Aleksei charged out of the elevator mid-transformation and emerged into a hailstorm of bullets and energy blasts. Everything they threw at him he shrugged off like raindrops hitting an umbrella, and then it was his turn.
Another torrential gout of flame loosed from his draconian maw and swept through the ranks of Boris’s henchmen. Ash, smoke, and flames rushed through the compound as he reduced the small army we had been about to go up against to so many charred corpses. All that was left was a handful of the more powerful guys—like that damn minotaur—but their guns were no longer even remotely functional.
Aleksei ran out flames and rose to his full height, letting out an impressively thunderous roar that made everybody stop short and reconsider going toe-to-toe with this guy.
Then he teetered and started to lean a little too far to one side.
Oh shit, he drank too much.
Down he went, out cold. Shaking the ground from the impact of his graceless collapse. For a full second nobody moved, staring at Aleksei to see if he was going to get up. But the mighty dragon just started snoring instead. If we survived this, I was never going to let him forget this moment.
The minotaur dropped his ruined minigun and hefted an ax from over his shoulder. This weapon was ornate as fuck, and looked like it weighed way too much for an ordinary human to wield it effectively. A part of me—probably the part that still refused to let go of the time prior to the accident where I desperately wanted to be a firefighter—took one look at that ax and immediately went; MINE.
I stepped out of the elevator and activated my Roulette Rouge’s twin blades with a snap-hiss, my eyes locked on the minotaur.
With a huff, the monster charged.
I charged back with an eager grin. This is what I signed up for when they offered me the chance to be a monster-hunter.
Everybody drew melee weapons and attacked.
Tabitha swapped her assault rifle for knives and went after two demons at once. Blitz holstered his pistol and went hand-to-hand against another demon. Euna split into multiple forms and forged her arms into blades, taking on literally everyone else.
My eyes were only on Mr. Minotaur.
For two reasons. One, that ax was mine. And two; this dude was a monster who aligned himself with a pack of monster-hating demons who wanted to take over the world. Everyone else there was probably doing this because they were already demons or were just shit humans to begin with. But this guy? This guy was a real POS. The second I saw him—before I even took note of the ax—it was fate on sight.
I darted forward, my movements lithe and serpentine as Io’s influence took hold of my body. All the training and coordination I had gained under Tabitha’s regimen could not quite compare to the instinctual prowess imparted to me by Io’s lamia heritage. My skin hardened into scales and my already somewhat canine teeth now elongated into fangs as I slipped right past the minotaur’s opening swipe and got behind him.
He looked around for me, confused, but I was already coiling down and gathering myself to strike from behind him. Leaping up, higher than I ever could have before last night, and brought myself level with the back of his neck and struck; shoving the twin prongs of my blades through the back of his spine as I reached out and landed on his shoulders.
A savage twist removed the minotaur’s head, and I surfed his collapsing body to the ground, holstering my gun and leaning down to pluck the gorgeous ax from the ground. The moment I hoisted it up into both hands, things just felt right.
I could not resist the slow grin that spread across my face as I finally got to wield an ax in battle like I had wanted to from the start!
The details of the next two minutes or so basically boiled down to ecstatic glee as I hacked and slashed my way through every remaining henchman in the laboratory. Tabitha and I moved in perfect sync. She got her rifle back up and moved with clinical precision, headshotting one guy while I hacked another in half.
The manticore-claw turned out pretty handy whenever the ax was poorly positioned, as I could swipe at enemies or just fire off a few spikes and get back to swinging the ax. It was a killer combo. Euna and Blitz did their fair share, but the moment I picked up that ax it all just fell into place for me. I was unstoppable.
Then the unthinkable happened.
Right as I cleaved my ax through the last human thug, the hellish portal suddenly spun to life; a fiery orange vortex in the center of the Bureau.
“Uh, guys? Everything’s going good up here, we’re almost done, but I just read a huge spike in infernal energy all across the city. Anomalies are cropping up all over the place. What’s going on?” Io suddenly demanded.
“We’re working on it!”
Boris let loose a viciously dark laugh and started monologuing about how, “All these years I’ve waited for this moment! Suffering you mortal fools and putting up with your insipid regulations! At last, I shall have Hell on Earth!”
