Vol.1 Ch.19 – Immortal And The Beast

Chapter 19: Immortal And The Beast

The trip to the library had only taken Elaine and her group a few minutes. Along the way she'd heard the rather loud sound of screeching tires and revving engines, telling her Marcus and Jordan had arrived to take the survivors away and, sure enough, just a minute later there was a fluttering sound and then Jeanne landed on the ground right next to her, telling her that everything was taken care of.

“So, how do you want to do this?”, Alexis asked as they reached the library building. They were in the back of the building, with no back entrance in sight. “Break through the window or circle around to the entrance?”

“Circle around”, Elaine said. “We're here for hostages so if we can grab them before we run into the big thing, everything would be so much easier.”

“Are you planning on leaving the cultists alone once we have the hostages?”, Jeanne asked.

Elaine snorted. “Of course not. But once we've gotten the civilians out of the picture we can go for the scorched earth approach.”

**

Cassie was about to ask the priest what he was waiting for when he heard the unmistakable sound of a door being kicked open.

A glimmer of hope he hadn't dared to feel sparked up in Cassie as the priest jumped up from his seat where he had been staring at the clock as if waiting for something.

“You stay here and don't you dare move”, the priest told them as he stomped out of the room.

“Who do you think it is?”, Kate asked as the priest had gone.

“Don't care”, Cassie replied. “Anything that pisses off that guy has got to be good for us.”

“Should we run?”, Kate asked.

“Let's first see if the intruders are actually on our side”, Cassie said.

**

Elaine used her now distinctly superhuman strength to kick the door in. It was an impressive feat given that the double doors had been built to be sturdy and imposing. After kicking the door in she immediately summoned her swords as a shield in front of her.

When no gunfire greeted her she motioned for her team to follow her, who did so, their guns deliberately not drawn. In a hostage situation, magic was far preferable to collateral damage machines like automatic rifles.

As they advanced Elaine thought she saw a blur of shaggy brown fur that vanished around a corner.

**

Kate and Cassie were about to rush out regardless when the priest ran back into the room and roughly grabbed Cassie by the neck.

“Soldiers”, the priest hissed. “How are there soldiers here?”

“How should we know?”, Cassie replied. “Let go you bastard.” He rammed his elbow into the priest's side but the guy's body was so tough it ended up hurting Cassie more than it did him.

“No, I don't think so”, the priest said. “I don't care about the timetable anymore. I'd rather anger him by sacrificing you an hour early than risk something going wrong. Come on.”

Kate grabbed the chair she'd been sitting on and smashed it into the guy's back. Unlike in movies, when you hit someone with furniture it's the person you hit that breaks, not the furniture. Except the guy didn't break. The chair hit, there was a loud sound of cracking bones, the chair bounced off and all the priest did in response was exhale forcefully and stumble a half step forward.

“If you've quite finished?”, he asked with a shit-eating grin. Then he dragged Cassie through the door at the other end of the waiting room.

Kate considered staying but then bands of invisible force wrapped around her and dragged her after the two of them.

Beyond the doors Cassie finally saw what had been making the squelching sounds. At first it didn't make any sense. The room was black and glistening and in the middle of the room was something white and undulating and it took Cassie a moment to realize what he was looking at. The undulating thing was a mouth, kind of like the round mouth of an octopus, but large enough to swallow a person. And the room wasn't black. No, the thing that the mouth belonged to was wet and black and glistening and filled out the entire room. And then Cassie noticed something else.

The thing was pulsing in time with the cancer mold that grew all over the library. In fact, considering how the pulses traveled outward, Cassie realized that all of the cancer mold must have been connected to this thing.

“Oh great master Shoggoth!”, the priest hollered. “I have come to deliver you new sacrifices!”

And then the thing spoke. Cassie hadn't expected it to speak. It didn't speak any language Cassie understood, in fact the words slid around his ears, refusing to stick, and the effort of trying to understand hurt his ears, but it spoke. And the priest clearly understood it because he replied:

“I apologize, master, but we are under attack and I thought getting your sacrifices was paramount.”

The thing spoke again and the priest nodded before he grabbed Cassie by the back of the neck and pushed him toward the undulating maw.

Cassie tried to resist, tried to fight being shoved into that tooth-filled cavern, but the priest was so unbelievably strong Cassie couldn't hope to resist. He could already smell the thing's breath, but then...

