~~Day 97~~

~~Mia~

The ground was split open, as was the ceiling, a giant gash through Angel's Spine. And chunks of torn archangel flesh dangled from the cracked ceiling above, bleeding onto the crowd below. The blood lake drained down into the new ravine, and smaller demons screamed with rage and panic as the flowing crimson pulled them down into the canyon. Mia didn't look. Maybe they'd find a ledge to grab onto, a tunnel or bone bridge or something in the ravine so they didn't hit the bottom. Those that did hit the bottom, she knew what'd happen. They'd disintegrate the moment they touched the bottom of Hell, the same as they had in Death's Grip.

Was it the void killing them, or Hell killing them before they reached the void?

"Cerberus!" she yelled. "Cerb--oh thank god."

The hellhound stood up from the blood lake and jumped over the waves as the flowing liquid poured into the new ravine. Others demons did the same, jumping up and over the rushing blood to escape its pull. The lake drained quickly, and the unending bloodfalls from the archangel flesh above, pouring from the enormous crack in the ceiling Mia had made, ensured new blood replaced it. But the liquid receded until it was only a couple of inches deep, and everyone stood their ground, or tried to, as the continuing hellquake tore the ravine further apart.

Mia's group was on one side, along with a few hundred demons. The spire, Dobasi, his tetrads, and most of his forces were on the other. The split through the ceiling, and now the split through the ground, ran straight across the cavern, missed the spire, and reached across Angel's Spine as it cut its way toward James. It was like someone had slashed a giant cut through Angel's Spine with a scalpel, and cut all the way through to the bottom.

Azreal, Noah, and Yosepha didn't come back. Maybe they didn't know what would happen. Maybe they thought Mia would be fine with Vin and the others to protect her. Maybe they understood how important it was to get to James and keep him alive.

"Dobasi!" Mia yelled from Vin's back. "They're coming! Get ready!"

Dobasi stood at the edge of the ravine, wings spread so the trembling ground wouldn't knock him in.

"You! You have summoned--"

The blood, flowing into the ravine in an unending, gentle bloodfall, exploded up from the canyon like a geyser. Something from beneath shot up from the ravine and splattered the blood and knocked it aside, something invisible. The demons roared in confusion, drew their weapons, and stared at the raining blood dripping from strange, see-through shapes jutting from the ravine.

The invisible bodies gained color and shape, black, and dark, sinister shades of blue, green, and purple. Tentacles, each a half dozen meters thick where they pushed against the ravine edge, with literal suction cups. What the fuck.

"Vin," she said. "Can you--"

"I see it," he said, and he backed away from the ravine. "Get back."

She hopped off Vin's back and put some distance between herself and the inevitable.

Creatures climbed out of the ravine, human-like creatures with glistening, dark skin the color of the ocean depths. Tentacles dangled from where their mouths should have been, and their black eyes glistened. Not a single hair on their alien bodies, they swarmed up from the ravine like a black tide. Their feet looked like human hands.

Some ran on all fours, spines bending harshly for the posture. The air around their bodies bent and twisted, grew shadow, shimmered, and then disappeared, leaving the bent-over creatures wearing black and purple armor that covered their backs and their large heads. More armor shimmered into existence, pulled from nothing and given form, covering their wrists and ankles and chests, but with some strange spikes along them. Alien armor, for alien creatures.

The strange armor looked different on the next wave of aliens. The ones on all fours charged forward, relying on the strange, heavy black and purple armor to guard their heads and shoulders, but the aliens behind them, standing up with human posture, waited. They let the others rush forward into the demons and begin the battle, but the others walked behind them, and shifting shadows enveloped them and bestowed them armor, too. The same as the others, except more elegant, more beautiful, as if someone had carved flowing lines into black and purple seashells, cut out sections, and fashioned body armor for them.

The standing aliens reached out a hand, and from twinkling shadows that danced around their fingers, drew black, beautiful spears into existence.

Not spears. Tridents.

Thousands of the aliens flowed up from the ravine, met the demons, and the battle began. Whatever words Dobasi had for Mia, they disappeared under the clang of metal on metal, and claws on flesh. Roars drowned out everything, and splatters of white alien blood arced into the shallow red blood flowing past their feet. But the aliens didn't hesitate, didn't stop if they got injured, and when one died, they faded away like dust.

It was chaos.

Mia clenched her eyes and reached for the music, but nothing happened. She plucked the strings, but nothing happened. She plucked harder, plucked until her soul bled, but nothing happened.

The aliens screamed, and she clenched her head in her gauntlets, palms to her ears, but it did nothing. The sound hit everyone with its shrillness, but there was a second layer only she could hear. Silence. A cold, empty silence stabbed her through the heart, and she stumbled back, desperate to block it out but unable to do a damn thing.

"Mia?" Kas asked.

"We have to kill them. Kill the tentacles. Kill them."

Kas nodded, and that was that. He charged forward and slammed into the closest alien. The others were already in the fight, Romakus and Julisa swinging their swords, but they were on the defensive. An alien on all fours got between them, caught them off guard, but Kas stabbed forward with his horns and skewered the creature up through its exposed neck. White blood gushed over his black head, and Kas tossed the body aside with a swing of his skull.

Dobasi's demons didn't fare as well, and were cut down in droves. Mia's team was really elite, with Romakus and Kas having a crazy amount of experience. And Julisa had been around for a while, too. Even in front of something this insane, with rows upon rows of six-and-seven-foot-tall aliens armed with armor and wielding tridents, they adapted instantly. They blocked the three-tipped spears of the aliens and cut down the other aliens running on all-fours like Kas did. But despite their prowess, Mia's team took steps back, pushed back by the alien tide.

Vin was a different animal. He charged forward and tore through the aliens like he was chopping through tall grass with a machete. Some aliens were smart enough to dodge or block, but like ants, they swarmed toward Vin with no regard for their own lives.

The demons weren't much different. They roared into the faces of the invaders, even as they died to tridents stabbing their throats or stomachs, or the clawed fingers of the hunched aliens on all-fours. And when a heavy groan rumbled up through the ravine, the enormous tentacles sticking up from the black within pushed against the ravine walls, and Hell shook as the ravine opened wider.

Dobasi was good. He, and his tetrads Anianus and Cillia, caught on quick, cut through the invaders, small compared to them, and they made their way toward the colossal tentacles. But they didn't reach them. From the shadows, more aliens rose, wearing black and purple robes instead of armor, and no helmets.

They hovered. They literally hovered, floating while upright.

Only angels could fly. That was the rule. In Hell, no demon, no matter how light, no matter how big their wings, could not fly, while angels had God's gift and could soar. The aliens didn't care. While thousands of their comrades poured up from the ravine and engaged the demons, a dozen of the strange mind-flayer wannabes floated over the battle, mouth tentacles dangling as they scanned it.

They spotted Mia, and held out their hands toward her.

Mia reached for the music, screamed for it, but she couldn't find it in the drowning silence. The music was gone. She froze, staring up at the creatures as they prepared some sort of attack. No one had expected flying aliens. Vin, Kas, Romakus, Julisa, they'd all engaged the aliens in front of them and were doing a good job keeping them from reaching her. But the flying aliens ignored them, hovered a few dozen meters in the air, and the ember sky burned above them.

They unleashed something from their hands, a swirling orb that bent light around it. For a fraction of a second, Mia spotted a tiny black dot inside each swirling mass. Black holes? A real black hole of that size would destroy an entire planet in moments. But that didn't change that it looked like the strange aliens shot black holes at her, with the swirling colors and shimmering, bending light around them all too similar to an event horizon.

And Mia couldn't do a thing. She held up her staff and screamed.

Gold erupted around her, and she screamed again under the sound of explosions crashing against something hard. White spread in front of her. Wings. And a colossal, gold, see-through wall protected her.

"Azreal!"

Cerberus rumbled beside her, hopped side to side, and gently clawed at the back of Azreal's right greave.

The angel looked back at her and spared only a quick nod.

"Yosepha and Noah continued on, but when the ground split open, we knew you had to be defended."

"I told you--"

"We will save you both, but..." He pointed his spear up at the hovering aliens. "This is a problem."

"Dobasi!" Romakus yelled. "Get some demons up there!"

Dobasi roared across the ravine. "And how do you propose I do that!?"

"The spire! Get some gorgalas up the spire and get them to jump! Fucking christ, do I have to think of everything!?" Romakus swung his sword down, both hands, and cleaved through a standing alien, shoulder to crotch.

