Chapter 30: Chapter 31: The Cobalt Immortals purge a house of hunters

Eight horned figures slip through a moonless night. They pull the shadows tighter around them, dull the iridescent glitters of cobalt surcoats and the silver glints of armor, annul the thump of their feet shod in star-osmium. We are oil, haze, the wraith’s talon cutting cold chill upon the backs of minds lost to uneasy dreams. Plate-encased tails drift soundless. Demon-crafted rail-rifles, bayonets fixed, murmur at the touch of slug-heavy magazines. Only we can hear the clack of charging handles.

Hunters, human and otherwise, often need to be hunted. Put back in their place. The brief command passed down claimed that after much consideration of reports from outside Machrae Diir, Immortal leadership has chosen to deploy us. They mention that the Lady on her nova throne offered input, and only input, that they'd have deployed us anyway.

But I? I know the truth. Command only says these things to maintain appearances. The Lady’s grown tired of their arrogance, tired of their creeping incursions into the liminal spaces, the outer places, where monsters like us have always made our homes. Furious at the tales of dolls and witchlings and other precious things murdered, maimed, and ensnared by fanatics with shallow minds. It’s time we purge these scum.

We are her irradiant claw descending on their throats.

We are the heel of her sabaton crashing through their skulls.

Tonight is the night when Maroj Fezzlen will gain the Lady's favor.

Credit where it's due, my claws only tremble a little in pulling the silvery tube forward to meet the twin-handle tube with its simple nozzle. The reticulated, serpentine channel rustles. Sounds no different from a gas station pump.

"You sure about this?" Sarge asks.

I consider the dingy brick hulk ahead. A lurking, shingled, moss-covered sentinel. A promontory of hideous mundanity. A boil festering in the shadow of the City’s Escherian skyscrapers, and the self-replicating urban blight of buildings that eat other buildings.

My brooding winds on far longer than tactically advisable. And even that, even that, is spite. Mortals, humans, especially humans, get to be angsty and inefficient. They get to fuck up over, and over, and over again and still win because the monster makes one mistake.

Let’s see if I’ve got the luck of a devil yet. I want to push it as far as it goes. I’m going to sit here and psyche myself up, giving them all the chances they could ever ask for to catch me off-guard. Let’s see if they’ll get that bullshit danger sense they always hand themselves in the tales they write to make themselves sound good.

They probably stole that idea from a demon, too.

This is the part where they're supposed to burst out and catch us--which is what we have a second squad on overwatch against--or their wards are supposed to stop us (they won't)--or I'm overcome by sudden compassion and can't do the job.

Why? Why should I feel sympathy for these invasive, gaslighting, two-timing parasites? Every time they come to us crying, begging pity. They go on and on about how much they need our power, how desperate they are for the joy of magic. But by the end they’re always saying we never did anything for them, really, they don’t need us, we’re lesser than them, we should just give them everything we have and get out of their way or they’ll kill us.

They’ll kill us anyway. That’s the whole sickening point. Make us dance and beg and squirm, make us cry and hold our hands out and scream for mercy, then kill us anyway.

They sit in their comfy homes in worlds where every little thing caters to their special little whims, and they make up stories about us to scare each other so they can prove how brave they are. And when they can no longer stand the fear they chose to fill themselves with it, when they can’t take the terror they taught themselves to associate with us, it’s always the same. They march into our homes, they hunt and kill and break our cousins and our own kind, and when we fight back they say that just proves we deserve it!

Everything they claim we do in fiction, they do to us literally. They kill real people because they get too scared of the stories they make up, and I’m supposed to feel sorry for them? I’m supposed to have compassion for how hard they have it? Fuck that!

Humans and their stories. It doesn’t matter how many times they write it. When they walk out of their fictions and enter our reality, they’ll always be the ones to die.

I’ll make sure of that.

A lot of hunters aren’t really human anymore. Those are the ones I hate the most. Traitors. Assimilationist dredge. Monsters degrading their own power as human, playing into the sick human need to be better than us at our own game, without ever admitting that they’re playing. At least their dissonance makes them easy to break.

Just have to know how to hit them where it hurts.

"We're not fucking doing this again." Serrated tones seep into my voice. I glance back at Sarge--his silvery atmosphere-sealed helmet with its bladed nose, his fluted armor, his blue coat, like mine. "A hundred goddamn years holding the line in Saingediir, while angels and mortals and rival demons kept trying to tear Machrae Diir apart before it was even born. A hundred years I watched them break her heart over, and over, and over. A hundred years they attacked her from the outside while Seurchraig attacked her in her own mind."

I'm like everyone else in the Immortals. I hate hurting people. But I hate it a hell of a lot less than I hate sitting on my thumbs waiting for them to hurt me. A hell of a lot less than I hate living in fear, wondering each day, "Is this the day they come for me?"

"You know what?" I quietly tweak knobs.