**

Elaine kicked down the next door and saw a truly nightmarish sight. It wasn't just the room-sized eldritch abomination that looked like a cross between a sewage worker's snot and all the worst bits of an octopus. It wasn't even the two terrified civilians. It was that one civilian was struggling against invisible bonds holding her in place and the other was currently being shoved towards the abomination's maw by a goat man taller than any of the cultists they'd encountered so far.

She thought fast. Instead of sending one of her swords into the goat man and putting the hostage at risk, she created a tiny little crystal throwing knife.

Now, knives weren't really meant to be thrown. They tumbled end over end so the chance of actually hitting with the pointy end was rather terrible. But there were knife shapes that lent themselves to being thrown and one of them was the stiletto. It wasn't that they were named after stiletto heels. The shoes with the super thin heels were named after these things. It wasn't thrown end over end, it was thrown like a dart and weighted in such a way that it would fly straight. That was what Elaine created. Once she had one made of crystal, she pumped it full of as much fire and light and shadow as she could in a second and then threw it into the cultist's head.

**

From one moment to the next the pressure against Cassie's back ceased and he immediately used the opportunity to jump away from the thing's grasping maw and turned around to see a bloody knife tip coming out of the priest's forehead. His mouth was hanging open and he was making strangled sounds, his eyes swiveling around unfocused.

Cassie couldn't believe it until he saw a group of people in armor standing behind the priest and he ran over to the newly freed Kate and hugged her to him.

“Are you alright?”, the leader of the armored people asked the two of them. Her voice was feminine and concerned and Cassie nodded in response.

“Thanks to you, yes.”

“Who are you?”, Kate asked.

In response, the woman who had spoken to them made a hand motion off to one side and the black glass of her helmet retracted, showing a pretty woman's face framed by fluffy light brown hair. “US military, here to save you from the cultists”, she told them. “Get behind us, please. We're going to take this piece of filth down.”

Cassie and Kate scrambled to get behind the soldiers and as Cassie passed the woman their eyes met.

Gosh, she's pretty.

**

Even in a life or death situation Elaine couldn't stop herself from ogling the adorable girl in the waitress uniform. She felt bad about it but come on, the girl was gorgeous with the frazzled blond hair, short bangs, short on the sides and then long in the back, reaching down to her cute butt. The hair style tickled something in the back of her mind but she just couldn't place it.

She was knocked out of her musings when she noticed something weird.

The cultist whose head she'd thrown her dagger into was still standing. A certain amount of continued motor function was to be expected but he'd been standing there for at least a minute now and he just wouldn't fall down.

Clearly Elaine wasn't the only one who noticed because both Abigail and Evelyn trained their assault rifles on the guy.

The big thing, meanwhile, hadn't so much as twitched. Maybe it was incapable or maybe it was too lazy to work for its meals.

Elaine half turned to Jeanne. “Jeanne, what is up with that guy?”

Jeanne, for her part, had a hand on the Trumpet on her back and wasn't speaking. She wasn't ignoring Elaine, she was staring at both the big thing and the cultist.

Finally, there was a clattering sound as Elaine's dagger was pushed out of the cultist's skull and fell to the ground.

“Did you really think you could kill me?”, he asked, a cackle in his voice.

Evelyn and Abigail, bless their hearts, didn't give him time to gloat and simply unloaded their assault rifles into the guy. He jerked as the bullets hit him but still did not drop.

“As I was saying”, he said once their clips ran empty, “you have no hope of defeating me. Even less with my master here.”

Elaine decided she couldn't rely on Jeanne for information and pulled her scan up, first on the cultist, then on the big thing.

The peak of ambitions for cultists of Shub-Niggurath, born again through the Outer God's own body.

Ageless and immortal and with a mastery over the foul spellcraft of Shub-Niggurath that puts the Dark Young to shame.

Physically strong and fast as well as magically capable. Cannot be permanently destroyed by any means.

When engaging, keep in mind that 'immortal' does not mean 'invincible'.

Higher tier version of the Dark Young, created by feeding a Dark Young thousands of human sacrifices.

Susceptible to all forms of damage but so enormous that it takes incredible amounts of punishment to put down.

Changes size according to the situation. Can shrink down to room size when left in peace and expand up to skyscraper size when threatened.

Do not engage unless team includes a fighter of B-Rank (Arch-Fiend, Cherubim, Lacrima, Lv15+ Shard Bearer).

“You're... immortal?”, Elaine asked. The cute waitress snorted behind her, apparently the only person in the room who got the reference.

