spot in a dry fountain in the center of the intersection. "I've been here before, the emergent needs living victims. We're in a ritual of theirs," and he held his helmet up while glancing around the side of the fractured centerpiece--
And flinched a tad when something tore off his helmet, and nearly his hand. Everyone leaned to get a look at the helmet pinned to the base of the paladin's cover by a fletched spear. Joker made a phlegmatic oath as he donned a sea-blue hat, made by his kind in the local style of a beret. "And make that a fat cu--"
"We get it, hobgoblin," answered the paladin.
"Well, right now the other half of those pioneers as you call them are moving to outflank us," he added.
Tiber glanced from his spot next to the paladin. "We haven't the juice to take them on--we're all too tired." The deacon-lieutenant offered the same look both knew and had given before: the tired soldier's first duty to do it anyway. But primary school taught Tiber something of holy oaths. "Can you suffer that? A withdraw?" he asked the paladin, who while crestfallen remembered the tired officer's second duty: in the two-by-two square comparing subordinates' fighting integrity against that of the enemy, err favoring the former and fight again another day.
"I will spend my short rest atoning, then pick up the hunt with or without you," the paladin said.
"With us, then," answered the Sergeant, and the two sealed the deal with a handshake before lifting their heads for an idea of the terrain.
"I see what the hobgoblin meant--I can sense evil down that street," the paladin pointing his head down a street in the same state of ruin as all the others before refocusing on the intersection.
"I want to cajole Rattles into following me thataway, spoil the flank and give you guys an opening to withdraw." Tiber looked around, and called to everyone "where's the undead!?" before looking where the paladin pointed to the intersection center.
The undead just stepped over the fountain-wall and was even with Joker and the centerpiece. Rattles must have overheard their talk--did he understand their speech?--because he tapped Joker on the shoulder and motioned down the street where the flankers supposedly approached. Joker, the more cautious of he and his friend Shorty, dispensed with caution and ran for an overturned cart as a few quarrels bit at his forelegs, barely looking where the undead pointed.
Tiber's words seized in his throat and he impulsively followed the hobgoblin, the paladin behind him making a note of confusion before catching up.
"Where are they?" the sergeant asked the hobgoblin as he joined the former at the cart.
"I… don't know. The ancient just tapped me, pointed, and I…" Tiber waved him off, remembering hours ago when, in the middle of a melee, the undead beckoned him to launch his sword onto the fell priest atop the hill--and he seemed to jump out of his own body then. His thoughts were canceled when the rest of the team ran past to start the deadly scavenger hunt and, never to be outdone, he followed.
THE STATUE CENTERING the fountain casually shoved off as easily as shifting one's own body, the main joining the broken-off face in pieces in the fountain basin. For a moment, Rattles assumed the same pose as the statue he replaced, and their startled pause registered with Tiber and Co. as unusual; the pioneers hesitated an iota, unsure what to make of the facsimile, nor the strange movement of what they considered an uncorruptable 'sterile' thing. When they caught on, it was too late for one of their number, for the undead struck a bullet with the boss of his club, doing one of them in through the sharp-featured mask that defined these abyssal specialists. A spear shot down from the third story gloom, striking an empty plinth--Rattles was on the move.
Rattles counted seven degenerate rebels of the same masked sorts encountered underground, to be disposed-of in the same fashion. A figment of bewilderment where these bastards hailed from and what banner they claimed as the undead overcame one of the many arms of the huge demon-corpse heating the atrium; pushing through a smog-like weight permeating the very air around the smoldering corpse.
The tile and stone hallways behind the atrium echoed their canine-sounding field-cant--laced with soft consonants to hide their location, a creative touch. The undead ran until to his right appeared an open-centered spiral staircase climbing the height of the building, two pioneers a short ways up, shouting for backup. The first he met on the ascent, who met the blade of his club. The second swung a slung crossbow around his shoulders to loose a quarrel over his doubled-over cohort, recoiling to see the sterile one deflect it with the boss of the club and armor. Not losing an instant, the pioneer whipped his crossbow back and leapt, drawing his knife.