“You go left, I go right?” Tabitha suggested psychically.
“Nah. Follow my lead,” I responded, broadcasting my plan to her
“Wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“Oi fugly!” I shouted. “I’ve got some paperwork for you to fill out. About a CAT scan!”
Boris, now an eight-foot-tall red dude with horns, turned to me. “You motherfucker.”
“My bad dude, I didn’t know she was your mom. If it’s any consolation, you must get your looks from your dad ’cause that woman aged like fine wine.”
“Enough! I will send your soul to the fields of punishment, myself!”
“You and me, fugly,” I agreed, twirling my new ax. “Let’s dance!”
I don’t really know why I expected him to draw some fiery sword and come at me to engage in melee combat, but I did. I guess I got so caught up in the whole I-have-an-ax thing that I forgot about the part where he had a lever-action rifle that he used to gun down Claire back in the apartments.
Boris issued a very painful reminder of this fact when he drew his rifle from over his shoulder and rapidly fired three bolts from the energy carbine my way. Red-hot streaks of energy tore through my body in various places. That shit hurt, and my healing factor responded at a sluggish pace compared to what I had come to expect from it.
Son of bitch doesn’t fight fair, I thought to myself as I darted to the side and started moving just erratically enough that Boris’s next few shots went wide.
“No shit, Ryan. He’s a demon.” Tabitha remarked as she strafed around the other side, firing burst after burst into the towering demonic figure. All of her shots just pinged off his crimson flesh and he kept his focus on me.
“Hey, that was private!”
“I don’t think you and I do privacy anymore, hotshot. We are one.”
“Then let’s take this guy down as one! Focus your fire on the portal. Get Euna and Blitz to help you take it down.”
Tabitha instantly shifted her fire and started spraying the portal with lead. None of her shots dealt any damage whatsoever. “Gonna need something heavier.”
“Head’s up!”
Rolling for all I was worth, I came up in a crouch and swung my new ax around into a flat spin aimed at Boris’s head. The giant demon neatly sidestepped, but the throw achieved its two-part goal. It gave me enough time to draw a Roulette Rouge without getting hit with infernal energy bolts, and it sent the ax where it needed to go.
I opened up with a full-auto barrage of cryo-rounds that peppered Boris all up and down his hideous red body. Each shot that landed built towards the inevitable supercombo that happened not a moment too soon.
In the same moment, Boris was flash-frozen and the ax embedded itself in one of the coils linked up to the portal. The whole portal system went on the fritz.
“Whatever you just did shut down a quarter of the anomalies I’m seeing up here. Keep it up!” Io cheered us on psychically. She seemed extremely distracted though, like she was fighting hard. I hoped she was winning.
Shit, I hope we’re winning. Sure doesn’t feel like it.
Boris suddenly erupted in darkened flames and turned his rifle towards Tabitha.
A shot rang out and my heart stopped, fearing that she had been hit. But it was just Blitz shooting Boris’s gun out of his hands. The rifle clattered to the floor of the lab and landed right by Tabitha’s feet.
Boris spun around to face the young Keeper. “How dare you betray your own kind! This pathetic world could be ours to reshape as we wish! You could be a king! And you would throw all that away! For what? Some monster-fucker and his troupe of whores?”
“Getting real sick of your shit, gramps!” I yelled, firing round after round into his side, even pulling out my other gun and firing akimbo.
Boris growled low and the lights in the lab flickered. He cast out his hand and hurled an orange sphere of magic between us, summoning a shield that deflected all of my shots.
That’s cheating. Oh right, he’s a demon.
The distraction was working though, Tabitha had already yanked the ax out and cleaved through another coil. Now she was dragging the weapon over to the opposite side to take out the other two. According to Io, the anomalies were already halfway gone.
“Abandon your mortal friends, fool! Join me and we shall conquer everything!”
Blitz paused. “‘Everything?’”
“Yes. We shall conquer everything!”
“Oh. Welp, I’m sold. Where do I sign up?” Blitz said.
“Wait, seriously?” Boris asked, slightly taken aback.
“No!” Blitz leveled his pistol and fired over and over again.
There ya go, Blitz, that’s the way!
“I really hate mortals, you know that?” Boris admitted.