“Oh yes”, the satyr said smugly. “Doesn't matter what you do to me, it never sticks.” To show it off, he spread his arms to show that the bullet holes were already closing back up again, the last of the rounds falling out of a bullet hole as he spoke.

“Jeanne, can you take the Shoggoth?”, Elaine asked.

“It's going to be tough for me alone”, the angel replied.

“Alright. Ophelia, Abigail, get the civilians away and then provide support for Jeanne. Evelyn, Alexis, with me, we're taking this bastard on.”

“But he's immortal”, Evelyn protested.

Elaine was also worried about it, but that comment in the scan kept nagging at her.

Keep in mind that 'immortal' does not mean 'invincible'.

“We'll figure something out. Everybody ready?”

A chorus of “Yes ma'am”s answered her and the satyr shrieked:

“Please master, lend me your aid!”

At that moment the huge black thing, the Shoggoth, started growing so fast it practically exploded outward, blasting through the roof and making everyone scramble backwards. Elaine and Ophelia each picked up one of the waitresses and ran out of the building as the black goo threatened to swallow them up.

Thanks to their superhuman speed all of them managed to get away in time, though Evelyn ended up having to carry Abigail part of the way.

As they barreled out of the library's front entrance, Elaine turned around to stare at the scene behind her. The black goo had taken over most of the building, with a giant black tar worm coming out of the library, hundreds of tentacles writhing over its skin. It looked vaguely like a giant lamprey, with a long tube-like body that ended in a circular tooth-filled chasm. Well, except for the fact that lampreys didn't have a network of pulsing black roots growing out of their backsides.

In fact, the black goo all across the library building reminded Elaine of a mushroom's mycelium, with the tentacled lamprey as its fruit body.

How did one even go about fighting something like that? Sure Jeanne was the one who was going to do the actual fighting, which is why Elaine had sent the two supporters of her team to help the angel, but still, even as an angel, how would she fight something like this?

As if in answer Jeanne stepped up next to Elaine and said: “Higher form... released.”

Then she kept walking towards the Shoggoth and as she walked she changed. The braid loosened and her hair flared out as two pairs of radiant white wings grew on her back. Her armor, which had looked like a more ornamental snow white version of what Elaine and the others wore, shifted until it looked slightly more like traditional armor, silver with golden trim, but still consisting of the overlapping panels of not-quite-metal that Elaine's armor was made out of. Elaine felt the angel's power growing exponentially. It wasn't some vague idea of power either, her presence was crushing, compressing reality around her as if she had her own gravitational pull. Had Elaine not been far beyond human, she would have found it hard to breathe in the angel's presence.

Jeanne drew the Trumpet from her back and swung the halberd-like weapon in a wide arc above everyone's head as she intoned:

“Oh Lord, grant us thy strength in this battle.”

Elaine saw golden glitter rain down upon everyone present and sink into them and as it happened she felt the benediction take hold on her body. She tried to point her scan function on it and, to her surprise, got a notification from it:

On top of the Shoggoth's head stood the satyr. He cackled before he jumped off and landed in front of Elaine with enough force to produce a crater on impact, though it didn't seem to hurt him much.

“You brought my master a Cherubim to devour? How gracious of you.”

Elaine narrowed her eyes and pointed at the satyr and the Shoggoth with one of her swords.

“Everyone, together we will”, she began and something else got involved. When she spoke the next words, she heard a voice in her head, vast and deep and monstrous and she had never felt so in tune with her magic before. The voice spoke in unison with her as she bellowed:

“Lay low the tyrants!”

Then she felt a piercing pain in her skull and staggered momentarily before righting herself. As she did, she felt power oozing from her body.

**

Jeanne glanced over to Elaine who was clutching her head with her free hand, apparently having received a spike of pain. Jeanne was shocked. She knew what had happened, knew what it meant. She'd just never seen it happen because it was exceedingly rare.

Elaine held a Soul Shard of Typhon, the son of Gaia. The son she had sent to slay Zeus, the king of the Olympians, whom the Titans had seen as tyrants. Rightfully so as Zeus had locked up Gaia and her kin in the deepest pits of the underworld.

Typhon was a spirit of freedom and rebellion, by deadly force and with no remorse.

What Elaine had experienced had been a resonance. Her conscious mind and her Soul Shard were in perfect sync, thinking the exact same thing at the exact same point in time.

