Chapter 6: The Main Course
They hit like water — everywhere at once, finding every gap.
Kiri moved. She managed to dodge a few hits, but far more had made it past her guard and been absorbed by the conversion field in her heirloom signet ring. I’d be dead if not for that, she thought as she brought up her pistol and fired. Once again, the super-heated blast narrowly missed a daemon. Throne they were fast.
Faster than anything she'd fought, their movements liquid and wrong. The one she missed came at her, grinning at her with too many teeth.
She dodged by instinct, felt the displacement of air as the daemon’s claw cut through where her head had been.
Seraya had waded into the center of them like she'd been waiting for exactly this her entire life.
It was something to watch, even from the middle of a fight. Kiri had seen her psyker fight before — knew she was formidable — but this was different. Her skin had taken on a quality that Kiri's eyes kept trying to categorize and couldn't quite: not stone, not metal, but something between them, something that absorbed the daemonettes' claws with a sound like impact on ferrocrete. She moved through hits that should have staggered her, her staff blazing and crackling and coming around in arcs that each time it connected with one of the creatures produced a sound like the warp itself objecting.
Three of them went down in the time it took Kiri to drop one.
Glume worked the flank methodically, power sword humming, taking more hits than Seraya and feeling each of them — he didn't have her stone skin — but absorbing them anyway with the specific stubbornness of someone built to absorb things. He killed one. It took a while.
Gen circled at the edge of the fight, hot-shot laspistol raised, looking for shots that wouldn't go through a teammate. Most of them didn't materialize. The fight was too close, too fast, too tangled together.
Something hit Kiri.
She didn't see it. Just felt the impact across her ribs like a cracking sound that she registered before she registered the pain — and then the pain hit, sharp and immediate, and she went sideways into a pillar, one hand catching herself, the other keeping the inferno pistol up.
Move. She moved.
The daemonette that had caught her was still coming. She burned a hole through its chest from close range and didn't stop to watch it fall.
Suddenly out of the corner of her eye a daemon she hadn’t noticed was on her. She pushed herself to the right and brought up her pistol, but she wasn’t fast enough. Then the claw was past where the conversion field in her signet ring would have reflected it.
The claw streaked towards her heart, and she was at its mercy.
Emperor forgive me, she thought. The three-word prayer the only thing she had time for.
And then she was flying backwards, the wind knocked out of her. Instead of skewering her, the claw had landed with the force of a blunt hammer. The daemon’s large eyes opened even wider. It was as surprised as she was.
She managed to keep her feet, her chest aching. Just then, one of the conversion fields discharged — she didn't know whose, just knew the light was suddenly total and blinding, the entire chamber erased in a flat white that lasted three seconds and felt like three minutes. She felt something pass close. Heard Glume curse somewhere to her left. Fired into the white toward where a daemonette had been, heard a distant impact. Another miss.
Her vision came back.
They came for Kiri twice more in quick succession. She dodged the first by dropping under it — ribs screaming at the movement, her breath catching — and the second she didn't dodge cleanly, took a glancing blow across the shoulder that spun her half around and left her arm momentarily numb.
“Havelock.” Seraya's voice, flat and close. Her staff swept over Kiri's head and connected with something behind her. The sound of impact. Something dropping.
Kiri found her footing. “I'm fine.”
Seraya was already moving again, already somewhere else, already killing something.
Then Kael moved.
He'd been watching from his altar the whole time — patient, almost amused — but something had shifted in his expression as they'd thinned his creatures down. He came off the altar without hurrying and walked straight toward Seraya.
She met him without hesitation. Her staff had been blazing since they'd crossed the membrane — the power she carried visible in the air around her, crackling and present — and she brought it around hard. It connected. Kael staggered.
And something in his face changed in a way that had nothing to do with pain.
The shape of him split.
Not broke — split. The human shape began to come apart, folding back from the inside, like a husk splitting to let out whatever had been using it. What unfolded out of him was larger. Much larger. Multiple arms. Horns. A great blade that appeared in its grip as though it had always been there waiting.
Glume looked up at what Kael had become. His expression went through several things quickly and settled somewhere near readiness.
“Well,” he said. “That's new.”
Seraya was already swinging.
She hit it twice in quick succession — her staff cracking against the daemon's weapons both times, but the blows were glancing and daemon Kael just laughed.
He swung back with his claw and she dodged to the side. With a yell, he stepped forward and swung his giant sword. She stepped inside his guard, brought her staff up into his leading arm from underneath — a crack that echoed off the crystal walls — and the arm dropped slightly, something structural giving in it. It shrieked in rage.
Kiri aimed down her inferno pistol at Kael and pulled the trigger, just as a sixth sense warned her that she was in trouble. She jerked her hand back just as a daemonette's over-sized pincer swung through where her wrist had been, her shot careening off the ceiling.
She immediately dove to the right as a daemonette attacked her, and her chest lit with fire. She was back up immediately, the daemonette pausing momentarily to lick her blood off its claws. She looked down and saw sharp gashes through her armour. Her life leaking out.
