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So much for being repentant.
Byleth looked inside each of the cases, eyes twinkling excitedly. He stopped, reaching down to remove something wrapped in plastic. Eagerly he tore away the covering.
The Colt Peacemaker glistened like gold in the harsh fluorescent light of the garage. Byleth held the six-shooter before him. Remy could only imagine what that piece of violence had to say.
The Satan examined the weapon’s loading chamber, his smile growing so wide that it could split his face.
“It’s loaded,” he said, aiming down the barrel of the gorgeous weapon.
“Strangely enough,” Mason gurgled. “It always seems to be that way, even after we’ve taken the bullets out.”
Like a kid at Christmas, Byleth placed the pistol back inside its case, moving on to the next one. He gasped, and as if carefully reaching for a newborn pup, he put his hands inside coming away with an ancient battle-axe. Byleth hefted the heavy piece, holding it out before him, a crazy person’s smile upon his face. As he watched helplessly, Remy was stricken with a sense of dread so immediate that if he had been able to, he would have dropped to the ground and covered his head.
There didn’t appear to be anything special at all about the axe, the iron weapon tarnished with age, the edges of the blade stained with something dark that he guessed could’ve been blood. But like the daggers, the ancient weapon had a voice, and it cried out to anyone with the ability to listen, and it was deafening.
“Something isn’t right,” Remy warned as he looked around the garage.
Procell remained undistracted from his task, while Mulciber came at him unexpectedly to cuff him on the back of his head, knocking him to the floor.
“Shut your fucking mouth,” the bald fallen snarled.
On his hands and knees, Remy felt the floor begin to tremble.
A look of confusion registered on Mulciber’s face. Momentarily distracted from Remy, he was feeling it too.
The fallen with the broken nose looked back to Remy with questioning eyes as the vibrations coming up through the floor intensified.
“I told you something was wrong,” Remy said.
“Satan?” Mulciber called out to his master, he too sensing that things were not how they were supposed to be.
Byleth ignored him, swinging the battle-axe in the air. Remy could only imagine the slideshow of countless lives cut down in the blade’s lifetime playing inside the Satan’s head.
Mulciber yelled out, this time a little louder, the vibration at their feet growing worse. Procell noticed now, the chanting of the spell that kept Remy mobilized slowing considerably. And still the Denizen leader wasn’t listening.
“Hey, dumb-ass,” Remy finally yelled, bringing all the attention to him.
Axe in hand, Byleth snarled. Remy knew what he wanted to do with that killing tool, but he doubted the Satan would get that chance. There were other, more pressing matters, soon to be concerned with.
Remy’s outburst finally drew the Satan’s attention to the fact that something was wrong. The air was thick with the sense of menace.
“What is that?” Byleth asked, looking about the room. The alarms on the sports cars were triggered, filling the confined space of the garage with blaring horns and flashing headlights.
Remy’s eyes were drawn to a section of floor, cracks like bolts of lightning zigzagging across the hard surface before the ground erupted.
Chunks of concrete whizzed through the air as the stink of something awful wafted up into the room in an explosion of dust and dirt.
Remy knew what had burrowed up through the earth—he’d encountered one of them only hours ago.
A symphony of gunfire errupted, mingling with the screams of those dying at the claws and razor-sharp teeth of the animals that Byleth had said were created by a loving God to patrol the environment of Hell.
Hellions, the Satan had called them.
And this time there was more than one.
He could move again.
Remy quickly picked himself up, eyes searching through the concrete dust and chaos unfolding before him.
The screams mingling with the thunderous roar of gunfire were deafening. He glanced briefly to his right, at the sight of the spell caster, Procell, lying on his back on the ground, gazing up toward the ceiling and beyond, his right eye having been replaced with a jagged six-inch piece of concrete flooring. He wouldn’t be muttering any more spells for quite some time.
The explosion had pushed Remy away from the focus of the attack, and he moved closer to the center of the storm.
It unfolded before his eyes in a nightmarish blur. The Hellions—there seemed to be hundreds, they moved so quickly, but there were only four—were attacking the Denizens with ferocious abandon. They moved from one kill to the next, Byleth’s Denizen followers proving no match for their savagery.
Remy skirted around the gaping hole in the garage floor, the stink of Hell beasts still wafting up from where they’d burrowed. A bellow of rage, conjuring brief electrical flashes of similar cries he’d heard upon the battlefields of Heaven, drew Remy’s eyes to Mason’s van.
Byleth still held the battle-axe, swinging it mightily before him as one of the Hellions stalked closer, on the hunt for new prey.
The handicapped Mason was struggling to drive his wheelchair up the ramp and back into the safety of his vehicle, as Julia screeched in fear. Madach strained behind the man, pushing on the back of the chair, trying to move the heavy, mechanized conveyance up the ramp faster.
The Hellion poised to pounce before the axe-weilding Satan was suddenly thrown sideways by the force of multiple bullets entering its red, muscular flesh. The monster roared, spi
“Get away from him!” the loyal Denizen bellowed, emptying the clip uselessly into the durable flesh of the abomination.
Remy ran across the body-strewn garage, toward the van and the overturned table. He was looking for the daggers. They’d had some effect upon the Hell beasts before, and would likely do so again.
His gun empty, Mulciber attempted to run, tossing the now useless weapon at the hissing nightmare. The Hellion, its body seeping thick, yellowish liquid from where it had been struck, sprang at the back of the fallen. It landed atop him, driving him to the ground, sinking its razor-sharp teeth into the soft flesh found at the back of Mulciber’s neck.
Even though the Denizen was an ass, Remy was glad that it had ended quickly for him. And then he felt as though he had won the lottery as he found the knives, still wrapped with Byleth’s sports coat. He was removing the blades when screaming close by caught his attention.
Three of the Hellions were converging on the van.
It was Mason who was carrying on, his wheelchair having moved off the metal ramp, trapping him mere inches from the inside of the van.
“Do something!” the crippled man shrieked as he frantically toggled the hand control while Madach struggled to right the cumbersome chair.
Remy shoved the twin daggers into his back pocket and ran toward the van, jumping up onto the ramp, trying to help Madach get the wheelchair back on track.
“Nice to see that you’re not dead, Remiel,” Byleth yelled from where he was standing at the foot of the ramp moving the Pitiless axe from hand to hand as the Hellions moved inexorably closer.
“I’m guessing we’re going to try to use the van to get the hell out of here?” Remy said, grunting with exertion as he finally felt the chair shift, one of the spi
“I think that’s the plan,” Madach said, attempting to steer the chair so that it didn’t go over on the opposite side.