Rattles found this foe atop him, main hand dancing to slide the knife past his pauldron--and stepped back down the staircase. The pioneer landed off-balance and felt dead flesh with a vice-like grip on his chain and leather shirt--then falling.
The impact a dust-and-ashen all-enveloping drumbeat on his whole body, the pioneer pushed a groan through his mask, furtively moving his limbs among the scree he fell atop. He barely regained his wits enough to half-register the will-o-the-wisp eyes of the sterile one over the rail above, or the quarrel from his cohort's bow.
No sooner had he loosed the quarrel did Rattles loose the weapon taken from the pioneer at his feet, a dry note of disgust at the memories held in the thing, and planted a foot at the first pioneer's chest to lever his club from the rebel's cranium. He tore a handful of quarrels from a leather quiver a distressing shade of beige, feeling their history--the rushed craftsmanship, the mass-production, the touch of machinery with trapped souls--as tangibly as their weight and balance: artlessly crude, but there was aught else.
One by one Rattles slotted the fist of quarrels into the internal magazine of the crossbow the feathered one left behind under the city. Climb the stairs, kill the fiendling. The first barely registers the way Maneuver is naught but a coda to Fire. The second was the most-immediate expression of something that subordinated all thought and every idea under its single-purposed dominion.
The head of the stairs reached, the weapon-lever cycled. Baying like monster or mortal a foreign indignity to undead, this one uttered no sound, the air filled suddenly with a menacing hum, electric nails scraping instrument-strings.
The hunt begins!
Down the black hallway flanked with doorless jams on either side run two blue-gray flames oscillating with purpose. A bloated howl at the far end; a wide bulk obscures the arch to the atrium beyond. Another spear flies too fast for mortal arms, the undead weaves just in time for a glancing blow that nearly loses his pauldron and shakes bones. Through a doorway to flank, then.
A long room of marble, tiles, and mosaics, desks and partitions set in aisles; ash and burned paper everywhere like the wasted efforts of bureaucrats, and a scale facsimile of the crushed city just past armspan holes in the wall. Scraps chase after the undead down an aisle running along the central wall, the few bodies gazing on their avenger's sprint.
A pantherlike shadow leapt onto Rattles from a side-aisle, sending him into the wall and ducking away from the sweep of the bayonet; then then weaving aside and parrying the fixed blade with a long knife to keep the undead from lining up a shot. This they danced for a handful of movements, until--
A moment's pause, and Rattles discerned the masked pioneer's game--and forward was the only way through. He leapt onto a desk, over the partition behind it as the pioneer and the cohort he bought time for sunk their blades between ancient plates into dead flesh.
Heedless of the injury, Rattles about-faces while his foes round the corner, knives challenged on him, tips aglow with whatever permeated the undead's body. Unlike the mobs moved and drawn by incoherent animus, these fit elites of the foul army seemed to have an intuitive sense at least, an inkling of what and who he was. Did these two know?
Irrevocably committed to mortal contest with no place to run--the thought never crossing mind--understanding passed unspoken between the two parties like lightning between cloud and earth before a storm. The undead and the pioneers scanned for any hint of weakness to spell a bloody end as swift as the beginning. The pioneers briefly glance one another, masks giving nothing but posture betraying unease at the growling musical figments. One turned to menace the undead right in the aisle between desks, the other climbed them to get around their quarry.
So Rattles ran back.
The pioneers laughed an instant before giving chase down the walkspace, sudden adrenaline masking a clattering noise; the one on the floor lost his footing while the one on the desk leapt like his peer at the stairs. The undead shoved this one's midair stab onto his cohort and a floor that suddenly foiled sound footing. The undead leapt onto the desk, vaulted the partition--again--wasting no time: the sling bullets he dropped would beclown them only for so long.
Further down, another door back into the main hallway. Finally, the open air at the top of the atrium--where was the fiendling? The sudden missile to cleave head and arm?