You are reading story Demon Queen of the Deep Ways at novel35.com

The Nova Gate opens a portal directly into the core of a star. It belches siphoned plasma from the far reaches of the cosmos. So of course, when opened at full power, it instantly vaporizes its targets. At full burst you’re firing a thermonuclear explosion in conical shape. Wiping whole kilometers away in front of you.

A skilled Immortal operator, with top-notch training in the deep power allowing us all at once to create localized time dilations, to speed our reflexes so far they have to be measured in nanoseconds, to shield ourselves and our comrades from the insane heat unleashed at the point of firing, can use the Nova Gate to reliably obliterate targets as small as fifty feet in length along the attack vector.

Surgical. Elegant. So instant it’s painless.

I don’t want surgical. I don’t want elegant. I don’t want painless. I want these filth to burn for what they’ve done.

Sarge reads the movements of my gauntlet-covered fingers, their dance on the switches. His breath hisses in his helm. "Maroj," he says, "don't do this to yourself."

"Relax, Sarge." I rise, smooth as mercury. "If I regret this more than I expect after the combat high, well.." Behind a sloping, faceted face-plate, the lips of a lust-devil remember that maybe not EVERY part of her hates hurting people. "Isn't that what the handmaidens are for?" And my trigger-finger curls inward. Oh, look: time’s up. No alarms sounded. No super-special human protagonists just happened to have a nightmare and wake up in time.

That’s okay. I love humans so, so much that I’m going to wake them up myself.

The Nova Gate opens. Langorous blue white fire belching forth, plasma streamers spraying out around the silvery nozzle, and the pyre-plume punches through the windows on the ground floor of the hunter hideout. It only takes two heartbeats for ghostly blues to illuminate the upstairs windows, and by the third, smoke’s pouring out.

The screaming starts pretty soon after.

Beautiful cobalt blazes pour from every window, licking at the eaves of the roof, caressing every writhing inch of the hunters inside. Eating their flailing marionette-figures while they scramble for weapons their melting eyes and pain-blind nerves can’t find, clinging and devouring even the ones who get an easy death when the armory somewhere deep in the house cooks off and mows down a dozen with shrapnel.

Stupid, vain, pathetic filth. They come for us in our lairs, we come for them in theirs!

I walk on at least four mines. So what? I’m a succubus of the ancient days. I can see through earth and rock and stone. I can seep into trigger mechanisms and disconnect them. Even if all four detonated, even if they could shred my star-osmium armor, even if they could sever the bonds of raw power that hold my form together and blow me apart, I’d just manifest anew and go right back to my joyous butchery.

I can read the auras imprinted on the grounds all about this sanctuary of vermin. Their own memories, sick and fattening with immunity's smug delusions, tell me the location, the function, the way to thwart every pathetic trap they thought safeguard their hateful sleep. Tripwires snap too soon, spike-pits open beneath my panther-paw feet right as I spread my wings and fly across.

I walk, one window to the next, always biting my lip as I widen my stance and drop the Nova Gate’s mirror-sheen barrel in line. Squeezing the trigger like a lover's hand. I want to make sure every single inch of this place, every nook and cranny where these insects could seek shelter, burns with sacred fire.

"Rise and shine, meat!" I scream. I am an open vessel expanding in size, an invisible sphere of my presence grown beyond my form so I can bask in the burning's torture. I burn with them, burn so deliciously that skin blisters under my armor, burn so fierce that my cum boils away every time I melt into orgasm with the wondrous tide of my charnel feast. "I'm right here! Come on and hunt me!"

Of course a few of them do muster a little spirit--the mad agonies of dying animals. Smashing out of windows, wreathed in fire, using some witch's stolen spellcraft to douse the flames. But that magic only makes the fire hotter. Only makes ME hotter, as the azure inferno devours those delirious prismatic streams, chars the arcane into black unlight.

"Oh, YES!" I cry. "Throw more fuel to Mother Haksaema's maw!"

I'm about to indulge in a little monologuing--the smell of burning flesh always makes me mouthy--but one of the adorable useless things rushes me with a collar studded in rainbow swirls. I take the opportunity to douse him, my power a silken vise snuffing the candle of his body. Third-degree burns don't do much to help his leg-stability: I easily kick him over. An arm-sweep knocks the collar out of his hands.

Time for a new plaything. My tail seizes the collar--

--and a shot rings out, splattering the snarling hunter's skinless, raw-fleshed skull.

"Command said no prisoners," Sarge says. "Only misery in living with fascists, Maj."

I shrug, sigh, and seek throats to slit.

You can find story with these keywords: Demon Queen of the Deep Ways, Read Demon Queen of the Deep Ways, Demon Queen of the Deep Ways novel, Demon Queen of the Deep Ways book, Demon Queen of the Deep Ways story, Demon Queen of the Deep Ways full, Demon Queen of the Deep Ways Latest Chapter