His aggression earned him an attack from another alien, and a trident stabbed past his armor and into his side. He fell, swung his sword to the side, and cut the alien in half, only for one of the four-legged invaders to pounce him.

"Cerberus!" Mia yelled. Please please please please don't die. "Get 'em!"

Cerberus launched forward like a bullet. The fact he'd stayed at Mia's side at all throughout this was insane enough. That he went directly for whom Mia pointed at was even more insane. He tackled the alien off Romakus, and the fight quickly turned into a battle of the beasts, hellhound versus hunched squid human. And Cerberus had the advantage. He dove in, clawing and swiping, and while the alien's armor blocked much of it, Cerberus had three heads and he used them, biting and gnashing. He got a couple sets of teeth around the creature's neck and shoulders, and ripped them open, drenching his three heads in white blood.

Romakus got to his feet, groaning and using his sword for balance. He spared only a short nod for Cerb, turned, and cleaved another alien coming for them.

Cerberus turned and faced the alien Romakus slayed, past it, and to the battle raging around them. Roaring, the hellhound ran past Romakus and Julisa, and disappeared into the fray.

"Cerberus!" Mia yelled and stepped around Azreal, but the angel stuck his wing out and blocked her.

"Stay behind me!"

"But--"

The gold barrier emanating from Azreal's shield erupted with the sound of explosions, and Mia fell back as the waves of impact pushed through everything, sending splashes of the ground's flowing blood up over her body. Another bombardment. She sat up and stared at the gold wall shaking, like bullet-proof glass struggling to withstand RPGs. Azreal grunted and slid back, body pushed back despite him leaning forward into his enormous shield, each explosion pushing him as if he were on ice. The gold wall of his shield held.

The explosions stopped. The aliens unleashed their strange, shrieking screams, and Mia forced herself to her feet. Through Azreal's gold, see-through wall, emanating from his colossal shield, Mia watched the hovering aliens spread out and surround Azreal and Mia from all angles. Mindless creatures wouldn't do that.

"Azreal," she said. "They're--"

Azreal's wings glowed gold, and Mia squinted against the blinding light as the angel stepped back closer to her. He lifted his enormous shield into the air over him, and the gold wall went horizontal with it, a massive disc of gold energy. And again, the aliens unleashed a bombardment from above.

Mia stayed as close to Azreal as she could, but with the gold disc only a few feet overhead, each explosion hit her with a sizable chunk of whatever strange, kinetic force they unleashed, through the shield, and shook her to her bones. And each explosion sucked the sound out of the air, like she'd gone deaf, and sound came with a dizzying snap each time.

A vrat ran over, jumped onto the shield, and jumped up toward the aliens above. Mia stared up through the gold wall, only to whip her eyes away when one of the strange mini black holes hit the demon, and detonated him. He didn't just explode. He shattered. Limbs ripped from his body, and pieces of him went everywhere. Some pieces stopped existing entirely. And his blood coated the gold wall.

Some of the hovering aliens floated lower to the ground and tried to shoot Mia and Azreal from their exposed sides, but that low, demons had no trouble catching them. A dozen aliens found themselves blindsided by demons who turned and came to Mia's aid; maybe not so much to Mia's aid as an opportunity to kill the thing suddenly attacking their home. A couple dozen vrats and brutes charged the aliens, pinned them to the ground, and tore them apart with glee.

But there were still another dozen in the air, and they shot at nothing but Azreal, a relentless bombardment that boiled the blood river around them. They wanted Mia. They wanted to kill her. All this, just to kill her. And maybe James. Fuck, if she got James killed with this, she'd jump off a cliff. Fuck, if she hadn't done this, he'd be dead anyway! Fuck fuck fuck.

A new wave of shrieks filled the cavern, but not alien. From above, higher than the hovering aliens, a hundred wings descended on them. Gorgalas and dilojas. Gargoyles, and bat girls. The ladies glided down from the cavern ceiling and fell on the distracted aliens. The explosions came to a halt, and bodies fell from above, many of them landing straight on Azreal's shield with heavy thunks. They rolled off the massive gold wall over Mia's head, hit the ground, and the demons and aliens ripped into each other. Even the hovering aliens with their fancy, black and purple robes still had claws.

Mia looked through the battle, across the growing ravine, to Dobasi. The tetrad spared only a quick glance and nod to Mia, and resumed the slaughter.

"Azreal!" Mia yelled. "We have to--" Another explosion smashed into his shield, ripped the air from her lungs, and the sound from her ears. Sound came back a moment later like someone mercilessly dialing up the volume knob. "We have to close the ravine! I can't play any music with that ravine open! With that... that thing down there, screaming!"

Azreal shook his head. "I cannot leave your side. If you die, this is all for naught."

"Then can you--" Another explosion, heavier than the first, and the force of it pushed through the gold wall above and knocked her to her knees in the blood. She took as deep a breath as she could. "Vinicius! Get the tentacles!"

Somehow, her tiny voice pierced through the roars, clashing metal, claws, and flesh, and the titan looked back to her for a moment. White blood oozed down his body and faded away a second later, only for him to grab an alien's trident sticking in his side, yank the alien toward him, rip them in half, and drown his body in white again. Red blood oozed from the fresh wound and disappeared into the flowing red under everyone's feet.

He marched toward the ravine, toward the biggest tentacle, and prepared hellfire. His spine glowed amber, and the titan swung out his four hands against nearby aliens, knocking them aside as he got ready to breathe death.

A swarm of the creatures erupted from the ravine and poured over him. The glow in his spikes disappeared, and the titan fell onto his side, buried in brawler aliens. They drove their hands down on him, hammer punches, and Mia froze solid. The aliens looked so human, so strangely human, but for the tentacles hiding their mouths, the larger skulls, and the empty gaze of their black eyes. The way they crashed their fists and armored wrists down against Vin looked less like monsters fighting, than it did like apes, hammer punching down on something they'd pinned.

Kas pushed past an alien, dove past another, jumped another somehow, and tackled the aliens beating on Vin. That was strange. Demons normally just killed what was in front of them. Kas had picked a target well out of his way and went for it, taking two of the strange, large humanoids off Vin's side and sending them to the ground. He bit them, stabbed them with his horns, and ripped them apart with his massive bulk.

More aliens poured up the ravine, and Vin and Kas disappeared behind a wave of black flesh.

"Kas! Vin!" Mia got to her feet, but there wasn't any point. She took a step forward and stopped herself. "Cerberus! Cerberus!" she yelled, hands shaking and throat quickly protesting with pain. She screamed louder. "Cerberus!"

Cerberus came back. He darted around aliens and demons alike and came back to her, white blood fading away, even as an alien limb disappeared from his mouth. Red blood trickled from him too, a gash on his side and a trio of holes in his shoulder leaking a trail behind him into the two inches of archangel blood. And once he reached her, his sturdy steps turned into a limping mess.

"Stay!" she yelled, slammed her staff against the bloody ground, and stared out at the violence. Cerberus didn't so much as whimper, as lower his growl to a weak rumble, and he pressed up against her armored leg.

She needed a plan, something, anything to get a handle on the situation. Saving James was pointless if she got them both killed. She needed--

An arm shot up from the ravine, and demons jumped back from the colossal limb of black and glistening dark colors. Another one. It was another one of the giant monsters like they'd fought so long ago when they'd first entered the Black Valley and got separated from the others.

"Romakus! Julisa!" she yelled. "Vin needs help! He needs to kill that monster!"

Hissing, Julisa carved her way to Kas and Vin, four swords out and splattering white blood everywhere. But two aliens got between her and the two demons, and drove their tridents toward her. She had the swords and coordination to block both, but another alien on all-fours came in from the side and ran into her, knocking her off her feet, and it dragged claws on any exposed flesh it could find.

Romakus joined her and cut down the alien clawing at her neck and shoulder, but the moment he tried to reach Vin, a dozen of the aliens surrounded him. Unlike other demons, Romakus had enough of a head on his shoulders not to throw himself into the melee, and he took up a defensive stance beside his fellow tetrad. He wasn't going anywhere.

Mia got to her feet, pointed her staff at the nearest alien, and played a song. Nothing. She tried to summon a spike. Nothing. She tried to summon a fucking pebble. Nothing.