The fleshies in a winning fight but a losing flank: their foes buying time for the fiendling to overrun them. A shout in the street below, a soldier in blue impaled on just such a missile as the undead anticipated; the youth's sword buried in a pioneer slumping over the thick shaft.
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The word freezes blood and limbs, strains diaphragms, snares eyes and minds. The very city seemed to quiet. No thought, a leap over the third-story railing to the landing below, crossbow braced in vice-like hands. A sound like a shovel thrusting into wet soil. A corpulent frame stumbles as a desiccated frame lands. Over the crossbow, the undead locks eyes on the fiendling.
Yet the fiendling had none, and the maneuver went barely noticed by it.
Rattles sees infantile skulls and faces pressing out from the blisters and tumors covering rolls of fat and blubber. The impressions of faces, sightless and mouthless as the creature's very skull, lock on the undead. Eye sockets and brows cinch in white-hot wrath, and the undead understood this beast knew exactly who and what he was. The bayonet wound spat out the blade and screamed in surprise, agony, and rage.
[And now back to writing by hand and keyboard.]
This creature was purpose-corrupted for the seven-foot bow of laminated bone and hair held in the spindlier of two left forearms branched at the elbow. The other, sturdier forelimb shoved Rattles away as the draw-arm raised. This limb, mutated to greater length and flexibility, scars suggested the original bones were removed and the fingers replaced with ropelike appendages to maximize grip-surface area. This whole appendage shot forward, pinning the undead to the wall, digits finding his neck under the heavy plates and unfurling under helmet and breastplate.
The lights under the helmet scowl at the branched arm clumsily knocking and half-drawing an immense arrow for a melee-thrust, the undead cribbed a desperate memory from the crossbow, pumping the lever with his trigger-finger braced tight.
The first gave the fiendling pause. The second surprised it, the third quarrel into the pit of the drawing-arm destroyed its concentration, while every missile after severed the insides of the corpulent imitation-demon's draw-arm.
Of the faces buried in the beast's skin and its own, the flesh of the jaws split open, screaming through wells of blood and pus. A chord of recognition held the undead stricken an instant--but only.
Something changed in the crossbow, he could sense and feel the change. Poor mayfly of a weapon, microfractures audibly tinkling, lacing about the spring-steel of the arms--did they use spirits? The draw-arm pinning him slackened and he rushed ahead. Purchase easy for hand and foot on the rolling fat of the fiendling, the undead kick-stepped and sheathed the crossbow's bayonet through his enemy's jaw.
As the Emergent tried, screaming through open sores, to free the weapon it did not notice the undead draw his flat club and get to work with both hands while the phantom-notes found a crescendo.
ON THE STREET, Tiber saw Rattles single-handedly kill the Emergent, then get rushed by four pioneers. Everyone glanced the undead recklessly climb the proto-demon and tip it over the ledge onto the massive smoking corpse below. To his brief astonishment, the pioneers withdrew instead of flying into a collective fit like the mobs when their demons were killed; even the ones they were beating back street-level saw and withdrew.
Tiber and his team gathered around the smoking debris, the paladin standing by rote procedure at the closest extremity so the others, not bearing divine protection, would not expose themselves to the toxins emitted by the huge deceased knot of arms and wings.
The men were tired, canteens dry like throats, and coils of smoke rising from every lip packed with coffee grounds. The one casualty littered on a spare tarp. Even the paladin lit up a roll and dragged hard. "Do we leave it?" asked a soldier after a long draw.
"No," said Tiber and the paladin as one, and they acknowledged each other. Then something stirred.
A pile of burned timber and broken desks and chairs; they saw a hand emerge, gripping the desk edge. What was once the front desk of the office reception, now standing on its short side, promptly fell forwards, revealing a pile of open drawers, empty bottles, and the undead. Rattles stood up and nonchalantly approached the group. "Okay, Sergeant," said the paladin as the group stifled laughter. "We can keep him." To his mirth and everyone else's, the undead took the paladin's roll of leaf with a hand already holding a rescued clay flask, indulging in both as he walked into the dim morning light of a dark overcast day.