Gabriel
Chapter: 7
Gabriel
The first demon charged, black eyes gleaming like tar pits, swinging his claws like scythes, unnaturally flexible. I felt his intent before his foot hit the ground. His claws arced through the air toward me fast. Cipher showed it to me, his predatory joy spiking just before the swing.
Tearing out the needle, I dashed aside. The blade missed my shoulder by a hair, feeling the gust of wind his swing generated pass over my head. My footing was shaky, but I backpedaled, keeping my distance. I regained my balance once again. I couldn't afford a direct hit. The demon eyed me down.
Then—
ROAR.
He came fast. Brutal. With terrifying speed, the yellow-eyed demon rammed with terrifying speed. I couldn't feel him until the last second. I turned, eyes wide. But it was too late.
The yellow-eyed demon's shoulder slammed into me like a battering ram, lifting me clean off the ground, knocking the wind out of me. I crashed into a glass railing with a deafening shatter and plummeted to the floor below, shards slicing into my arms and side. If it weren't for my Overdrive, my insides would have been crushed instantly. Gasping hard, my vision blurred, but I had to keep moving.
I rolled with Overdrive, staggering me up, because Cipher warned me again. "Fire."
BLAM! A shotgun was fired at me, but I barely dodged it.
The shell missed, barely, but the next one didn't
BLAM! Again, the gun fired, and pain exploded through my left shoulder as a stray bullet tore my flesh. "Tch!" I staggered. But other than that, I was fine. I needed to move. I took off running through the mall, imbuing Overdrive into my leg. One of the demons took off after me.
I turned and sprinted into the corridor of the shops, Cipher showing me the echoes of their thoughts like a sonar pulse—Chase after it, waist, Corner.
They were communicating in demonic words, but I understood every intent. The leader stayed behind, calmly reloading, while the others scattered to cut me off,
I glanced over my shoulder and saw the formation.
Shotgun. Sickle and claws. The bull has nothing. Does he not need a weapon?
I skidded into a wrecked souvenir shop, glass crunching under my feet. One of the black-eyed ones rounded the corner, fast. Too fast.
But I knew he tried to go for my waist, but I threw the pouch of salt into his face.
He screamed as if I'd thrown acid. The grains sizzled against his skin, smoke rising from the contact. He clawed at his face, blinded.
The Cipher fed me his panic, which made me grin a little.
I lunged. Overdrive surged through my legs and the metal rod. I stabbed the long metal bar into his throat with all the momentum I had. The screech that followed turned into black ash within seconds.
Three left.
Another shell exploded into the wall past me. I dove right, but I still ended up with three bullet holes in my arm. I screamed. My left arm is useless now. landing on my wounded shoulder. The pain was white-hot, but I couldn't stop.
The second black-eyed demon came at me hard, claws spinning. I ducked under one swing, then another, but his foot swept under me— Thud. My back hit the floor.
I rolled fast and shoved upward, scrambling toward another store window. This time, a clothing outlet. As I crashed inside, the demon followed, snarling with every step. I weaved through shelves of jackets and mannequins, using Overdrive to propel myself faster than he expected.
I slammed into a shelf and sent it flying towards him.
He didn't see it coming,
The rack flew into him like a battering ram, sending him flying back out of the store.
But then the shelf… redirected back at me?
I jumped over the shelf to see the yellow-eyed one, not running. Just moving.
The floor cracked as he stomped in and leaped toward me. His form eclipsed the ceiling lights. I threw myself aside. Barely escaping the downward smash. He landed like a meteor. Boom
Dust and rubble flew. I coughed, vision shaking.
Enough.
I shot forward, Overdrive in my legs, and kicked the yellow-eyed demon in the ribs.
Nothing. He didn't even flinch.
He grabbed me, arms like steel, and lifted me off the floor. Then threw me through the display window and into the concrete column outside. Still, with Overdrive protecting me, I felt something crack in my back. Blood in my mouth.
Still… I stood.
He charged at me, I tore my jacket off and threw it at his face, ducked to his side, and jabbed a metal bar into him with Overdrive. Direct hit to his ribs. It sank in deep, but he smiled. He kept moving, faster. dragging the embedded bar with him, and dragging me, clinging to the weapon, half pinned.
Why is he getting faster? What are you? Some law of the universe? Am I not strong enough!?
I let go of the bar so I wouldn't get dragged through another wall.