The giant alien pulled itself up from the ravine and towered over them. Its strange, human body squatted down, aimed its strange, human-like face and tentacles toward Azreal, and swung its colossal arm down.

The massive limb crashed down against Azreal's gold shield wall, and the world exploded around Mia. The blood covering the floor shot outward from the impact, and force flattened Mia onto her ass. Cerberus crumbled beside her and let out a strange howl, like someone had punched him in the lungs.

The gold wall remained, but Azreal fell to a knee. He made no noise, not even a grunt, dismissed his spear, and got his second hand up against his shield's base. The gold wall that pulsed outward from the shield above glowed brighter.

"They want me," Mia said. "They... They just want me. Azreal, can you--"

Again, the massive creature slammed a hand against Azreal's shield, and again the surrounding blood exploded outward, revealing the stained rock underneath. Mia got to her knees, leaned her weight on her staff, and tried to stand up and maybe push up on the shield, too. The next strike rocked the shield hard, and the impact sent her to her ass as pain ripped through her arms.

The gold shield wavered.

"Mia," Azreal said. "I cannot hold this for much longer. You will have to run."

"Run!?"

"Yes, run. I will distract it."

She shook her head. "It's not--"

More roars and shrieks cut through the silence. Dobasi found the space for a running sprint, vaulted across the ravine, glided across, and drove his huge sword into the giant alien's ankle. Its tentacles spread and trembled as it screamed, turned, and swung down at the spire ruler. But Dobasi saw it coming, got between the creature's legs, and cut into the other leg. He wasn't even tall enough to reach its knees, but he didn't need to. With a flap of his wings, he drove his body back, dodging another swing of the creature's hand, jumped up, and took a swing for the back of the knee with the tip of his sword.

The alien spun faster than it should have been able to, and drove the back of its enormous hand into Dobasi, hand nearly as big as the demon's body. Launched, the spire ruler flew back and landed on the other side of the ravine again with his spire and most of his forces. He got back up, but even from a distance, Mia could see at least one of his wings was broken.

A tetrad crawled up from the ravine on Mia's side. Cillia, Dobasi's partner. She must have jumped over too, hit the ravine wall, and climbed up. With a mighty roar, she sprinted at the giant alien, and drove her swords into its foot. But she was too slow, and the monster got a hand around her, lifted her, and grabbed her legs with its other hand.

It tore her in half. Mia stared up through the gold ceiling of Azreal's shield and gulped down the bile in her throat. It wasn't bile, but something burned inside her and made her want to vomit. It only got worse when the giant monster threw Cillia's upper half at Azreal's shield and soaked it in a new layer of crimson.

The titan alien slammed its hand against Azreal's shield again, and again, hammer punches that drowned Mia in the uncanny valley. It shouldn't have moved like that. But it did, hunched over and swinging its fist down like an ape trying to break something. And each punch sent cracks through Azreal's gold shield.

The gold wall exploded, and Azreal fell to his knees. His massive shield landed in the blood beside him and disappeared in a gold puff, leaving the angel with nothing but his armor.

"Run," he said. "Run."

Mia forced herself to her feet and ran. The alien swung for her, and Azreal flew into the hand's path, only to get thrown aside. Again, the alien swung for Mia, and again, Azreal flew directly into the alien's path, wings glowing gold. He knocked the invader's hand aside, but this time, the invader swung out its second hand directly for Azreal, not Mia, and sent the angels careening through the air. He struck the cavern wall near Mia, and the angel fell in a heap, unmoving.

Don't help him. You can't help him. You have to run.

Mia ran faster, stayed close to the cavern wall, and the titan creature gave chase.

"Cerb! Come!"

Cerberus stayed at her side, but one of the many smaller aliens dove around nearby demons and went for Mia, running on all fours. It crashed into her, knocked her onto her side, and the impact sent her rolling. Her staff flew from her hands, her crown fell off, and everything clanked loudly as her armor and its spikes smacked against the rocks underneath the shallow blood.

She stared up at the cavern ceiling above and the giant crack she'd torn through it. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew she should be in pain, but adrenaline -- or the Hell equivalent -- would keep that sensation suppressed for now. She drove her elbows into the ground and forced herself up, but roaring and tearing sounds beside her had her rolling away. Cerberus was fighting the alien that'd tackled her, and was losing.

She held out her hand, summoned her staff back to her in a puff of red light, and ran at the alien. It was on Cerberus's back, sinking its claws into him, but it looked straight at Mia as she approached, like she was all that mattered, like Cerb was just a stepping stone to get to her.

"Get off him!" She swung her staff out as hard as she could, and the alien blocked it with a simple flick of the wrist. But it was enough for Cerb to buck the large humanoid off and pounce on it instead.

She didn't get to watch. Giant shadows grabbed her attention again, and she spun. The big alien took a step toward her, and swung its hand out at her, open palm, like it was going to squash her like a bug.

Fire shot up its body, and it roared, rearing back. The banshee shriek ripped through the cavern, and Mia's own scream disappeared under it as she fell to her knees and clutched her skull. The scream buried her in silence, even as the sound rang in her brain like ten thousand nails on a thousand chalkboards. It was worse for the giant creature. It grabbed at its own body, swiping at the flames, but hellfire couldn't be stopped so easily.

It turned to the ragarin, Vinicius, standing behind it, and kicked him. The creature was at least four times as tall as Vin, and the kick was absurd, a colossal limb that struck Vin straight on and sent him through the air.

"Vin!" She got to her feet, got two steps, and collapsed, leaning on her staff. All she could do was stare out at the battlefield as the huge demon, her demon, flew through the air and into the ravine. "Vin! V--"

More dark limbs erupted from the ravine, each the color of ocean stones, lines of dark blue, dark green, and dark purple mixed into their black skin. Their strange, human hands grabbed the ravine edges, and half a dozen more of the gigantic monsters pulled themselves up onto the cavern floor. They ignored their companion as the burning creature fell to its knees, and disintegrated.

The six titan aliens looked at Mia, and came for her.

The cavern erupted with vibration, and another hellquake shook everyone and brought them to their feet. Titanic bridges above, random outcroppings of bone that'd somehow survived until now, fell upon the armies below. The spire trembled, and the bloodfalls from above boiled with the heavy rumbling as the six titan invaders roared their alien screams. The strange sound shook Mia up through her feet and into her bones, and silenced the invisible strings completely.

She was fucked.

She looked to her side. Cerberus won his fight, all three heads biting and tearing open the throat and shoulders of the hunched alien. He came to her, stood at her side, but as the six titans approached, he took a single step back. It was the first time she'd ever heard him whimper.

Romakus and Julisa were standing near the cavern wall, but barely, bleeding from stab wounds. Kas weaved through the battle and made for the ravine, maybe trying to reach Vin if the child of Belial was still alive in there, but three aliens wielding tridents blocked him. Azreal was a few dozen meters behind Mia, slumped against the wall, still in his armor but not moving, and one of his wings looked broken.

She and Cerberus were on their own.

She closed her eyes and grabbed the invisible strings. Move. Move! She hit them, hit them as hard as she could. Play! Make noise! Do something!

Something happened.

A new rumble, something full of life and energy, cut through the ravine, through the cavern, through the crack in the ceiling and walls, through it all. Mia hit the strings again, harder, and again a new rumbling sound pulsed through the cavern, and brought the six aliens, and the thousands smaller invaders running around or hovering by, to a standstill. They looked to the ravine, and the strange, heavy sound bubbling up from it.

That wasn't Mia's song. Mia wasn't doing anything. Her song was silent. What the fuck was that?

Another arm reached up from the ravine, and instead of the glistening black of the ocean depths, the arm was dark red, covered in black spikes, and the hand was armed with a dozen fingers. An arm that dwarfed the battlefield. The hand alone was almost as big as one of the alien titans, and it scraped against the cavern ceiling before planting against the ground.

The hand snapped out, grabbed one of the alien titans, and crushed it. White blood exploded out from the alien's eyes and from under its mouth tentacles as the colossal hand squeezed the life -- or whatever it had -- out of the invader. The alien's shriek died in seconds, and the newcomer's arm reached out and grabbed another of the titans. They jumped away, but not fast enough, and the giant hand captured one of the titan alien's lower halves, and squeezed. If the alien had bones, each one was broken in a dozen places.

A second arm reached up from the ravine, reached higher and further, exposing its shoulder as it swung its hand out and grabbed another alien titan. It brought its palm down hard and crushed the massive alien into the rock. It was like watching a grape get crushed by a hydraulic press.

