Chapter 115: Nem8 Queen

If he pushed the Wing too hard it started to fall apart. James wished the damn thing came with a speedometer. Was he going 200 mph? Faster? He couldn’t tell. But as he drove it harder, forcing the craft to blur up the avenues, he felt its components begin to shake apart, its chassis separating, held in place by raw Aeviternum and his will.

He ripped north up Bowery, tearing along between the five and six-story brick high rises, over abandoned buses and burning cars, leaving a wake of shimmering silver behind him. Midtown was a distant, hazy mass of buildings, the demon symbol shimmering over the Empire State, but he had one focus and one focus alone:

Cleansing the fuck out of the streets.

It became a test as to how fast he could drop bombs and burn his divine pool while Ruby strained and fought to regenerate. As he flew he dropped four Heavenly Assaults two blocks over in every direction, not caring for what he hit or how, just unleashing his fury on anything and everything susceptible to his destruction.

Below him, along Bowery, he dragged a net of pure Diamond, a facsimile of Seraphic Web made with Aura Mastery, forty yards wide and trawling the avenue with complex swirls of silver.

Demons shrieked and leaped at him, tried to run up-avenue, clambered over each other, howled their fury, and died.

By the hundreds.

By the thousands.

Faster and faster James went, the Wing shaking apart, the silver Aeviternum bonds visible now between the distinct parts. Leaning out wide, twenty yards above the asphalt, James dragged his web along, filled the avenue with pure glory even as he dropped Assaults again and again on the blocks over.

Get the fuck outta here!Screamed Jelly, his panic and elation mingling into one euphoric scream. James, we gotta slow down!

You mean go faster?

Because there was no doubting the scale of the catastrophe that was engulfing the city in real time. Millions had crammed their way into the city the day before, flooding the streets in panicked masses, and millions had died.

Everywhere James looked he saw the dead. Torn, shredded, hurled apart, crushed, gauged, decapitated. The dead were everywhere, and part of James felt that if he could only go fast enough the bodies would blur, lose their individual identities, would no longer stare blankly up at him with projected accusations in their eyes.

James, the Wing!

It was rattling, shivering apart. James grimaced and willed it to come together, to coalesce once more.

It did so, draining more from his divine pool.

Which was slowly dropping. Ruby couldn’t keep up with the sheer scale of the shit he was dropping.

Bowery split in two up ahead. James veered to the left, heading more inland, toward Midtown.

Heavenly Assaults blasted the side streets continuously, magnificent, insane, draining his divine pool, his Diamon Aura causing the demons below to shriek and get cheese guillotined apart.

But these demons weren’t mindless Nem2’s, or even the bestial cunning Nem3’s. Word was spreading amongst them, and the avenue was clearing up ahead, demons splitting left and right to sprint into side streets even as the Nem7’s and Nem8’s flew as fast as they could for the Empire State building.

Around which a storm was building.

No, not a storm.

James grunted as if he’d been punched in the chest.

Thousands of flying demons swirled around the demon symbol. So many that they looked like storm clouds, great swathes revolving endlessly around the symbols.

With one demon growing ever larger in the center.

A Nem8.

Even as James flew toward them, he saw more Nem8’s merge with it. Adding to its power, its bulk, its Infernum might.

Looks like we got a fight up ahead.

James, maybe we should call in more of Crimson Hydra.

They got their own battles.

James pulled up on the Wing, rising above the six and seven-story buildings, ramping up and heading right for the top of the Empire State. He ceased dropping his Assaults, allowing his divine pool to begin to regenerate.

Could he do it? Thousands of Nem7’s were circling the spire, aware of him, watching him approach.

Even as he drew ever closer they raised their arms and cast a spell in unison. Their Infernum blasted out and formed a sphere around the demon sphere of purple and black flame. The Empire State itself was plumed in ebon flames, the Hive encompassing the entirety of the edifice, but this was different.

They’d called it a Circle of Damnation back in Old Crow.

But that had been an eggshell compared to the nuclear bunker they were building here. Thousands of Nem7’s were drawing on their power to fuel its creation, a layered onion of defenses, each layer replete with unholy symbols, roaring like a furnace, filling the air with emanations of demonic energy that battered at James’s Spiritual Exaltation like gale winds presaging the arrival of a hurricane.

James narrowed his eyes and forced the Wing to go even faster. It rattled, thrummed, pieces floating free and only held relatively in place by his will.

Like a bullet from a Gauss canon he flew right at the ever expanding sphere of flame, faster and faster, screaming as he closed. Jelly was shrieking until high above the city James’s screams turned into peals of manic laughter.

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Angelus Armor, Aureate Buckler, Holy Zeal with a focus on cleansing this hive, Increase Arete, and Indomitable Resilience. He layered the Gloria-infused benedictions as he hurled himself at the two-hundred yard diameter sphere.

The Nem7’s all screamed their defiance at him as one, a wall of sound that hit him just before he went Nova.

He hit the sphere like a ball of phosphorous, burning bright, and shattered his way clean through, punching through layer after layer like a lead safe dropping through a hundred layers of plate glass.

The Wing didn’t make it. Chunks fell away, shattered, broke, and then James was hurtling through the air by himself, over a thousand feet up in the air, through the Circle and inside.

No time for thought, for anything but to unleash everything he had. Heavenly Assaults flared down in a ring around him, ten all at once, the lightning bolts splitting sky with crazed BOOMS that caused James’s to vibrate from the sheer density of the sound. His Nova flared larger and larger, his divine pool draining into it, turning him into a dark speck at the center of his own Diamond moon. Nem7’s screeched and died, torched all around him, hundreds upon hundreds going up in smoke.

James was going too fast and had no way to stop. He hit the Empire State building at over 300 mph and simply crossed his arms before his head as he slammed through the massively reinforced windows.

