Amaranthine

“B-Money! Blender mode!” Cait commanded, shooting off through the charging cultists. Most of them really were, apparently, un-altered humans, given how 808lbs of superhero moving at-speed turned them into meat mist. The Tentacultists were the clear exception. Grasping appendages ripped at her with each step, and were it not for her friendly purple backpack she would have been quickly overwhelmed.

Instead, like a Dora the Explorer accessory straight out of a Clive Barker novel, Breastman whipped his own tentacles around Cait, shredding any of the pale imitations that threatened to actually slow her.

While Cait’s aggression was meet with screaming fury, she could swear those ripped apart by Breastman were letting out screams of an entirely different sort before they expired.

That’s not gonna be good for his mental state, she thought, in the same moment her head pulped a woman’s head on impact. She had to wipe an eyeball out of her peripheral vision. And that probably still shouldn’t be good for mine.

She pushed that to the back of her mind. Easily. Like she’d done dozens of times now.

Cait felt a pull that was both less and more than physical, like the air itself had grown heavy against her limbs. She slowed slightly, but whatever force was working on her seemed to just slide right off of her, like oil on water. There was a tap on her temple, and she followed the pointing tentacle that had done it to a man in a polo shirt and golf shorts who was chanting, complete with the same arcane hand gestures Willow was fond of.

“What,” Cait asked, blasting towards the presumed Wizard, “you can see magic now too?”

-WHO THE FUCK KNOWS ANYTHING ANYMORE-

“I know your mom is 5 bucks behind the gas station.”

-FUCK YOU-

Out of the corner of her eye, Cait noticed something that added a little urgency to her current murder target. While whatever ‘Hold’ spell this guy was working had slid off of her, Qi hadn’t been so lucky. She was frozen mid-swipe, scale armor already beginning to crack under the whipping blows of the Tentacultists that surrounded her. More of the same abominations surrounded the Wizard, wise enough to have already realized magic was their only real chance at taking down Draconic.

Worse, it looked like a locus of resistance was forming around Golf Shorts; a woman had joined him in the circle of Tentacultists, and judging from the way the wyrd monsters movements had become supernaturally jittery, seemed to be focusing her efforts on making them more dangerous.

Cait’s eyes flicked past them, where the rest of the mob was tearing towards the helpless caged hostages. She almost decided to run past the mages, trusting in Qi to be tough enough to last a while longer, when explosions began to scatter the surging tide of fanatic humanity.

Gwyn had taken advantage of the cult’s lack of air superiority to fly over the battlefield, sowing explosive bundles like seeds over the hostile crowd with relative impunity. Even when some managed to take up small arms to return fire, the buzzing barrier surrounding her simply sparked off each hit, unworried by any caliber less than anti-tank.

“Ha haaaaa! Die trash!” Cait could hear Gwyn taunt from across the room, “Tech beats god every fucking time!”

Jesus fuck, maybe I’m not the psychopath that needs worrying about, Cait thought, but felt as though their resident murder-nerd probably had the mundane crowd handled.

Cait turned her attention back to the Wizards, and remembered she was holding a gun.

Can’t be this easy right? She thought, shouldering Tamara and sending a snapshot towards the female spellcaster’s head. She was right; it wasn’t. Faster than her eye could follow, one of the enhanced Tentacultists whipped out an appendage, intercepting the bullet. It left a raw, black, mess in the purple flesh, but even that began to heal immdediately.

“Looks like we’re diving Midboss, B-Money, keep the tentacles off me, yeah?” she asked, already shifting her feet to push off. When a ‘thumbs up’ flashed in front of her, she pushed off.

Instantly, her path was blocked by a forest of tentacles. Even quickly shredded by Breastman, the sheer mass clotheslined her, sending her sliding along the floor towards the Wizards. She growled, cocking a fist back to pull herself upright and at Golf Shorts. His eyes went wide, and he stopped his chanting for a moment to hold his hands up in what looked like a Witcher sign. Her fist slid off a barrier in the air, invisible, but flashing on impact, and her momentum took her past him.

A roar, followed by a blast of heat and flickering orange light told Cait that the caster nearly being pulped had been more than enough to free Qi though, and she looked over to see the tides well and truly turned against the Tentacultists who had been beating on her with impunity. Those tentacles might regrow from a lot of injuries, but as Qi was fond of reminding her enemies, there were so very few things immune to dragon fire.