Mia ran. The alien titans gave chase, closing the distance in moments, but the four remaining all disappeared as four arms, each towering beyond sizes Mia could wrap her mind around, reached out from the ravine and crushed the alien goliaths into white piles of gore. They faded moments later, and Mia ran back and fell on her knees beside Azreal at the cavern wall.

"Azreal! Get up! Get up, we have to move! It's Beelzebub! It's--"

Yet another four arms reached up from the ravine, and with hands the size of houses, pushed against the canyon's edges on both sides, driving the canyon to tremble again. Rocks crumbled and snapped off under the Old One's grip, its palms sliding against the ground as it tried to push the canyon wider. Physics didn't agree with the Old One, like someone trying to lift an airplane if they were Superman. The weight of the plane would just make Superman punch through it like a needle. And Beelzebub's hands did the same, mammoth hands breaking off giant chunks of the ravine wall as it pushed out and made room for its body.

The Old One pushed its way up through the ravine, torso snug against both its sides, and the battle grew silent. The ravine was, what, as wide as a soccer field was long? Wider? And the creature's bulk struggled to fit, shoulders ripping off more chunks of rock as the monster climbed higher.

Its head poked up from the shadow, and the demons stared in awe. The aliens took advantage of the pause in the fight, and bolted toward Mia, all empty black eyes aimed at her. Cerberus stood his ground in front of her, but blood leaked down his body, and he stumbled. But he bared his teeth at the oncoming swarm, anyway.

Beelzebub swung its arms across the cavern floor, and crushed the alien horde like a child knocking aside a thousand Lego pieces. Demons did their best to get out of the way, but most failed. Julisa and Romakus only survived because they were near the cavern wall, along with Mia. A thousand aliens and demons died in a bloody white and red mess, bodies strewn everywhere, crushed under the Old One's forearms and hands.

With its back to the spire, the Old One faced Mia instead, and brought more of its body out from the ravine, exposing its neck, and eventually its torso. No more of it could fit in the giant cavern.

"You summoned them," it said, and glared down at her with the face of a dragon. But not a dragon. The dragon face was split down the center vertically, all the way down, cutting through the face of the monster so it almost looked like it had two skulls. Almost. It was like someone had taken a dragon head, cut it vertically down the center to the neck, and put teeth along the inside so its entire head was a sideways mouth.

John Carpenter would have been envious.

Mia forced herself to her feet and stood in front of Azreal, as if she could protect him. But it wasn't him the strange kaiju was looking at. Like the aliens, it only looked at her.

"I had no choice," she said. "Beelzebub."

The split-faced wingless dragon with eight arms looked down the ravine it'd crawled out of, and down the path Mia had forged when she'd ripped the mountain apart. A cut in the world the aliens had made a thousand times worse.

"The mother's song," Beelzebub said, bassy voice driving the blood rivers to bubble. "The power will be mine. It should have been mine!" It reached for her. So much for communication. Asmodeus, Beelzebub was not.

A thousand aliens jumped onto the dragon's back. The creature roared and turned, two giant eyes glaring down at the rushing horde. They sank their claws into Beelzebub's flesh, but with all the effectiveness of bee stings without the venom. The ones with tridents jumped high and landed on the creature's stomach, only for Beelzebub to wipe them away and squash them, ants trapped against its forearms. They could do nothing to it.

More hovering aliens floated up from the ravine and flew toward Mia, but Beelzebub twisted and swung two of his many arms through the air. The impact was awful, like crash dummies tested in cars doing 300 kph, and the aliens exploded, sending dark limbs and white blood splattering everywhere before they faded away.

But they weren't the only aliens. Even as more of the alien creatures poured up from the ravine, tentacles reached up from the black below as well, some as big as the titans Beelzebub had killed. They struck out, but not at Mia. Like a battle of the monsters, the huge tentacles snapped out at the Old One and wrapped around its wrists. But Beelzebub would not be denied, and it roared, opening its mouth the normal way while simultaneously opening its whole head down the center, exposing the million teeth within. The Old One pulled and struggled, and the ravine's edges broke away, more rocks falling into the endlessness below.

If Beelzebub fell, could it grab the ravine walls? It'd clearly climbed out of some deep pit the aliens had accidentally opened up when tearing Angel's Spine a new hole. The ravine had to be a few kilometers deep at least, lined with tunnels and other giant caverns.

Maybe Vin had grabbed one of those tunnels or cavern edges on the way down. He had to. The alien had kicked him straight into the ravine wall opposite Mia. Surely he was alive. Surely.

"I will not be denied!" The dragon aimed its strange split head down at the ravine, and the colossal spikes on its spine glowed amber.

"Shit. Vin! Kas!" She ran for the ravine, got four steps, and stopped as Romakus and Julisa reached out from the cavern wall and yanked her back. "Romakus! Julisa! Where's Kas!?"

Romakus shrugged, favoring one leg. He was bleeding, badly, his usual smirk gone, and left arm and wing dangling in strange shapes. Julisa stayed with him, somehow not having any broken limbs. The damn bitch was a survivor. Bleeding from a thousand cuts and gashes, but a survivor.

"He was biting a tentacle, last I saw him," Romakus said. "I--"

The cavern erupted in hellfire. The glowing spikes on Beelzebub's back lit the cavern with their warm glow, and the creature unleashed death straight down into the ravine. Flowing waves of red and orange poured out of its split face and mouth into the canyon. From where Mia was, near the cavern wall a couple hundred meters away from the ravine, it looked like a river of fire, running along and between the bloodfalls raining from above.

And as the tentacles burned, the aliens shrieked. The tentacles writhed, and the aliens on the other side of the canyon, where most of the fighting was happening, unleashed their voices. More than just Mia clutched their ears, everyone wincing and protecting against the sound as best they could, but it punched through everyone's palms straight into their skulls. Her friends couldn't hear the special music or feel its strings, but maybe they could hear the strange silence the screams brought, like a grenade had just gone off beside their heads.

Vin was in that ravine. And she had no idea where Kas was.

Beelzebub filled the ravine with hellfire, even dousing bits of its own body in the flame. The dragon monster had too many arms, unable to avoid the fires completely, but if Beelzebub cared it was burning itself, it didn't show it. It drowned the canyon in red, and the tentacles swung wildly, crashing into the ground as much as the Old One fighting it for space.

The tentacles fell apart, hellfire eating through them like some horrid combination of flame and flesh-eating bacteria. And as the flame exposed the white insides of the alien creatures, pieces fell away, fading into nothing until the tentacles disappeared. The other alien soldiers, still fighting Dobasi's forces near the spire, clutched their skulls and shrieked, but the demons recovered from the screams and cut the aliens down.

The hellfire faded away, and the aliens died.

Beelzebub leaned forward over the canyon edge, facing Mia, and drove its weight onto eight palms.

"Fool," it said, voice pure bass, and it shook the cavern. "You draw the invader closer."

Mia clenched her eyes shut, stood up straight, staff in hand, and forced her gaze onto the giant. First Asmodeus, and now Beelzebub. Did David have to deal with this?

"I had no choice," Mia said. Talk. Distract. The aliens were gone, and that meant she could play the music again if she had to. She just needed to get her bearings. If she played loud again right now, would that summon the aliens again? Would Beelzebub fight them if she did that? "I wasn't going to let you kill an unmarked. I wasn't going to let you kill my friends."

The dragon snarled and leaned closer to her. When it spoke, it kept its split head closed, and its face looked mostly like a dragon demon, almost like Vinicius. But the seam down the center didn't quite disappear, and as Mia stared, she saw why: there was a line of thousands of tiny teeth along the seam, hinting at the hidden mouth behind them.

"Come to me, unmarked. Let me devour you, and I will spare your friends."

She slammed the base of her staff against the ground and shallow blood. "You think you can stop the invader with the power of the song?" She could feel it. Her inner fingers worked again. The strings were there.

"Yes, I can. I am Beelzebub."

Mia squinted and gestured to the dragon. It was bleeding. Massive gashes covered its waist and arms, some deep enough to expose the bone inside, and fresh burn marks covered its shoulder and a couple of arms. The gashes weren't new, and the alien hadn't caused them. It'd been bleeding for billions of years.

"You're wounded," she said. "Hurt in a war?" Kas, Vin, wherever the fuck you are, be safe.

"The First War. The only war."

