Vol.5 Ch.20.1 – Best Served Cold I

Chapter 20: Best Served Cold

Slowly but surely we were whittling down Bres and his horde.

While his sword's ability to act independently from his body was dangerous, it was still just a sword. It was swung with divine strength and needed multiple people to defend against, certainly, but unlike a powerful divine miracle it was at least possible to defend against. And once the sword was taken out of the equation all that was left were Bres himself and his army of Fomorians and cultists. I had also seen a few Dark Young before but apparently they'd been cut down first, unsurprising seeing as they were weak to magic and we had some of the kingdom's finest mages hurling death at our foes. Oh, and of course there was Bres' miracle.

The maelstrom of water keeping us hemmed in continued to disgorge the same creatures, half eel and half hound, but as time went on the frequency kept increasing. Which concerned me.

Pretty much every other miracle I had ever encountered either continued at full strength until dispelled or petered out eventually but this one apparently grew more dangerous as time went on. And while the creatures themselves weren't particularly powerful, constructs made of water that went down with a single one of Artemis' arrows, eventually their numbers would overwhelm us. We could not let this drag on for too long.

Thankfully, it wasn't an issue quite yet. While the frequency of these creatures being summoned kept increasing, Bres' army kept shrinking faster. The main problem with the water creatures was that, unlike the army, they didn't charge at us from one direction. These water creatures came from the maelstrom, which was all around us. I considered using a dispelling stiletto to get rid of the miracle but they didn't work very well against miracles.

Actually, to be more precise, dispelling stilettos didn't work against miracles at all – I had checked that after failing to dispel a Dark Lord's fire orb miracle – but most miracles required the caster's concentration and it turned out that eight inch pieces of sharpened metal hurled at high speeds were quite good at disrupting most people's concentration. Unfortunately, I'd already seen Bres recoil after taking smaller cuts from Poseidon's trident and evidently that hadn't been enough to disrupt the miracle either. It opened up some fascinating questions about the nature of gods and miracles that I absolutely didn't have time to be pondering.

One thing that did strike me about his abilities was that after making such a big show of revealing his Outsider markings he hadn't actually used them for anything except to make it nauseating to look at him. Both the sword and the miracles had been perfectly mundane and the only Outsider power being flung around was in the spells the cultists had used to coat their hands. It made me worry that he still wasn't taking us seriously.

I was pulled out of my musings as Bres' sword hurled itself at me in a horizontal spinning attack and this time I didn't simply try to knock it off course. We weren't going to win this one by letting him dictate the pace of the battle. Spurred on by that thought I leaned out of the way of the sword and, once I was sure it would pass me by, sent Qi into my arm. I didn't use a proper Qi Burst, instead speeding up my movements just enough to grab hold of the handle without getting my arm cut off.

Holding on to the sword was hard, way harder than it should have been. Even if Bres himself was strong enough to send Ares flying with his punches that shouldn't translate to the telekinetic sword but it did. It felt like I was trying to hold back a charging bull.

At the same time, if I let go now the sword would probably cut me in half. And so, unable to let go and also unable to stop the damn thing dead I did the only thing I could do. You couldn't stop a raging bull but you could redirect it. And that is what I did. Instead of holding the sword in place I let it spin but I let it spin with me as its axis. It was unbelievably hard and just the effort of holding onto it made Qi ooze from my body to the point that I could see the white haze billowing around me. But when I finally let the sword go at the perfect moment I knew the effort had been worth it.

The sword's arc had been widened to the point where it now more resembled a harvester's scythe than a spinning blade of death and that harvester's scythe did what it did best: it reaped.

Dozens of cultists lost their heads. The Fomorians, taller and bigger than the cultists, had their upper bodies sheared off instead. Rows upon rows of bodies hit the grassy ground of the plateau, the only ones left alive the ones currently engaging our front line, the ones I'd spared for fear of hurting my girls with the massive blade.

“Clever little rat...” Bres growled and withdrew his sword. “Been a while since someone last used my blade against me like that.”

“Don't swing your dick around if you don't want people to touch it,” I slurred, my head still spinning after twirling that sword around. Then I considered what exactly I had just said and amended: “That came out wrong.”

“Indeed,” Poseidon said.

“Hilarious,” Bres growled and when the crawling Outsider markings across his skin started glowing I knew we had well and truly pissed him off. “Guess I finally get to try out what the titty goat gave me.” Titty goat? Was he talking about the Holy Maiden?