Glass exploded around him as he flew into one of the top floors like a torpedo. He hit an interior glass wall, burst through it, flashed through a hallway, exploded through a wall, through a conference room, through another wall, knocked a massive printer machine flying into a hundred chunks, through an open plan office, through a bookcase filled with leatherbound tomes and the wall behind it, through another wall, then into an office on the building’s far side and with a scream he burst out the far window and back outside.

The Nem8 had been waiting for him. Now over seventy yards tall, it wielded a scimitar of black flame the size of a school bus. It brought this screaming around like a baseball bat, a horizontal slice perfectly aimed to end James.

Who invoked Teleportation Circle right before him, perpendicular to the distant ground, dumping a point of Aeviternum into it and disappearing into its white flame just before the scimitar hit.

James appeared a hundred feet directly above the colossal Nem8, momentum hurling him straight down toward the demon.

Who reacted with impeccable reflexes, looking up instantly, burning eyes flaring wide as James screamed and hurled another ten Heavenly Assaults into its huge face.

His divine pool was down to half, Ruby straining to recoup. James placed the Heavenly Assaults over each other, and they twined into a tornado as they dropped, energy compacted and made ultra-dense, as thick as the Empire State itself and pounding into the vast Nem8 who invoked a burning wall of Infernum before him in an attempt to stave off annihilation.

The ten Heavenly Assaults hit it like the wrath of a primitive god. The black shield held for a moment, but the demon was hurled down before the electric storm, dropping the thousand five hundred feet in a flash to slam into the avenue with the strength of a meteor.

James dove right after, his hair streaming behind him, head down, roaring his hatred and glee as he filled the block below with Seraphic Web.

But this Nem8 was obscenely strong. James couldn’t begin to guess how many hundreds, how many thousands of Nemeses had gone into making it. With a defiant roar it struggled free of the rubble, shattering the walls and windows of the buildings around it, wings knocking over cars and light posts as it rose, its burning black shield fragmenting, the Seraphic Web scrawling deep wounds across its body.

Infernum manifested along the length of its scimitar which lost its form, became a mass of black fire, and which then flew up right into James’s face.

Split second decision.

Infernum Reaper drew the black flame even quicker to him, converting part of the attack into fuel even as James triggered Demonic Form and Void Break.

He was three hundred feet up when he exploded in size, wings bursting out of his back, the Nem8’s form becoming his own, obsidian erupting up his forearms, out of his shoulders, sweeping back from his brow in the shape of huge horns. In seconds he was twenty-yards long from claws to brow, his wings furled on his back, Void Break flooding him with Infernum that he’d stolen from the fireball.

The Nem8’s eyes went wide in shock and then James hit it like a bat out of hell.

The collision was so powerful it caused every window along the block and halfway up the Empire State to blast out. James drove the larger Nem8 deep into the crater, shattering through into some manner of underground basement or tunnel.

Bones ruptured, demon ichor geysered like a dozen burst fire hydrants. James’s Angelus Armor yet cloaked him, protected him from the worst of the impact, his Indomitable Resilience causing his wounds to immediately began to heal even as he targeted himself with Healing Grace and began dropping more Heavenly Assaults on the thrashing demon, one two three four, the sky turning blank white with the sheer power of the assault.

The Nem8 tried to teleport away but James activated Terrify which caused the demon to panic; it thrashed, crushing cars with each blow of its fists, other vehicles sliding and tumbling into the growing pit. The facade of the building across from the Empire State suddenly collapsed with a grinding roar, a huge dust cloud billowing up.

The Nem8 fell back, exhausted, depleted, half its skull crushed in. James reared back, clenched both fists together and then drove them down into the demon’s head just as he unleashed a final Nova, pouring absolutely all of his divine power into the explosion.

The Nova was soundless. The world went blank as it burst outward, consumed the noise of the demon’s head being crushed inward, the dirt and pipes and asphalt and everything else beneath them compacting another five yards deeper.

The Nem8’s body was consumed by the Nova which James felt blow out to cover one block, two, three.

A small hemisphere of burning white light rose to a height of some five hundred feet, halfway up the Empire State, consuming everything within its diameter.

Then it faded away.

James leaped out of the pit, abandoning his demonic form. Up into the air he flew with a single beat of his wings and reaching out with Spiritual Exaltation he found the remnants of the Wing, disparate and scattered across the streets. He burned an Aeviternum and willed the mystic bonds that had held the components together to flicker back into existence, channels of burning white light appearing between them, gathering them together, lifting them out of the rubble, so that the pieces rushed through the air toward him as he hit the apex of his leap in human form and formed beneath him just as he began to fall.

Jelly was there, laughing manically, unhinged. The Animus slotted into the recomposed Wing which sagged in the air under James’s weight and then throttled forward, picking up speed so violently that the front reared up, the back skidding and swerving from side to side before it settled and James cut a turn to head down the avenue, away from the Empire State whose burning hive had been utterly quenched and eradicated.

What the fuck are you doing?screamed Jelly. Where the fuck did you learn to do that?!

Figuring it out as I go, grinned James.

Ruby was causing his utterly depleted divine pool to regrow quickly. He’d only spent three Aeviternum out of his twenty and taken no damage. In a minute his divine pool would be utterly regenerated.

But all of Manhattan lay before him, with Jersey waiting just beyond. A dozen demon symbols, hundreds of thousands of demons, countless millions waiting to be saved.

James gripped the Wing’s handlebars so tightly the ivory and silver cracked. He willed the craft to fly faster, and with a roar began to drop Heavenly Assaults again, carpet bombing the city as he went with untrammeled glory and fury.

“Run, demon spawn!” he screamed as the demons saw him coming and turned to flee. “Run! Vengeance’s coming and it ain’t never gonna stop!

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