That wasn't such a rare occurrence by itself. Soul Shards did, after all, color the personality of their bearers. What was so exceedingly rare was for this resonance to be this strong. Humans had extremely limited access to their Soul Shards. They colored their personality and nudged their magic, but that was it.

But Elaine's Soul Shard was apparently strong enough to resonate with her to such an extent that, had Elaine been an angel, she would have accidentally entered her Higher form from that resonance alone.

But for a human, that resonance had done something else.

Stollos had given Jeanne access to the hidden stats he had been monitoring before this mission and she saw Elaine's strength of will skyrocket. Her chance to successfully perform the Oath of Crystal Tears was at 99.99% and power radiated out from her.

She shook it off and focused on the task at hand. Fighting a Shoggoth.

It took thousands of sacrifices to create a Shoggoth. Combined with the difficulty of summoning a Dark Young in the first place it meant that, before the Invasion, it had been exceedingly rare for even angels to have to deal with these foul creatures, to the point that Jeanne had never actually fought one. She had, of course, read the after-action reports of Heaven's prime Outsider hunting team, 'Acheron Vector' Omega and 'Radiant Prism' Kaja, but reading a report and engaging a monstrosity like this were two very different things.

She had to put on a brave face for the humans, but she was still terrified. The soul was supposed to be immortal. If a human died they were reborn as a celestial. If a celestial was killed they were reincarnated as a human. So far so comforting, but if someone were eaten by an Outsider, there was a chance of their soul being trapped inside the creature or even destroyed outright and Jeanne couldn't think of any worse fates.

But just as she was about to give into her fear she heard music and felt her power surging.

**

Ophelia was terrified. There was no reaction more proper and rational when faced with a giant monster that could give even an angel pause, even more so since her suit was compromised.

But she didn't let that stop her. She activated Shadow Cowl to cloak herself in shadows, then pushed intent into Consuming Shadow to make those shadows spread around her. Soon an area fifteen feet in diameter around her was cloaked in shadows with no source to cast them.

In that pool of shadows she felt her powers return and immediately activated her new support skill Light in the Dark. The range on it had seemed plenty big enough but now that she had to support an angel soaring through the sky it seemed lacking. But it was still enough to grant both her and Abigail better Darklight protection and faster casting speed, which was enough for now. Once she had both of those active she kept Umbral Embrace at the ready to use when necessary and used her other hand to create and then hurl shadow flares at the creature's bulk while Abigail began to sing.

Abigail felt pretty useless against something so gigantic but in this case she knew she could actually do something to contribute. She had seen Prudence fight and Prudence was Jeanne's subordinate, which meant that Jeanne would be even stronger than the already insanely strong angel she'd seen slay a dragon just days ago. And Abigail's songs gave percentage-based bonuses so on someone as strong as Jeanne they would be that much more powerful.

She considered using the Song of Chance but Jeanne's benediction had already given them all a huge bonus in Luck so she decided to go for the Song of Courage instead and this time as the red haze rushed out of her she felt the transparent shield of her Musical Barrier snap into place around her, protecting her as she sang of overcoming impossible odds.

**

Jeanne felt the power surging through her and kicked herself up off the ground as she soared into the sky, spinning her Trumpet while thinking of ways to approach the fight. The beast's most dangerous asset was its cavernous maw but the hundreds of tentacles that rippled all over its body like bristles were also a deadly weapon that could entangle and strangle as well as just club weaker enemies to death.

Finally she decided to copy a trick she'd heard Elaine had used, even if it would take a bit of work to prepare.

She channeled an air spell through her Trumpet, summoning dozens of blades of wind to tear into the creature and it shook back and forth, furious at the pain they caused.

In response it sent dozens of tentacles after Jeanne and she had to weave through the air to avoid them as she readied her next spell.

Contrary to what she'd told Ophelia she did actually still have a bit of an issue with fire but it wasn't enough to keep her from using it as a weapon if necessary. Unlike Prudence however she didn't like swathes or gouts of flame. For one because she didn't like looking at open flames and for another because they were horribly inefficient.

So when she cast a fire spell to channel through her Trumpet she focused it down and down until she had a pencil-thick beam of searingly hot fire that carved foot-deep furrows into the Shoggoth and cut off dozens of tentacles before petering out.

The thing went mad with pain, thrashing about and making huge tentacles of black goo shoot out from the library building, grasping for her, but again she weaved through the air to avoid them. This time, though, a foot-thick beam of Darklight shot at her from the beast's maw and she only barely managed to twist out of the way enough so that it didn't hit her center mass but it still tore through the two wings on her left side and she plummeted to the ground.