He began drawing power to himself and immediately I knew something was wrong. It started out feeling like the power of a divine miracle but as it passed through the markings on his skin it turned weird. Alisha and Selene, the only ones in our party with the Sense Evil ability, started retching but everyone else felt it as well. It felt horrid. I could taste the color blue on my tongue and my ears rang with the stench of rotting flesh as an intense wave of vertigo almost swept me off my feet. And this wasn't even the attack. This was just him converting the very essence of divinity into foul Outsider power.

“Black Goat of the Woods,” he ground out, his voice sounding as if this power was hurting him even more than it was affecting us, “White Goat of the Seas...”

“Someone stop him!” I called out and Atalanta, her arm finally restored, dashed at Bres.

Her path was straight and short, except... about twenty yards away from him she started swerving like she'd had too much to drink. I could hear her swallow, clearly trying to force down vomit, and she stopped herself from falling over with a massive stomp, then drew her bow and sent out three shots. At a mere fifteen yards away there should have been no way for a legendary archer to miss and yet... Two shots went wide, flying all the way over the maelstrom. The third almost flew true. Almost. It grazed the side of Bres' head, shearing off a half inch of hair. Credit to the evil bastard, Bres didn't even flinch.

I frowned at Atalanta's display. There was no way for her aim to be this off. I raised a throwing knife of my own and as I aimed at him... The smell of green tickled my nostrils and my vision started swimming if I so much as looked at him casting this miracle. I threw the knife anyway, just to make sure, and it, too, went wide, hitting the ground behind Bres, near some... brambles?

A few more of us tried to throw magic or projectiles at him but he simply continued:

“Entwine our powers... unfetter the darkest places... plunge the surface into chaos... Visage of Terror!”

The foul power rushed out of Bres, accompanied by an equally enormous amount of proper, untainted divine power. The power, black and white tendrils, exploded like a sunburst around him, rushing not into us but into the maelstrom surrounding the plateau.

Instantly the maelstrom flared up, growing to twice its previous size and the water turning black with angry red streaks. Dozens of the eel dog creatures, now made of that same black and red water, rushed out of the maelstrom, more and more, but none of them charged at us. Instead they gathered in the sky above us, fusing into a single body.

Bres started cackling and I decided to make use of his distraction. I Qi Dashed towards him, intending to run him through with Helios Edge as he gloated. The nauseating aura surrounding him had faded with the completion of his foul miracle and no barrier sprang into place to protect him.

At the very last moment, right before Helios Edge would have pierced his heart, he jerked one of his hands down, knocking my sword off course just enough that instead of destroying his heart I only pierced a lung. Even so, he spat up blood and then glared at me in utter fury.

“Pest!” he barked before attempting to backhand me.

I had seen what these swings could do. Anything that could send Ares flying would turn me into a fine red mist. I threw myself backward, realizing to my horror that Helios Edge had gotten stuck between two of Bres' ribs. I had to choose between eating that backhand and leaving my sword where it was. It wasn't a pleasant choice but it was an easy one. I let go of Helios Edge and threw myself away from Bres, his swing whistling above me with the speed of a loosed arrow. Even just the force of the wind his swing kicked up sent me a good yard farther than I'd intended to go.

Even as the thing above us coalesced into whatever Bres had summoned he pulled the sword out from between his ribs with a wince, then looked at it. “Impressive sword you got there. Didn't I see this thing on one of Ares' Chosen Ones?”

“We killed him,” I said as I stood back up.

“You have a thing for killing Ares' Chosen Ones or something?” he asked, then grabbed Helios Edge with both hands and, to my utter horror, bent its blade into a v-shape. The sword didn't break, it was a Legendary weapon after all, but I wouldn't be swinging it anymore.

“Oi!” Hephaestus yelled, “that thing took me weeks to make!”

“Like I give a fuck,” Bres called back and a moment later a shriek told us that whatever his miracle had been meant to do was finished.

I stared into the sky and concluded that 'Visage of Terror' was an apt name for what I was looking at.

It resembled the head of a goat, with floppy ears, curled horns and the eyes with bar-shaped pupils I had become unfortunately familiar with. Except instead of a neck and a body this goat head had tentacles. Enormous tentacles, thick and lined with suckers, a barbed hook at the center of each sucker, surrounded the goat head like the mane of a lion. Oh, and the entire thing was as big as a giant, its sheer bulk blotting out the night sky as it hovered above the plateau.

“Time to die, morsels,” Bres cooed.