"That why you're not trying to scoop me up and eat me right now? You're still wounded from a war fought a few billion years ago?"

She peeked back at her friends. Azreal wasn't unconscious, but with the way he wasn't moving, he might as well have been. Cerb stayed at Mia's side, snarling up at the dragon the size of the cavern itself towering over them. Romakus and Julisa leaned back against the wall beside Azreal, panting and bleeding everywhere. If she had to rely on them, she was screwed.

She looked past Beelzebub, or at least as much as she could, considering how wide the monster was. But past it, she caught a glimpse of the spire, demons standing outside it, and a tetrad entering it. Dobasi? Anianus? Wherever they were going, they left a couple thousand demons behind on their side of the cavern, all of them staring up at the Old One's back with wide, revering eyes. She couldn't blame them.

"Do not duel with me, unmarked. Your music will summon the invader again."

"You think." She slammed her staff again, like a nice, fat period at the end of her statement. "And that's a risk I'm willing to take. And you know that. That's why you're not attacking."

"I can crush your song, unmarked. I will silence you, mute you, and I will devour you."

"Try it!" She pointed her staff up at the monster. "The moment I feel you touch the strings, I will punch through it and summon a bolt of lightning straight onto your head. You might be stronger than me, Old One, but you're not as strong as Hell herself." For all her big talk, she was shaking.

"Why does Mother Hell listen to the song of a useless soul? You are nothing but a brick for the Great Tower, like any other soul. Why would she play for you, and not for me and my kin?"

Mia stared, gulped, and looked back at her friends again. They said nothing, but Julisa managed a shrug. No one expected this, the Old One actually asking Mia questions and looking for answers. Maybe he did like to talk like Asmodeus.

"You're the Old One! You're one of the nine, the first ones created by Lucifer. You tell me, why won't she play for you?"

The dragon loomed closer. "Without her aid, you are nothing but a drop in the ocean. Weak. Powerless. Stupid."

"Stupid? Fuck you! I'm trying the save the Great Tower, and you're getting in my way with your selfish delusion! You're not strong enough to save it, even with my music!"

The whole conversation must have looked absurd to anyone watching. Little her near the cavern wall with her wounded friends, two friends missing, while a monster the size of the cavern itself leaned over her, sticking up from a giant ravine the aliens had made only moments before. And they were having a shouting match.

"I know you are biding for time, unmarked, or do you think me stupid?"

Shit. She gave her best poker face.

"Then why have you been talking to me?"

"To allow my servants to arrive."

"Serv--"

Humans poured over the edge of the ravine, naked, and bulging with weird muscles. They hissed and roared, thudded the ground with big mallets -- not meera metal -- and pounded their chests. Their eyes were bloodshot and wide, and some of them had an extra arm growing from their back or neck, or an extra mouth growing on the side of their jaw.

A thousand of them rushed up onto Mia's side of the cavern, but not the other side, and the ravine was too wide for anyone without wings to easily jump. And the few demons left on Mia's side stepped aside and watched, bleeding and confused, as hundreds of mutated humans rushed for Mia.

Some souls look burned. Some were still burning, caught by accident by Beelzebub's hellfire. Some fell to their faces and didn't get back up as the last of their master's flames consumed them. Every one of them glared at Mia like nothing else existed, a thousand 666s rushing straight toward her.

Mia reached for the music and plucked a string. Nothing. It wasn't silenced, but it was suppressed. She tried again, but someone else squashed her song, smothered it with a blanket, and the sound couldn't get out. No matter how hard she plucked, she couldn't get the music to go. Each time she tried, the titan before her rumbled, and its eight hands sank their nails into the ground.

It was hard for the monster to block her, but it was. Beelzebub was stronger than Asmodeus.

"Bring her to me," Beelzebub said. "Do not harm her. Do not let her harm herself. Remember what happened to the unmarked the angels killed."

The one the angels got? It meant the one that had died on Angel's Spine weeks ago. Mia had assumed the angels had taken the corpse away. Did something happen to the body, something that would make Beelzebub demand they bring her alive?

The giant demon reached for her, and she struck out with the loudest note she could play. The demon hissed through its vertical slit mouth, withdrew its hand, and blocked her song. Its fingers flexed against the air and ground, a dozen giant fingers on eight hands, all of them bending and twisting as they fought against Mia's silent music.

It was cumbersome for the Old One to play music, and she could see it on his body. For all its power, it was physically taxing for the old, wounded creature to do what Mia could do easily at this point. Except, the Old One wasn't just suppressing Mia's song, but stopping it from going anywhere. It was blocking her song so absolutely, it could be heard by no one, not Hell, not even Cerberus next to her. The aliens stopped her with silence, like playing music in a vacuum. Beelzebub stopped her with sheer brute force.

She looked back again. Cerberus was the only one up. Romakus had collapsed against the wall, and Julisa was trying to pick him up, but all that did was double the blood oozing from her side. Azreal had the strength to keep his batlam rune summoned, but every attempt to get up stopped the moment he put weight onto a limb.

"Cerberus," she said, and she choked out the command. "Get 'em."

Cerberus charged forward without hesitation, and bit into the closest soul. They clubbed one of his heads, and the hellhound roared with the second, and tore out the soul's throat with the third. Like a wolf, Cerberus went for the throat every time, threw his weight out at the next soul with his front feet up and claws raking down, brought them to the ground, and bit out their throat again. A soul next to him was unlucky enough to be in reach of dopey head, and dopey head ripped the soul's leg open.

Souls weren't demons, but these might as well have been with the way they looked at Mia, baring their teeth. And they fought off Cerberus with the same mindless addiction to violence demons had. The huge hellhound tore through half a dozen of them, claws eviscerating guts and three heads ripping open jugulars, but they came at him with their fists and claws, and surrounded him. His yelps cut through the battle and into Mia's bones.

She ran at them and swung her staff, body not listening to her anymore. The result was predictable. The first human to reach her grabbed her staff, threw it to the side, and grabbed her by the hair.

The soul exploded. A colossal sword cut him down, and human skin gave way so much easier than demon skin. Bone and flesh shot outward, and Mia squeaked as a splatter of the warm liquid coated her face, and something dangled from her head. A dismembered arm, fingers tight around her frizzy red hair. Her squeak turned into a quick scream, and she pried the thing from her head.

Romakus stood beside her, eyes glaring at the oncoming horde, joker smile gone. He looked barely conscious.

"Cerberus!" she yelled. "Help him, Romakus!"

Romakus took a step forward, blood flowing down his side, and the surrounding souls paused for a whole second. It was enough for Romakus to take another swing, but the souls jumped back, and Romakus fell to a knee. They swarmed him.

Julisa joined him, four swords out, but she lasted three seconds before they poured over her, beating her with stone mallets. Some had little rock knives, and they stabbed her, the rock unable to pierce her dark red skin deep. But shallow cuts were still cuts, and Julisa roared up at over a dozen souls as they worked together to pin her arms and beat her. Like chimpanzees, surrounding freshly captured prey, they beat her.

Beelzebub let out a roar, and the souls stopped. They lined up shoulder to shoulder, some flexing their extra arms, some dragging fingers across their chests and painting lines of demon blood across their muscles. More than a few gnashed their teeth, and Mia sucked in a breath. She'd seen teeth like that before, on the surface, when people with a particularly 'passionate' love for their tastes got their teeth filed to points.

"Unmarked," Beelzebub said. "Look around you." The giant used one of its many arms to gesture behind it, across the ravine.

A thousand demons stood around a thousand demon corpses, and they all stared across the pit at Beelzebub's back and at the army of souls about to kill Mia's friends. They couldn't get to Mia, not easily anyway. Any attempt would be easily stopped by the monster with eight arms.

But Vin was down there in that pit, he had to be. And where was Kas? She couldn't see him anywhere.

Mia summoned her staff back to her side and leaned her weight on it. Cerberus lay on his side, bleeding from two mouths, one of his legs crooked, several of his mane's spikes were gone, and a big gash along his side leaked into the shallow, flowing blood of the cavern. Only one head looked conscious, boss head, and he looked back at Mia. And whimpered.

Mia squeezed her staff, clenched her jaw, and reached for the strings. But no matter how hard she plucked them, Beelzebub blocked her.

"Enough," the old monster said. Each time it blocked her strings, its colossal muscles flexed. Stopping her wasn't easy for the Old One. She had to find some way to exploit that. "Enough, unmarked. I have no interest in your companions, and replacing my servants takes time. Come here, be devoured, and I will spare their lives."