Still, if Golf Shorts had done it once, he could presumably do it again. Breastman was all-tentacles-on-deck in his efforts to keep a dozen Tentacultists off her back, so Cait was on her own dealing with this asshole. Another booming punch, once more glancing off his shield and answered by an infuriating smirk, told her this was going to be more logic puzzle than beatdown.

“The brawn of the physical world is nothing before the might of mana!” Golf Shorts yelled, which, dressed appropriately, might have sounded cool. Decked out entirely in Titleist and wraparound shades? Patently ridiculous.

“That what you told your wife when you found her ass-up under the country club’s Golf Pro?” Cait shot back, making what she thought was a safe assumption. Still, the guy was a little right. This wasn’t working.

That said, Cait had been a scientist. Just because she liked beating ass didn’t mean she was incapable of putting thought behind punches as well as power.

She threw a few more haymakers, making sure she couldn’t just overwhlem whatever magical aptitude this guy had. Unfortunately, it felt like she never hit solidly, always sliding off a cleverly angled wall, stealing the force from her strikes. So, instead of focusing on the shield, she focused on the man.

Each time she struck, he moved. Not in a dodge, not in a way that made any direct correlation to the way his shield kept deflecting her, just more of those arcane twitches all these mages seemed to do. He tried to make it look casual, but the tightness at his eyes, the bead of sweat at his temple, the fact he wasn’t even really focused on the pissed off angel of death beating down his door, all of that told her what he was doing took effort. Took focus.

She grinned, throwing another haymaker, then immediately stepping forward, slamming that foot into the ground with all the force her muscles and technology could muster.

It didn’t make an earthquake, she wasn’t Qi. But it did crack the stone, shake it just enough, that the man’s focus broke. That didn’t drop his shield, but it meant her follow up strike hit it dead on, and whatever magic powered it apparently did have limits. The air itself seemed to shatter around him, and finally his eyes focused on her, just before they were pushed out the back of his skull.

The witch empowering the Tentacultists was almost an after thought, Cait sprinting straight through her as she moved to help Gwyn thin out the ravening tide of cultists trying to complete their sacrifice. It was an uphill battle. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, more than Cait had seen coming in, she was sure of it. Looking around, she found more pouring in from side chambers, and wondered if they hadn’t stumbled upon a damn-near city sized operation here. Or if this was the only one.

It hardly mattered though. Most of these were normal people. Cait had probably killed a hundred already, with effort comparable to a light jog. Breastman had Taken even more, his breath starting to come in the weird drunken hiss that happened when he’d been fighting too long, been exposed to too much death.

Are we doing a war crime here? Like, what the fuck else am I supposed to do? These guys are going to kill our guys.

Another, more practical voice, niggled at the back of her mind.

How do the ‘sacrifices’ even work? Does every soul that ends up smeared across my fists count?

That point was more or less as moot as the first. The Dawn Posse was a lot of things, but non-lethal wasn’t one of them. Cait continued her rush through a sea of humanity, a river of red in her wake.

“Cait!” Gwyn yelled, swooping down over her. “This is insane! They aren’t stopping for shit!”

“Yeah, Christ, I thought videogames exaggerated death cults but it feels like they nailed the vibe of this one. Ideas?” Cait said, using the comms to be heard over the mass of screaming assailants.

“I think…. I don’t know Cait, I don’t think they’re stopping till they’re dead! This is a fucking massacre!”

Me neither. Shit.

“Then we fucking kill them all!” Cait snarled, throwing herself through another line of cultists, “Its rough, yeah, but this isn’t a cosplay doomsday cult, I think this is active effort towards the end of the world!”

“TOWARDS THE END OF ALLLLL THIIINGS!” Hat Man shrieked, voice on the knife’s edge of coherency as his tentacle limbs extended to send him high over the crowd, chasing down the charging duo. “HE COMES! HIS RAVENOUS SERAPH IS UPON YOUR VERY FLESH! DELAY THE HERETIC MY CHILDREN! YOUR SHEPHERD SHALL COMPLETE THE RITUAL”

It was immediately clear he cared roughly as much as Cait did about his followers lives. Each sinuous stride crushed a few, but in stark contrast to the screams of rage and pain they let out when Cait killed them, death from his tentacles was met with a burst of religious ecstasy that left them expiring with moans.

Fuck me, no, I’d already been hearing that. They’re doing it for B-Man too.