189 – Hellfire Mantle

After he snapped the phial’s neck and breaking the seal in a single motion, he kicked it back and shot the pitch-black contents into his throat. The urge to vomit gripped his insides as the liquid near-instantly absorbed through his stomach, but he knew to resist it.

Coughing and spitting, Strolvath struggled to his feet and continued singing, mentally counting down from sixteen. He had to burn it before then, or the sheer distilled essentia he’d just ingested would begin melting his cardiovascular system.

“Hgroaagh!” yelled the middle-aged soldier with a stomp and a strum. An ill-focused wave of concussive force erupted forth, and blew away the corpses clogging his path.

“Your people know me as a Victory Demon,” he yelled. “Now let me show you what that title really means! Victory Echoes: Hellfire Mantle!”

Strolvath’s upper half became utterly enveloped in fire. His shirt burned away in a flash and was replaced by a pulsating, undulating cloak of blood-red fire whose shape mirrored a commander’s trench coat. Much of his head was enveloped by this same fire that somehow conformed to the usual shape of his hair. The Brass Eye started emitting a white-hot projection of itself overtop the right half of his face, while the left had become like a blazing coal. Each word he spoke and each breath he took caused gouts of flame to spill forth from his face, and even his normal speech thundered with enough force to shake the ground.

“Every burned town, every scorched field, every innocent life rendered to ash by the Divine Army, all those flames burn on in me! While this fire of retribution still burns Ikesia cannot know defeat!” he roared over the growling, distorted tones of his instrument.

He played three times faster. Moved three times faster. Killed three times faster. His voice became just as ear-splitting and rugged as the strings he plucked, and yet he remained perfectly intelligible. Even amidst the all-consuming carnage, all those in this chamber could make out the individual words of his blood-boiling, chitin-shattering song.

It was a manifesto, a lofty declaration of his unending patriotism and dedication to his nation rather than its borders.

“In this burning heart, there can never be surrender!” he declared, smashing the heads of drones whose carapaces happened to not resonate with his music. He leapt and zipped around with speed rivaling Zelsys at her fastest, weaving circles around the Sister’s echolocation-driven rampage as he continually put holes in her legs with his stake.

“BUNKER!” he still called out with each activation of the device, yet it didn’t interrupt his song at all, as if he now had two voices to sing with. It glowed bright-orange and reverberated with such violence that the holes it left behind could easily be mistaken for the results of anti-armor explosives.

The old soldier exploded into a flaming avatar of nationalism and sonic mayhem. So forceful did his music become that each strum and each howled lyric could be seen ripping chunks out of the Sister’s exoskeleton and shaking all the nearby hive matter to pieces.

She collapsed under her own weight and struggled to move, her bodily fluids boiling out of every uncovered orifice and wound. Despite the fact the Black Swordsman’s corpse and the Red Mantis were both all the way across the chamber, they too were affected. The Mantis, too, began boiling in her own shell, and her armor too began bursting right off her skin plate by plate, but unlike the Sister she wasn’t being torn apart where she stood. Much the same couldn’t be said for what was left of the black-armored titan, as the sonic trauma was melting his cadaver into a barely-coherent pile on the floor.

Unfortunately, it seemed that the Victory Demon’s true form was the final straw needed to wake the Queen from her slumber. Perhaps it was the bone-shaking volume of his music or the heat he exuded, but it was most likely the effects he had on the mega-hive, causing portions of its roof to cave in.

Having put the Black Swordsman to rest, Zelsys looked to finish dealing with the Mantis.

She saw that the red bug had somehow been thrown all the way across the chamber and was just now clambering down the wall of a hive. Her chest-plate was covered in huge cracks that just begged to be exploited, her body riddled with bullets. Bullets too big to come from the Inquisitor’s pepperboxes.

“So that’s why the mad cunt didn’t try to stop me,” Zel chucked inwardly.

Zelsys briefly stowed her cleaver and reloaded her arm-cannon with malicious intent. The empty shell took the fresh one’s place in her ammo belt. Back out the cleaver came, and once more she strode straight towards the Red Mantis, only now noticing that one of her arm-blades had been broken. In fact, she seemed to be in a stupor, her mouthparts shifting as she did strange gestures with her fingers. There was no Fog coming out of her mouth, no tangible intent behind her eyes, just detached emptiness.

“Is she…” the slayer furrowed her brow. “Is she praying?”

Her train of thought was rammed right off its rails by a roaring invocation and a wave of heat, a manifestation of manhood so violent it made a stick grenade seem like a firecracker by comparison.

Seeing and hearing such a manifestation of superhuman masculinity, she couldn’t help letting out a wholeheartedly impressed laugh. Zelsys had arrogantly thought that she would have no issues keeping up with and outperforming surviving Ikesian cultivators, but now, she wasn’t so sure. The Sister delivered a flurry of slashes and strikes that Zelsys would’ve had no choice but to dodge, but Strolvath didn’t even bother. He belted his dedication to his nation even louder than before, strumming in perfect rhythm to the blinded Locust Noble’s assault.

Even with gaping holes in her legs and her guts boiling out of her mouth, the Sister barely slowed down.