**

Elaine was busy engaging the satyr alongside Alexis and Evelyn and the guy was on a completely different level. It wasn't just that he was able to shrug off anything they threw at him, he also had a proficiency with that bizarre Outsider magic the likes of which she hadn't thought possible.

Instead of the big flashy tentacle portals that the Dark Young and the other cultists could summon, he instead summoned tiny little portals with the same diameter as that of a beer can. Out of them came not a mass of tentacles but single tentacles that lunged like striking snakes and he could easily summon half a dozen of these tiny portals at a time, from any direction and with barely any warning.

Elaine was spending most of her attention on cutting down these tentacles wherever they appeared, leaving it to Alexis and Evelyn to engage the bastard up close, but that's where they found the next nasty surprise: The guy wasn't just magically skilled, he was also strong and fast and trained in melee combat. At the start of the engagement he'd summoned a staff. Not some fragile and largely ornamental magic catalyst, mind, but a proper staff made of something that wasn't metal but sure felt like metal when struck and that he used to slap away Alexis' Areadbhar and Evelyn's Vajra with contemptuous ease. But just because the staff was usable in combat didn't mean it wasn't also a casting catalyst and he used it to shoot wire-thin beams of Darklight whenever the girls gave him the slightest opening.

When Alexis began incorporating light speed flashes with her spear attacks she started to actually pressure him but even that only slightly turned the tide in their favor. He was immortal and he knew it so he could shrug off most wounds as inconveniences and keep going.

But Elaine had noticed that, while he was immortal, he still felt pain and his wounds didn't close up instantly. But the most interesting observation had been when a lucky slash from one of her blades had taken an arm off. She had assumed he would just leave the arm and grow a new one but he hadn't. He'd summoned dozens of tentacles to hold the girls off while he scrambled to get the arm back. Oh, his body had started to regenerate the severed limb but it had been very slow. Then, when he'd grabbed the arm and placed it against the wound it'd healed up in a matter of seconds.

Keep in mind that 'immortal' does not mean 'invincible'. The words kept reverberating in her mind and she just knew she was close to a revelation. An idea started forming in her mind. Elaine had once read about something like this in a fantasy novel. Ironically that book had been the point where that series had started going seriously downhill, when it had started giving the most unlikable bitch in all of fiction point of view chapters, but that was beside the point. Elaine knew how to beat the immortal satyr and she smiled.

**

Ophelia was feeling pretty smug when she let loose the Umbral Embrace she'd been holding at the ready since the fight began. Controlling Shadow's Embrace had felt effortless but it had been sluggish compared to the upgraded version. The new Umbral Embrace's shadow tendrils shot across the ground slightly faster than Ophelia's own blistering running speed and wrapped around Jeanne. Only seconds later they unfurled again with Jeanne fully healed once more, the wings whole again and the breaks she'd suffered from her fall all gone as well. The angel nodded her thanks and shot back into the sky.

**

Cassie was floored.

It wasn't just the angel weaving through the air hurling everything and the kitchen sink at the giant monster but all the soldiers were unbelievably powerful as well. One swung translucent swords with telekinesis, another commanded shadows as if they were living things and yet another teleported in flashes of light to strike with a magical spear.

Kate tried to urge him to back off but Cassie was mesmerized. Of course their foes were unbearably powerful but these soldiers were holding their own and Cassie knew he wanted to be like them.

He'd thought it had been the end when the angel had hurtled out of the sky but it had taken the one with the shadow powers only seconds to heal her back up.

The priest seemed to be giving the other three just as hard of a time but then Cassie noticed the leader pausing and saw something swirling around her.

Come to think of it, since the start of the confrontation Cassie had been seeing white streaks swirl around all the soldiers and the angel and as he grew more excited he started seeing the streaks swirl around himself as well.

He felt as if he could almost reach out and touch them before they were drawn into the vortex the one with the translucent blades was gathering.

**

Jeanne was stunned by how fast Ophelia's healing ability had fixed her up and suddenly she knew why Rachel had seemed jealous of the vampire. Angel wings were almost indestructible and could withstand fire from a battle tank but Darklight was the antithesis of the universe and almost nothing offered resistance to it so her wings had of course been shredded by it. And just as the wings were nearly indestructible they were also slow to heal, but Ophelia had done it within seconds.

