Amaranthine

“Where the fuck did they get all of them?” Cait asked, eyes flicking between the faces of the caged people as Gwyn panned the feed across them.

“Wait,” Qi said, “Go back… yeah, right there, zoom in,” she ordered, tapping one enormous claw on the display, and letting out a guilty sigh. “I think I know.”

It took a moment for Cait’s mind to connect the same dots Qi’s had. The woman she’d had Gwyn zoom in on was in rough shape. Fully half of her clothing had been burned away, and the skin on that side looked boiled at best, charred at worst. Her other side was better, but perhaps only visually: her good arm was pressed against three horizontal gashes in her side.

Either of those clues alone wouldn’t have been enough for Cait, but put them together, and she reached the same conclusion she was certain Qi just had.

“The Silvers,” she whispered, meeting the dragon’s ruby eyes as she nodded gravely. “Fuck! I thought all the civilians got killed by the rest of the horde! This is… well, not worse since we’re here, but a damn close thing.”

The feed jostled as someone walked past the microscopic camera, wrenching open the iron gate of the cage it was focused on. A man scanned the inhabitants, seemed to waffle between the woman they’d been looking at and another person in nearly as bad shape as she was, before finally deciding on her and starting to drag her out of the cage. It took two tries: the skin on her burnt arm sloughed right off when he tried to grab it the first time.

“Okay, people,” Cait said, hearing a hard edge creep into her voice at the casual cruelty, “those hostages put us on a timeline and bind our hands a bit. Plus… I mean, fuck, we probably shouldn’t just go in and kill a bunch of regular people and kids, right?”

“Right,” Gwyn answered for everyone, the question of why it had even been a question for Cait in the first place clear in her tone.

“So, ideas? I’d bet my entire ass they’re taking that woman to be sacrificed, and the empty cage implies she’s not the first,” Cait said, wishing with all she was that Kennedy or Swan were here. They were much better with tactics.

“You will have to go first, whatever we do,” Willow said, eyes locked on the door, or more accurately the stone around it. “That door is cursed to hell and back, Wave magic, not something I’d be remotely comfortable trying to decrypt, much less disarm.”

“Well yeah, I was gonna do that anyway,” Cait said. Except in very specific situations, her being the tip of the spear was just the way things were going to be.

“I will shield the rest of us, and follow you in,” Willow said before beginning her cryptic muttering, a ghostly bubble covering the group. Breastman wiggled pathetically as Cait peeled him off of her back, tossing him to Gwyn.

“Sorry bud, don’t want you to get caught in some Harry Potter ass trap,” she explained. The little guy gave her a thumbs up. “Jump back on me soon as Willow gives the all clear.”

“Cait, hold up,” Gwyn ordered, twin clouds flowing out of her lab coat to Cait’s hands. They began to coalesce, 3D printing themselves midair into an enormous assault rifle, straight out of DOOM. The barrel alone could have accommodated Cait as well as any of her girlfriends, and the sci-fi bullshit Gwyn had slapped all over it made the thing immense and intimidating.

“Fuuuuuuck yes,” Cait breathed, hefting the weapon. She shouldered it, finding a sight that adjusted itself to align perfectly with her eye.

“Right?” Gwyn said with pride, “Been working on it for awhile. Eventually I want it to be summonable for you, but for now, it’ll just be a big ass gun. Remember what Kennedy said?”

“My fists might be the most dangerous thing about me, but there’s just something about staring down a barrel,” Cait paraphrased, running a finger along the smooth shroud of the barrel. White chrome with purple highlights, it even matched her color scheme.

“Exactly,” Gwyn said. “Don’t think it’ll do any magic, its still just a gun, but might help with getting those people to listen up.”

Cait couldn’t resist striking a pose with the gun, then hitting her friends with an eyebrow wiggle that met varying degrees of appreciation. She let her face fall, turned to the door, leaned back, and kicked it off its goddamn hinges.

As she strode through, she got a chill feeling, like ice water over her shoulders and down her spine, followed by an angry fizz from Willow’s barrier.

“Kurwa,” Cait heard the witch hiss, “Cyka should be a frosty skeleton after that,” then she sighed, and continued; “but I should stop being surprised.”

Cait let that pass without comment, slamming a foot into the stone hard enough to create an indoor pothole and unleashing a sustained burst from Tamara (she’d already named the gun) into the ceiling.