Of course it'd say that. She sighed, clenched her eyes shut, opened them, and found reality unchanged. She was fucked, again.

She'd traded places with James. Noah and Yosepha would save him, get him to safety, and get him to the Forgotten Place. Maybe save the world.

But now she'd die, and if Beelzebub and Asmodeus were right, Beelzebub was about to gain her power. With how powerful the monster already was, how powerful would it get? Enough to take on the invaders? It'd already just won a battle against them, but this was just a tiny skirmish. How bad would it get? Would--

The old monster rumbled. "You are trying my patience, unmarked. I am not Azazel. Do not test me."

Mia sucked in a slow breath. "Will you fight the invader? The alien?"

The dragon loomed closer, the vertical split along its face more visible, showing the thousands of small teeth lining it.

"Of course. If the Great Tower is destroyed, I will have nothing to rule."

"Mia," a hoarse voice whispered. Azreal. The angel struggled back to his feet behind her, right arm dangling beside him, but he summoned his spear into his left hand, his shield hand, and pointed the weapon at the Old One. "Do not let this monster... kill you."

She stared back at the angel and glimpsed his amethyst-purple eyes through the narrow T-slit opening of his helmet. He looked sad. Azreal never looked sad. Stern, intense, even angry, but never sad. And his eyes lingered on her.

"Azreal?"

"Don't... don't let it... kill you." The angel stumbled forward, but his spear did not tremble, a perfect edge pointed at Beelzebub. "Run."

"Run? Azreal, you--"

"Run."

She stared at him. Again, the angel met her gaze, and his eyes ripped her into bits. The fuck was going on in those eyes? Like an ocean wave slammed into her chest, she almost stumbled back as she stared at him.

"I... I--"

A nasty snarl ripped through the cavern. Mia spun. It didn't come from Beelzebub, or his servants, or the demons watching from the other side of the ravine. More invaders? The ravine was still open, but no, it wasn't the aliens. She could still feel the music, and the sudden shriek brought with it no alien silence.

The scream came from overhead. Everyone looked up, and Beelzebub roared as a massive creature fell onto its skull. A lizard? Something with a huge body but low profile, like a Komodo dragon or something, like a--

"A sercano," Romakus said, dragging himself up to his feet. "What the fuck."

A sercano, one of those giant lizards the rider had ridden when it'd attacked Death's Grip. The same sercano they ran into in the Black Valley. But this wasn't that sercano. This one looked weird. It had six legs instead of four, and too many claws. And it was bigger. A lot bigger. Too big for the tunnels, but not too big for the giant crack in the ceiling Mia had made.

"Deus Sercano!" someone yelled from across the ravine.

Deus Sercano? Mia didn't need to ask. This was a mutated sercano, and it had a name.

The lizard was bigger than the alien titans Beelzebub had killed before. Still small compared to the Old One, but 'small' in this case meant as big as the monster's head, and Beelzebub roared in rage and pain as the colossal creature tore the right side of the Old One's face open. Beelzebub tried to bite the creature with both mouths, but the lizard stayed firmly attached to the side of the Old One's face.

Beelzebub grabbed it with one hand. Not good enough. It stayed latched on, hissing down at the Old One as it tore at flesh. Beelzebub's roar was deafening, and it got a second hand on the lizard. Something glowing red on the lizard's back jumped down, landed straight on Beelzebub's second hand, and chopped off one of its fingers. Again, the Old One roared in some ancient combination of fury and agony, and yanked its hand away as waves of blood gushed from the burning, severed knuckle.

The glowing red thing glided down toward Mia's side of the cavern. Wings of flame. Fuck. She just could not catch a break.

The rider landed on the ground directly in the center of the army of damned souls. With both axes glowing with hellfire and a fresh coat of Old One blood, the rider came for Mia.

"Cain!" the Old One yelled. "Cain! I will have your head for this, Cain!"

The souls turned and swarmed. No hesitation. They hollered like chimps and threw themselves at the rider, but their clubs and knives of blackstone weren't as strong as meera metal, let alone the aera metal the rider wore. Their weapons bounced off his armor, and their bodies ignited in flame as the rider cut through them. As Cain cut through them.

Romakus hooked his sword onto his back with his good arm and scooped up Cerberus.

"Let's go," he said, slung the hellhound over his bad shoulder, and started walking. How he wasn't collapsing, Mia couldn't tell, and she didn't dare ask.

Julisa scooped Azreal up, and the moment the angel didn't have to carry his own weight anymore, he collapsed. His good wing went limp, his good arm did, too, and his armor and spear vanished, leaving him in his white toga.

Mia shook her head. "But... but Kas, and Vin, and--"

Beelzebub's roars exploded again, and the cavern shook with the power of the old creature's surprise. It wasn't only the strange, mutated sercano attacking the Old One. Like the rider had waved a green flag, a thousand demons jumped onto Beelzebub's back, climbed it, sank their claws into its skin to grasp it, and worked their way up its body. From a distance, Mia could still feel their auras, a thousand spheres of violence, pure destructive intent, and a hunger for glory.

Whoever killed the Old One would become the most renown demon for all time. And if they ate its heart, they would be the most powerful demon of all time. So they probably thought.

It wasn't just their auras. It was a spire aura. Mia couldn't see Dobasi anymore. He'd got back to his spire, and unleashed an aura from the towering structure, drowning the cavern and beyond it in an aura he couldn't have summoned when Beelzebub had control. The Old One no longer had control, and the spire radiated with its desire: bring down the Old One.

Did Dobasi know how absurd that was? How impossible? Or was he just trying to help Mia escape? After what happened, she'd figured he'd want her head on a pike, not to help her. She shook her head and scanned the chaos of battle for Kas and Vin. No sign. And the bodies throwing themselves at the rider weren't slowing him down at all. He marched his way after Mia, cutting down through the mutated, damned souls with forward hacking motions. He wasn't fighting. He was carving a path through annoying brush.

"Cain!" Beelzebub yelled, finally got another hand on the giant hellbeast on its face, and threw it down against the cavern. The massive creature landed hard, but it had six legs and used them, landing on them and somehow not breaking every bone in its body. Two enormous chains dangled from its face, hooks drilled into spikes sticking up from its forehead. Another creature the rider had somehow broken and tamed.

Beelzebub picked a new target and swung out a hand. Mia bit down a scream, but the massive limb didn't come for her. It went for Cain.

"You will not kill her!" the Old One yelled. "She is mine!" The massive limb crashed down against the ground, and rock cracked like splintered glass. At least fifty servants exploded under the impact, and a fresh coating of blood and gore joined the flowing waves of crimson still pouring across the cavern floor, unending and fueled by the hanging flaps of archangel flesh above.

The Old One yanked its hand away, roaring unendingly as a spout of blood gushed from a cut on its palm, flickers of flame eating away at the skin. The rider stood up from a small crater and resumed his chase of Mia.

Mia and her friends ran like hell. The crew stuck to the cavern wall and kept as much distance as they could. She ran, metal boots clinking against the bloody floor, and somehow Julisa and Romakus kept pace, their blood trails disappearing into the flowing blood below. Cerberus made some more whiny noises, and Mia blocked them out as best she could. If she listened too hard, she'd break, turn around, and try to console him. Keep running. Just keep running,

A goliath hand slammed against the path in front of her. Beelzebub, snarling down at her from a distance, glowered and swung his hand for her, a little too fast. He might kill her.

Something glowing red flew by and crashed into the Old One's giant wrist. Compared to the wrist, it was just a small ember, but it cut deep into the monster's flesh and ignited it, forcing the Old One to raise the limb and scratch at it, desperate to get the flame free. One of the rider's axes.

Mia looked back. The rider walked after her, raised a hand, and like an angel summoning their weapon, a swirling mix of gold, bronze, and burning amber encompassed his fingers, and his axe re-materialized in his grip.

"Cain," the Old One said. "I know not what madness has possessed you, why you are intent on dooming our world. But you will not kill the unmarked. You will not destroy us all!"

Mia stared back and almost tripped. The rider, Cain, sprouted his flame wings again, and as Beelzebub swung an arm at him, Cain jumped over it. For all Beelzebub's amazing power, he was a giant monster, and that meant predictable motions. But the moment the rider landed, and another hundred damned souls rushed him, and Cain continued the march forward, butchering through the humans in his way. Nothing but cattle, but they slowed him down.