Even Hell's premiere healer couldn't hold a candle to those healing speeds.

And with Abigail's song still ringing out she felt faster and stronger than ever. Under normal circumstances fighting a Shoggoth would have taken all she had but now she felt on top of the world.

Her Trumpet had been charged with both air and fire and she knew just what to do with that.

She flew straight at the Shoggoth and bombarded its huge body with more and more fire and air, charging her weapon and laying into the beast at the same time and the thing struck. Not with its tentacles, but its entire body rushed forward to swallow her whole.

She dodged the attack with contemptuous ease and swung her halberd through a vertical arc, cutting deep into the beast but not yet unleashing the power inside her Trumpet.

Dozens of smaller tentacles tried to grab her but she wrapped herself in a sphere of cutting winds as she kicked off of the Shoggoth's main body to gain distance, cutting all the tentacles foolish enough to make a grab for her.

The thing shot another large beam of Darklight at her and Jeanne let herself drop to avoid it. It wasn't necessary as Ophelia shot a shadow flare into it, negating the beam and sending a resonance back into the Shoggoth that made its whole body shudder. The entire library building shook alarmingly and the beast reared back to strike at Jeanne again like a cobra as she kept falling, exactly the reaction she'd hoped for. She'd let herself fall to both dodge the Darklight and to bait this very attack, but the little vampire negating the Darklight attack was still much appreciated.

Then the huge beast struck. It was exactly what she had been waiting for.

The Shoggoth's course was calculated to hit and immediately eat Jeanne but as its massive body surged forward she cast another spell.

Air and fire were elements she was good at but they weren't her main strength. Her strongest element wasn't flashy and it wasn't good for direct attacks, but it was no less terrifying for that.

Jeanne cast a time spell.

As the Shoggoth surged forward Jeanne's downward motion was reversed as if someone had hit the rewind button on a recording and as the thing rushed forward her body was transported back up.

Once she was back at the height from which she'd fallen the Shoggoth was directly underneath her, completely overextended, and she threw a slow spell at it to make sure it wouldn't be able to escape. Stop spells were hard to pull off and easy to resist but a well-timed slow spell was almost as strong and much harder to resist, so that was what she went for.

Then she grabbed her Trumpet in a two-handed grip and released the stored power. Several fire and air spells had been focused through the weapon and each had charged the weapon up a little. She wove the two elements together until the weapon's blade was wreathed in a sheath of roughly 7000°C hot plasma.

Jeanne found Hell's counterpart to the Trumpet, the Thorn, to be a distasteful weapon but that had everything to do with it being tailor-made for assassins and nothing with the weapon using plasma.

She swung her weapon in a huge downward arc and it carved through the Shoggoth's body. To say it cut through the beast like a hot knife through butter would understate how devastating the effect was. When it came down to it a Shoggoth was nothing more than an overgrown Dark Young that had glutted itself on mortal lives and it still had all the same weaknesses, among it a massive weakness to the power of the universe, also known as magic. The plasma blade carved through the Outsider while encountering roughly the same resistance it did when cutting through the air. Whatever passed for lifeblood in the creature exploded violently at the temperatures the blade was giving off and whatever shreds of skin Jeanne failed to cut through were instead torn asunder by the heat, resulting in half of its body getting carved off.

She spun the weapon through the air once more and stabbed down on what passed for the beast's head, riding it to the ground where Abigail shot a sunlight arrow straight into its gaping maw and Ophelia bathed it in paradox flame.

Logically Jeanne knew that Ophelia's bizarre purple flames wouldn't hurt her but standing on top of a beast wreathed in magical fire was still disconcerting to her and she shut her eyes as she kept twisting the plasma blade around inside the Shoggoth's severed head.

**

Elaine had been gathering huge quantities of Winds to her for her next attack. The Winds were drawn to strong emotions and everyone was feeling those at the moment. The biggest contributor, to her surprise, was the cute waitress and the Winds she'd been gathering were tinged with excitement and awe. Elaine almost had enough to do what she'd planned when she heard the satyr snort.

“Is it finally starting to sink in that you can't beat me?”, the satyr taunted as he spun his staff in a complex motion that batted away Areadbhar, then the Vajra, and then smacked Alexis right in the side of the helmet, sending her flying. Elaine didn't worry about Alexis. Their armored suits did sweet fuck all to protect against Darklight and those tentacle spells but against very mundane blunt trauma they were excellent and, sure enough, within seconds Alexis was back up and ready for more.