“Listen the fuck up cultists!” she shouted into a sea of stunned faces, “I’m Amaranthine, and the Dawn Posse is about a second behind me. You are operating in defiance of… fuckin’, common decency I guess. Get on the fucking ground and surrender your hostages!”

For a moment, it looked like it might’ve worked. Most of the plainclothes cultists did hit the ground, hands behind their heads like they’d done it before. Even a few of the robed cultists dropped to their knees, clearly confused. One, taller than the rest, or at least looking like it in his massive pointed hat, unfortunately decided to laugh.

“Common decency has no business in a consumed reality!” he chuckled, intonation the same condescending cult-special she’d had just about e-fucking-nough of with the Bookkeeper. She trained Tamara on him, making sure her face read as unimpressed when she pulled the trigger and lit him the fuck up.

It didn’t have the effect she’d hoped. Cait had gambled that one good example, plucked from the upper ranks of a cult that dealt with live sacrifices, might serve to cow the lower ranks. As the bullets tore away his robes, she understood that had likely always been a pipe dream.

Sickly pale skin adorned the parts of his body that could still be classified as human, but that was maybe 50% of what was left of him, his torso mostly. His extremeties were, unfortunately, very familiar. Thick, muscular tentacles thrashed in pain as bullets ripped through them, but the holes they left closed up nearly as fast as they were made. Cait could tell it hurt, but it sure as hell hadn’t killed him.

His eyes went wide with rage, then his mouth went wider, far wider than it could have with normal anatomy, revealing a miniature version of Breastman’s maw where the entrance to his throat should be. That maw shook as it released a bone-chilling shriek, and the rest of the robed cultists exploded into motion.

When you were holding a gun, the immediate instinct was to start shooting the monsters, a category the disrobed cultists charging her definitely fell in to. However, she resisted that urge. It hadn’t worked on the Hat Man, good odds it wouldn’t work on these either. Instead, she trusted in her invulnerability, and lined up her sights on two human cultists who had grabbed weapons and were sprinting back towards the sacrifice cages.

The sights Gwyn had slapped on this thing were amazing. The aligned themselves to Cait’s shifting grip, automatically focusing in on the back of a man with a wicked looking ceremonial knife. Cait’s short burst cut him nearly in half, raising the standing of Tamara in her estimation; Lovecraftian horrors probably hadn’t been a fair benchmark. She quickly sighted in on the other runner, keenly aware of the eldritch human monstrostities approaching in her peripheral vision, and popped his lid with a single shot. Some hostages got sprayed with bits of brain and boy, but at least one cheered, so it seemed like a net win.

She did not have time to get the gun down, or react at all, before the first Tentacultist slammed a wriggling appendage into her stomach, blasting her back into the wall. Cait snarled, angling Tamara’s barrel down to put a chainsaw burst through the tentacle, dropping with it to the ground before shooting herself forward and putting a fist into his lamprey maw and through the back of his head. She breathed a sigh of relief as she pulled it back out, and he slid off of her hand, dead.

Phew. Not as hard to kill as B-man, then.

Speaking of the home-team horror, a shriek that put the Hat Man’s to shame erupted from the doorway, and a whole lot of cuddly chaos pulled its way through the entrance, flailing wildly. Cait whistled, and he immediately whipped a tentacle to her, regaining pride of place on her back, splaying out his tentacles around her like an eldritch Shiva.

They both readied themselves, the adrenaline of the beginning of a fight not letting them process that everyone in the room had frozen once more at the dynamic entrance of BREAST MAN. Cait flicked her eyes to their opponents, stock still where they stood in the process of surrounding her, to Qi, who had stopped mid-roar as she pulled herself through the too-small doorway, now looking more confused than wrathful.

Hat Man, as was apparently his wont, was the one who broke the silence.

“One of His Ravenous Seraphs!” he shrieked, voice cracking like a teenager in surprise and what seemed like orgasmic exultation, “Brothers! Sisters! The Fall is here! Riiiise with me! COMPLETE THE RITUAL!!!”

As one, the ‘well behaved’ cultists seemed to abandon their good sense, rising from their positions on the floor, some to poses of supplication, but more to grab what weapons they could. Like a human tide split by Moses, half rushed the heroes, while the rest sprinted wildly for the cages.