“No, we couldn’t tell from the whole conquer-everything and demon-superiority bullshit you keep spewing. Please enlighten us further!” I requested, still firing.
“Your species are like worms to us infernal beings. We will eradicate you and erect a glorious empire upon your shallow, ashen graves! Hell shall reign eternally!”
“Are all demons this literal or are you just ridiculously stupid?”
Boris roared in frustration and charged at me.
Finally! I thought, remembering too late that I no longer had my new ax. Damnit.
Euna suddenly came out of nowhere, towering over the rest of us as this absolutely colossally thick unit of pink biomass. I guess she had taken the time to absorb every single corpse we had left strewn about the lab in order to make herself into a freaking uber-slime, because she was now even taller than Boris.
She socked him right across the jaw and then rammed her fist into his gut with a vicious uppercut; knocking the wind out of him with a wicked one-two combo.
But she wasn’t done.
Though he tried mightily to bring her down, all he managed to do was cost her the occasional bits of pink biomass whilst she was free to completely demolish him. Even while getting his ass handed to him though, Boris was still dangerous. Every impact spread flames across the ground of the lab and made it harder for Blitz, Tabby, and I to keep our footing.
Blitz shot him in the head, and I was admittedly struggling just to stay upright but kept up a steady stream of acid rounds, figuring it could only help Euna’s attacks.
Euna was still in her element though, as sweet as she was when things weren’t dangerous, she was a cage-fighter through and through. She drew back a savage haymaker and fired it forth with everything she had. Boris’s fiery shield spell flickered and died, and the demon fell to one knee.
Behind them, Tabitha chopped down the third coil. Everything seemed to be going well.
“Bitch,” Boris grumbled, spitting out a blackened tooth and glaring up at Euna. “You’ll pay for that.” He pointed directly at Euna’s core and fired off a new spell; a fiery orange beam that seared through her layers of biomass and launched her out the other end.
“Oh,” she said softly, before her giant pink body melted into a pile of sludge.
The orb struck the wall and fell to the ground, growing dimmer by the second.
“No!” I howled.
Suddenly, a familiar gunshot echoed across the lab. Blitz had retrieved Boris’s rifle and was now firing round after round through the demon’s back. Holding onto my anger at Euna’s uncertain fate, I pointed both of my guns at Boris and fired every last shot that I had, full-auto, in as many different ammunition types as I had.
His skin melted off, electricity danced up and down his body, chunks flew off with each bolt Blitz fired through him, and an icy rime froze him in place so he was forced to just take the punishment we dished out.
A cry ripped free of my throat as I emptied both weapons, dry-firing a few times before I holstered my left Roulette Rouge and ran past the puddle that used to be Euna with all the speed and grace I had recently acquired from bonding with Io. I went down into a shortstop slide to avoid a new beam spell that he fired my way and sprang to my feet on the other side of his attack; leaping straight upward to latch onto one of Boris’s horns and yank him down to my level. He groaned in pain and clawed at my chest, breaking skin, but I was past the point of giving a shit.
Tabitha cleaved through the final coil, and the Hellish portal collapsed into a pinprick, evaporating with a sound like several hundred gallons of gelatin getting tossed into a woodchipper.
Boris was in pieces. Bone was showing through his heavily damaged red flesh, and one of his eyeballs was dangling out of its socket from the beating Euna had given him. But he still managed to croak out a noise of disgust at the realization that he had lost.
Without any further preamble I drove my red blade through his eye sockets and into his brain, hoping that the knowledge of his failure after all these years spent gunning for one goal was enough of a disappointment that his final moment was one of pure agony.
Boris collapsed to the ground, and the fight was over.
Blitz let out a whoop of joy.
Io was telepathically broadcasting nothing but good news from the surface, saying that all the anomalies were closed and the vamps’ numbers were all but extinguished after Alan’s hunt. The Bureau agents and Keepers that Boris had sent out to deal with the vampires were cheering Alan on as he hunted down the last vampires, and apparently they had really lucked out because nothing had even come through the anomalies.
By all accounts, an overwhelming victory.
But I only had eyes for Euna’s faintly flickering orb.
We won, but at what cost?
It felt like losing Hannah all over again.