Mia looked ahead. The ravine she'd torn in the ceiling, and the ravine the invaders had torn in the ground, created a strange mess. If they went to the right, they'd fall into the canyon. On their left were collapsed tunnels and ruined caverns, creating a sloping wall of rubble pushing them toward the ravine edge. They had to keep going forward along the path Mia originally created, and that meant precarious moments of stepping around ledges, boulders, and crumbled walls so they didn't fall into the ravine.

A roaring howl erupted from the tunnels ahead. Mia froze. More demon screams and roars, from the tunnels behind. The walls blurred, overflowing with black and red. Movement, pouring up from the canyon, and down from the crack above. Mia squinted, staring, but it didn't take long before what she was seeing made sense.

Demons. Hundreds of demons. The ravine reaching from ceiling to the bottom of Hell meant a thousand tunnels were exposed, and demons were good climbers. They poured out of the tunnels, drawn in by the spire aura Beelzebub was too distracted to crush. Thousands of them. Gargoyles jumped down from tunnels above and landed on the giant monster. Others landed on the rampaging sercano and hacked at it with their swords and axes, only for it to buck wildly like an angry bear trying to kill whoever had jumped it. Vrats and brutes rushed out from tunnels on foot, and poured straight through the damned souls, cleaving their way through them on their way to the Old One. Dobasi had summoned the horde.

A couple tetrads showed up, gave Mia and her crew only a passing glance, their minds strong enough to stay above the pull of the spire's aura. But they went to battle anyway, and followed the others into the fight. Other demons joined them, climbing up from the ravine and literally up Beelzebub's body like ants.

But Beelzebub had eight arms. It swung them along the cavern floor and mowed demons down, breaking their bodies. It swung two for the rider, and while Cain jumped one, Beelzebub caught him with another and hit him into the cavern wall. The rider dropped a couple dozen meters to his feet, boots sending a massive splash of blood out on impact, but he stood up a second later and again gave chase after Mia, ignoring the Old One as best he could.

Mia could barely see through the horde. Demons jumped from over her head and hit the ground running, straight into battle. A hundred of them exploded underneath the Old One's palm, and again, Beelzebub put a hand in her path, blocking her.

Mia pointed her staff and summoned a spike. A small one, like the ones she'd used to kill dozens of demons before. She plucked the invisible strings hard, and summoned a huge spike straight up into the hand, and again the Old One roared and yanked his hand back. Splinters hurt.

The madness did not stop. More of Beelzebub's souls showed up, all climbing up from the ravine around their master's body, and they met the oncoming horde with rocks and hammers and knives.

"Enough!" Beelzebub roared, aimed its head toward Mia's escape path, and unleashed death. It opened the vertical split of its face, revealed the alien mouth within and its million teeth, and poured hellfire. The deadly flame rushed down along the ravine, cut across Mia's path, and drowned her goal in fire.

She spun and faced the Old One. In the chaos, the Old One got one of its hands around the rider and pinned him against the cavern wall. He'd break free soon. He always did. But for the moment, the only thing she had to concern herself with was the Old One. For all its power, it couldn't multitask better than anyone else, and with eight arms, it struggled to balance wiping demon ants off its skin, keeping the rider pinned, and blocking Mia from leaving.

Like familiar silhouettes in a crowd, two demons on the other side of the ravine grabbed her eye. Kas, climbing up the ravine wall, with Vin right behind him. The child of Belial was climbing with only two arms, and his right foot looked crooked.

Mia slammed her staff in the ground and turned and faced Beelzebub. The hellfire blocking her path would pass in a minute, and she would not let Kas and Vin die in the meantime.

"Romakus, Julisa," she said. "Get ready to run."

Julisa snorted. "Lilith take me, what the fuck do you think we've been doing?"

Mia shook her head. "This is only going to get worse."

"What? You cannot be--"

Mia pointed her staff up at the sky. She needed to stop Beelzebub. She needed to put him back in the ground, injure him, get him out of the way. The rider, too.

And if she could save James and Adron, she could save Kas and Vin.

She reached out to the invisible ocean and the silent music. The alien was still in there, the endless void, a black eye gazing up from beneath the ocean, from some place darker. Life, the Great Tower, the song, they were an ocean of music on top of an ocean of endless oblivion, and that oblivion was looking for her. And it was going to find her again in a second.

Beelzebub let go of the rider when Cain's red wings burst out from the Old One's skin and burned the creature. The rider fell to the ground yet again, and the damned souls swarmed him, rushing past demons to bury him, while the demons ran past the souls to swarm over the Old One. The cavern drowned in violence auras. No one was thinking past their most basic order: 'kill the Old One' for the demons, and 'stop the rider' for the souls. And through it all, Beelzebub roared without pause as a fresh wave of demons dove onto it and cut, bit, and stabbed its flesh.

Mia was free to play the music, and she reached for harsh, high-pitched notes. She pulled from the sky, played to it, and Mother Hell matched her song. She pulled harder, reached further, grabbed the sky itself, and demanded it dance to her tune.

She slammed her staff against the ground and summoned lightning.

Through the crack in the ceiling, the amber sky flashed, and red lightning snapped down between the torn archangel flesh above, down through the ceiling hole, and straight onto Beelzebub's head. It wasn't electricity, but pure power like a hurricane condensed into a stream of red, and it shot through the Old One's head and through its body. Thunder followed, and a new type of sound shook the cavern, a borderline blast wave that crashed into everyone and sent them flying.

The black eye in the hidden ocean looked up again.

Beelzebub teetered, teetered, and fell forward. Its long torso crashed onto the cavern on Mia's side of the ravine, and all eight arms went limp and slumped over the battlefield. Demons and humans alike disappeared under its torso, and Mia looked away as a fresh wave of blood flowed out from under Beelzebub's chest.

Gravity got its hooks into the Old One, and it slowly fell back into the ravine. If it fell all the way to the bottom, would it hit the void below and die?

Think later. Act now. She aimed her staff at Kas and Vin, and summoned a bridge of stone. That much rock that quickly was another beacon in the hidden ocean, and the black eye within spotted it instantly.

"Vin! Kas! Run!"

Kas and Vin needed no prompting. They double-timed it up the ravine wall, navigating past exposed tunnels filled with demons and damned souls fighting, and up to the ravine edge. They got on the bridge and ran, and each of Vin's steps was agony to look at. That was a broken ankle, and Vin ignored it, pushing forward.

With a bridge to take, it didn't take them long to reach her, but the bridge summoned the attention of hundreds more of the damned souls pouring up from the ravine. They ran down Kas and Vin, but even injured, the two demons had no trouble throwing the naked souls back into the canyon they crawled out of.

But they couldn't do anything about the alien tentacles.

Again, the black tentacles thicker than Vin's whole body erupted from the ravine, and shattered the bridge. Kas and Vin went flying, but they already had the momentum and came soaring toward Mia. They did not land gently, and Vin rolled, spikes bending oddly as he crashed into the wall. Kas landed like a cat, and his claws dragged along the rock as he slid.

"Vin! Kas!" she yelled. "Get up, we have to go!"

Romakus snarled down at Mia, and for just a moment, she thought the tetrad would bite her head off.

"What have you done!?" he yelled.

"I put a dent in Beelzebub, and I knew what would happen."

"You summoned the invader, again! On purpose!? It--"

The alien shriek ripped up through the ravine, and the chaos turned into an orgy of death. Twice as many of the colossal tentacles shot up from the blackness below, and they struck out at random things in Mia's general direction. They smashed the bridge; they smashed into the wall ahead and above; they smashed the ground; and they smashed down on the titanic creature taking up all the space.

Beelzebub awoke, rose, and did the first thing any waking, panicked animal did when suddenly surrounded by strange, moving shapes hurting it. It attacked wildly, roaring and twisting, biting and scratching. For all the ancient entity's supposed wisdom and epic desires, it fought like a mindless animal, like a demon drowning in its own violence aura.

The tentacles reached for Mia over the endless corpses and swung out for her, but Beelzebub, be it intentional or accidental, grabbed the tentacles sharing the ravine with it, and tore into them. Alien shrieks cut through the air, ripped it apart, and Mia's soul along with it.

If the alien focused on Mia because she played music, maybe it had beef with Beelzebub too? Old Ones could play the music. Maybe the alien couldn't focus on her because of that? Or maybe it just kept fighting Beelzebub because Old One was in its way.