Kiri caught a glimpse of Seraya: holding the center of the chamber, hammering at the daemon, refusing to give ground.
And Glume to her left, doing what he'd been doing since the daemon appeared — keeping the daemonettes off Seraya's flank, his power sword carving through anything that got too close. Two of them rushed him at once — not coordinated, just opportunistic — and the first got through his guard and the second was already there before he could reset. He went into the wall. Came back off it. His left arm hung wrong, the elbow at an angle it hadn't been before. He looked at it. Looked at the door.
He swung his sword in large sweeping arcs and as the daemonettes recoiled, he pulled back to Gen.
She was already rummaging through her medikit for what she had left, hands moving before he'd finished crossing the floor.
“Door,” Glume said quietly while she worked. “All of us. Now.” He grimaced as Gen shoved something into his skin. “Come back prepared.”
Gen said nothing. She kept working.
“Kiri, Seraya,” he yelled. “We should retreat!”
The daemonette facing her looked over at Glume. Kiri took the opportunity and fired off a quick shot at Kael. It missed.
But it did get the daemonette’s attention back. Plus the attention of the two that had been attacking Glume.
They were fast. She managed to ward one off with a quick shot, but the other came at her from the side. She dropped under the swing and came up firing and missed — the beam scorching stone — and then it was on her and she was moving, circling, and firing.
And then she was sideways on the ground. Her head exploded in pain and her vision was sheeted red. She tried to get up. She couldn't.
There was screaming. Hers.
“Kiri!” Seraya’s voice.
Something warm and immediate flooded through her, like being pulled back from a very long drop. She got her hands under her and pushed herself up. Wiped the blood off her face. Seraya was five feet away, staff in one hand, the other extended toward her. “Thank you,” Kiri said, glancing back to the daemon over Seraya’s shoulder.
The daemon who had noticed the opening.
The great blade came down on Seraya while she was still turned away and she went down hard, blood spraying everywhere. It sheeted across Kiri.
“Seraya!” Kiri yelled. She tried to rush to her but a daemonette stepped in between them. It moved like something designed to be looked at — long limbs, a face that the eye wanted to linger on even now, even here, one arm ending in a claw that was still wet with blood. Kiri grimaced. She wanted to look away. Couldn’t.
“Retreat,” Glume called again, louder. “Now — “
“No,” Seraya croaked, from the floor. Her staff arm was shaking as she tried to lever herself up. Kiri didn’t even bother to respond. They were nearly spent, nearly done, but they could yet snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
Gen was already running.
She crossed the floor and knelt beside Seraya and her hands moved with the precision of someone who had trained exactly for this, and she worked fast enough that Kiri didn't have time to think about what it would mean if it wasn't fast enough.
The daemonettes were circling Kiri, laughing. Every time she brought up the pistol one of them danced back out of the line of fire while the others drifted closer. They were toying with her. A part of her wanted to let them.
“Not yet,” she said.
Kiri let them circle her. Let them think she was still tracking the nearest one. Then she looked past all of them, directly at Kael, aimed, and pulled the trigger.
The beam hit. The daemon staggered — really staggered, the great blade drooping, something finally going out of it. A hole had been punched clear through its shoulder.
The daemonettes stopped laughing. They started hissing.
For the first time since entering the chamber, Kiri let herself believe they might actually survive.
Glume was already moving.
He crossed the chamber at a run and hit the daemon like a man who has decided that distance and pain are both someone else's problem. His ruined arm trailed behind him while he used his other to stab with the power sword. No swing, no arc — just a direct thrust with everything behind it, straight up through the hole Kiri’s shot had left in its shoulder, up into the neck and skull.
The daemon folding around the sword as it went deeper, until the tip found something vital and the shriek that came out of it was unlike anything that should exist in realspace.
The daemon stood for a moment that lasted too long.
Then the shape of it came apart — not collapsed, not fell, just ceased, like a word forgotten mid-sentence.
Every daemonette in the chamber vanished between one heartbeat and the next.
Kiri collapsed to the ground, her breath coming in ragged gasps.
Blood. She was covered in her blood.
But she was alive.
Kiri looked up – Gen was helping Seraya to her feet.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Gen said.
Kiri took in a deep breath and stumbled to her feet.
She nodded at Gen. “Get her out of here. We’ll be right with you.”
Holstering her pistol, she turned towards Glume. “You still have those demolition charges on you?”
On the flight back, somewhere over the dark gap between the warehouse and the ship, Kiri finally had a moment to sit still.
She felt … wrong. Unclean. She’d washed her hands, but somehow she still felt dirty.
What would Saint Alicia Dominica say about this? She thought.
Kiri reached into her coat and pulled the Litany of Sacrifice from its pocket over her heart. Her fingers traced a long gouge across its cover. Leather split clean through, deep enough that two fingers fit into the groove. That was new.
She turned it over. Stared at it for a long moment.
“I guess this means she already had her say,” Kiri muttered. She slid the book into the pocket over her heart, leaned back, and closed her eyes.