“You wish, freak show”, Elaine told him as she sent four of her swords at him which he had to scramble to avoid.

At that point Elaine had closed in and started to pressure him, hoping that he wouldn't be able to summon any tentacles if she kept him too distracted. He drew his hoof in an arc across the ground and a line of tentacles shot up, trying to grasp at her, and scrambled back to create distance. Once there he summoned up a translucent barrier almost like the one the Yellow Wraiths used and Elaine reacted by shadow leaping behind him and ramming her version of Areadbhar into the bubble, instantly overloading it and forcing him into open combat again.

He tried to shoot a beam of Darklight at her but she thrust forward with an open palm and sent a column of air that knocked him out of his concentration and finally she had her opportunity.

She used the sword in her other hand to chop off his left arm at the shoulder and, before he could grab and reattach the limb, she shadow leaped and grabbed the arm out of the air.

“Now!”, Elaine shouted as she fell back. She'd been giving Alexis and Evelyn instructions via her CARD and as she jumped back the two women jumped back into the fight.

Elaine used the Winds she'd gathered to create vast quantities of carbon and used them to encase the satyr's severed arm in a layer of crystal half an inch thick. Up until that point the arm had been trying to escape her grasp but once she'd trapped it in crystal there was nothing it could do and she tossed the severed limb into her Ring of Holding before resuming the fight.

Sure she wouldn't be able to kill the immortal but she would be able to make him utterly helpless. And once she had him all carved up, well, she knew a certain scientist who would just love such a fresh specimen to work with.

“What did you do with my arm?!”, the satyr shrieked and Elaine spun her sword through a complicated pattern.

“The same thing I'll be doing to the rest of you”, she told him. “Did you think being immortal was going to save you? By the time my bosses are done with you you'll wish you could die.”

Then she surged forward. With only one arm the satyr was much less nimble. Not only did the lost arm limit the ways he could move his staff, it also clearly threw off his balance. Still, the staff made it hard to go for the other arm so instead she carved off one of his goat legs. Again she grabbed the limb and backed off but this time he sent a beam of Darklight straight at her and Alexis scrambled to intersect the beam with Areadbhar, sending it rebounding into the satyr's forehead.

Now missing his left arm and right leg he only managed to stand upright by holding his staff like a crutch and as Elaine advanced towards him he started opening dozens of portals to hold her off, but Evelyn sent a wrist-thick bolt of lightning crashing into his head, disrupting his concentration. He barely managed to keep himself upright but then the Shoggoth's enormous head hit the ground and the tremor made the satyr stumble and fall.

At that point Elaine chopped off his remaining arm and leg and encased them both before removing the head and crystallizing that as well. Finally she started to feel the drain of creating and condensing that much carbon so for the torso she used up three of her crystal swords to create the casing.

Alexis had to catch her as she stumbled but she eventually managed to place all of the satyr's parts into her Ring of Holding.

“It's over”, Elaine breathed.

“No, it's not”, Jeanne replied, just as weary. “Remember all the patrols we had to avoid on the way here?”

“Fuck”, Elaine said.

Just at that moment something that looked a whole lot like a flying car descended from the sky and landed right next to the little group.

Once it had landed the doors opened and out came Prudence as well as Jordan with his team of Shard Bearers.

“Heard from Jeanne you could use some transportation”, the red-haired angel told them as she pulled out a sword.

“Why are you guys here?”, Elaine asked.

Jordan smirked, which made him look not at all nerdy at that moment, and replied: “Thought it was time to repay the favor, Caldwell. You go back to base with the civilians and leave the bastard cultists to us.”

“Guess I owe you a beer now”, Elaine told him and Jordan snorted.

“Nah. We're even.”

Elaine smiled and then opened up her helmet before walking to the civilians. “Are you two alright? We're going to bring you to a safe place.”

Cassie gave Kate's shoulder a light squeeze before replying: “Thank you, for everything.”

Then Elaine turned around to Jeanne and asked: “So, you know how to pilot one of these things?”

But instead of the angel it was Abigail who answered: “I'll do it.”

Everyone looked at her in shock, except for Prudence and one of Jordan's teammates.

“What? I piloted one of these things before, when we were headed to the base.” To demonstrate she walked past everyone and sat down in the pilot's seat. Finally Elaine led first the civilians and then the rest of her group to the ship, or to the Gospel, as Jeanne explained the vehicle was called.