Aliens poured up from the ravine yet again and joined the fray, and everything became a mess in a mess. The violence auras disappeared, crushed under the silence the aliens brought with them, but that didn't matter. You didn't need the aura to entice a demon to fight. And Beelzebub's souls looked rabid, as if their minds were empty except for their master's orders. The three forces ripped into each other, and the cavern turned into something worse than chaos.

Mia got what she wanted. The hellfire blocking their escape route dissipated, and Mia started down the path.

"Come on! We go!"

"Damn woman!" Julisa said. "You'll be the end of us all!"

Mia didn't respond. Running set her lungs on fire, and as they went down the path, the space between the ravine on the right, and the various walls and broken tunnels on the left, shrank. The charred ground was not stable either, and the blackened dirt broke apart under their feet and claws.

Kas and Vin followed as fast as they could, Kas in the rear, and her shark dinosaur bodyguard kept aiming his eyeless gaze at Vin's leg. Looking out for him? A million questions shot through Mia's mind, but a glance past Kas to the battlefield behind them knocked the questions back out.

The rider. While everyone tore each other to bits, the rider pushed past the crowd and came after them, and for the first time, he ran. Mia's blood froze cold. He wasn't fast, barely jogging, but something about the way the man in the massive suit of armor ran, both axes in hand at his sides while his greaves hit the bloody floor, was terrifying.

They ran as fast as they could, which wasn't fast either. Mia put some distance on her friends, and stopped so they could catch up. They were all bleeding, injured, with broken arms, broken wings, and with Vin's ankle broken, the big guy was the first to slow down.

The battle faded into the background as the group moved on from the cavern, the distant roars and screams of Beelzebub, thousands of demons, thousands of souls, and maybe thousands of aliens fighting for sound as much as space. And thank god the few hovering aliens that came up from the ravine quickly found themselves snatched from the air either by demons literally jumping off Beelzebub's shoulders, more gargoyles and bat girls jumping from the spire, or the Old One's swiping arms.

If Dobasi ever got his hands on Mia again, he'd kill her for this destruction.

Mia's path tightened, and the wall to their left closed in on the ravine. It wasn't long before they were jogging with only a few meters of space between them and the bottomless pit below. And it was bottomless. Mia glanced over the edge. Stupid, yes, but she had to see.

A void. An endless, infinite void, with hints of stars behind a curtain of oblivion. And within the oily black at the bottom of the bottomless ravine, something swam, and the great, invisible eye searched for her.

She yanked her head back. The aliens were distracted by Beelzebub. Don't tempt fate.

Problem: the rider wasn't distracted at all. He chased them, relentless, and didn't so much as glance down at the ravine directly beside him. His red wings disappeared; not like he needed them for running.

"Enough," Vin said. "We must fight."

"We can't fight!" Mia yelled back at him. "We have no room!"

Vin gestured ahead. The path weaved and turned, like an unstable crack that zigzagged as it cut through glass. Chunks of rock snapped off the edge of the canyon, and some errant souls fell, howling like monkeys as gravity sucked them toward the void below.

Mia snuck a quick peek again. Like before, anything that reached the bottom of the ravine, over several kilometers down, touched the void, except not. As if they collided with the bottom of Hell instead of the void itself, their bodies shattered, dispersed into dust and ash, and faded away. But not into the oblivion below. It was like Hell was making sure they didn't reach the endless nothing. Maybe saving them? Saving them by killing them.

They got further and further, but the rider was relentless. It was like he didn't feel fatigue, or pain, or anything. But they did, and Vin roared with some mix of rage and agony, and turned.

"Vin!" Mia yelled. They were only a kilometer away from the battle. They couldn't risk this.

Romakus set Cerberus down and joined Vin. "We don't have a choice, Mia. It won't be long before everyone realizes you're not there." He gestured past the rider to the cavern beyond, full of death. "We have to deal with this fucker first."

Julisa set Azreal down against the wall. There really was no room. A few meters of ground underneath them, a wall of rock on one side, a fall to their death on the other. Perfect for the rider. All he had to do was run at them, and they couldn't do a thing about it, not injured like they were.

Mia reached for the strings. Blocked. They were still too close to the aliens.

The rider slowed his run as he came close, and with axes at the ready, he walked after them, empty visor of pure darkness glaring at them.

"Give me the girl," the rider said in his boring voice. "Or kill her yourself. She must die."

Vin stood to his full height despite the ankle and glared down at the rider.

"I'd always suspected," Vin said, "that you were Cain."

The rider spared only a quick glance of his helmet up at his old comrade. "It doesn't matter."

"It does. Explain yourself."

"Get out of my way, Vinicius."

Vin flexed his arms, and his back spikes glowed amber. "No."

The rider shook his head. More emotion than Mia had ever seen from the man.

"She must die," Cain said. "We must all die. It must all end."

Mia drew her head back. "What? You... What?"

Cain stepped forward, and said nothing. Vin lifted his head, ready to unleash the hellfire he knew wouldn't work on the rider.

He stopped and stepped back, almost falling over Kas and Romakus as lava erupted from the ground in front of him. The rider stopped, too, and both men stared down at the bubbling red before their feet.

"Vin!" Mia yelled and ducked around Julisa and Romakus's legs, trying to reach the big demon, but Kas held out a hand and stopped her. "Vin's--"

A skeleton hand burst up from the lava. And another. Mia looked past Kas and Vin's legs, the titan struggling to stay standing, as a skeleton climbed up from the lava. They stood on shorter legs than Cain's, and unless Mia was wrong, the pelvis looked different. That was a girl's pelvis.

Red, bronze, and gold lines swirled around the skeleton, flowing, weaving strands of light. They absorbed and converged quickly, and a suit of beautiful armor, with just barely enough feminine curve to give away who wore it, materialized. And as the mighty armor solidified, the woman drew a long, shimmering shape from her back.

A beautiful, glorious, long, two-handed sword. She stabbed it into the ground in front of her as she finished her transformation.

"Unmarked," she said, looking at the rider and not bothering to look back. "You have stirred oblivion."

Mia forced down a gulp. "I had to. I wasn't going to let James die. Did you find him? Find Adron? He--"

"I did no such thing."

"But... But then why are you here?"

She pointed her huge sword at the rider. "I sensed his presence near you, as he would I, were I near. And the entire province has felt this chaos." She pointed the sword past Cain, to the battle in the distance. "What have you done, unmarked?"

"What I had to! I had to reach James. I'm not letting him die. I'm not letting my friends die!"

The woman looked back at her. Like Cain, her visor hid her face entirely, the tiny T-slit through the front of the skull helmet showing no hint of her eyes inside. But if they were like Cain's, they were fire, burning inside a skinless skull.

Vin glared down at the woman and growled, a deep, heavy rumble. "Then you are Lilith," he said, and he slammed his tail against the ground.

The woman in armor said nothing, only looked up at Vin for a quiet moment before looking back to her fellow skeleton in armor.

"Cain," she said. "You cannot want this." Like Cain, her voice was perfectly normal, with none of the edge or growl of a demon, or the grand and powerful eloquence of the angels. "My husband, please, let the unmarked reach their goal. That was our plan all along, was it not?"

Cain took a step forward. "Move, Lilith."

She cut an arc through the air, swung so fast it almost snapped like a whip crack.

"Answer my question, Cain. You spit on Ramiel's memory. Her sacrifice. Our sacrifice."

Silence, for a moment, as if the rider wanted them to stew in the waiting. Or he just didn't want to talk.

"This is the only way to bring an end," he said.

Lillith shook her head. "That is what we wanted to avoid! That is why we did what we did!"

He shook his head. "Not I. Not anymore."

"You cannot wish to doom the Great Tower and see it gone, just for--"

"It must happen, Lilith." He pointed an axe at her. "If I lose this opportunity, you will hate yourself for stopping me, for the rest of eternity."

She shook her head, too. "I have hope for the future, Cain. For the future of the Great Tower. For our future!"

Slowly, the rider lowered his axe. "I do not. The ebb of time will wear on us both until we are nothing but madmen trapped in this perpetual cycle. It must be stopped. We must end."

With a weary sigh, Lilith held up her sword, and braced herself.

"Go, unmarked," she said. "I will hold him off for as long as I can." Her sword glowed, and hellfire danced on the long blade.