I rolled away and gasped. Emphatic Cipher warned me of the brute's thought patterns. They were linear, obsessive. His mind didn't understand "Stop." It only understood forward. An idea made flesh, the very concept of unstoppable.
He's not just strong. He's inevitably
That's when the leader entered the fray.
He aimed and fired again, but I sprang with Overdrive just in time. But still, he was getting more accurate.
He shot again. I had to forcefully stop myself just so I wouldn't get hit. Pain shoots up my leg like something alive, gnawing its way into my spine. I catch myself on instinct—barely—and the world tilts sideways. I still couldn't stop.
Imbuing my legs with Overdrive once more, I dashed toward the ruby-eyed leader once more. I saw myself looking down his two barrels. I dodged his gun; he attempted to slam me with the butt of his gun, but with Overdrive, I disarmed him.
He grinned even more. Emphatic Cipher warned me just before he moved. Satisfaction. Cipher Buzzed "Jaw." He caught me off guard; I couldn't react in time. His fist crashed into my jaw. My vision went black for a second. I stumbled, dashed, then ducked the next, barely.
Bolting around, we began to trade blows. His fists were tingling with demon energy. glowing ruby red, the color of his demonic energy. His movements kept getting faster, they were practiced, leaving trails and after images. Surgical. But mine were wild, reactive, driven by the instinct and Foreseen glimpses into his intent.
Claws came at my throat from behind, ducked. A sound of a different gun, a pistol,
Six shots evaded.
Another brute charge vaulted over a broken bench.
My arm bled. My shoulder was barely usable. My legs ached. But I kept dodging. Not because I was a genius, but because my Cipher let me know when and where they were going to attack.
My nose started to drip blood, not because of injury, but because I was too low on spirit energy.
Already!?
Still, I dashed back at the leader, dodging the rest of his bullets. I confronted him and tore the gun from him once again.
My ankle nearly gave out beneath me every time I shifted my weight.
The strain had turned it into a burning knot of instability, a joint that no longer trusted me. Every step across the broken street sent a jagged pulse up my leg and through the broken architecture of my ribs. I could feel each fractured breath scraping inside my chest. Three bullet holes in one arm, glass cuts scattered across my skin like a thousand tiny punishments, blood drying cold along my forearms and jaw.
Still, I kept moving.
The ruby-eyed demon came at me again, huge and fast, all crooked shoulders and violent hands. With the shotgun stripped from him in the chaos, he fought like a beast that had decided its own body was now the weapon. His fists came down like mallets. I slipped one, ducked under another, and took a glancing blow across the shoulder that nearly folded me into the ground.
I hissed through my teeth and drove an elbow into the demon's side.
"Come on…" I rasped, stepping in despite my ankle buckling under me. "You're getting predictable."
The impact landed hard enough to make the ruby-eyed demon twist, and I followed it with a sharp, brutal punch to the nose, then another to the jaw. My knuckles cracked against his face. Emphatic Cipher fed me the shape of the next attack before it happened, the micro-tension in the shoulders, the pull in the hips, the intent behind the movement. I could read them almost before they committed.
The unstoppable demon lunged in from my blind side, and I pivoted just enough to avoid the full impact. The lesser demon rushed in behind him, trying to catch me between them, but my body moved before fear could. I ducked, stepped, and slammed a short hook into the lesser demon's ribs, then snapped back out of range before the next strike could land.
Every dodge cost me, and every answer cost me more. And the ruby-eyed demon was getting faster.
I could feel it in the way the demon's movements sharpened, in the growing cruelty of his rhythm. The more he enjoyed the fight, the more impossible he became. He was smiling now. Not with his mouth. With everything else. With his posture, his timing, and his confidence.
He wanted this.
That made me hate him even more.
The ruby-eyed demon swung a heavy right. I dipped low, pain exploding through my ribs, and answered with a quick back kick that drove my heel into the demon's abdomen. The creature recoiled, skidding back across shattered pavement.
For one fraction of a second, I thought I had space.
Then the ruby-eyed demon vanished.
He reappeared beneath me with a sudden, violent snap of motion, hands already reaching for my injured leg, fingers clawed and greedy, trying to seize my ankle and rip my limb apart with a single brutal wrench.
My eyes widened.
"Yeah…" I wheezed. "Not happening."
I saw it coming through Empathic Cipher before the demon even fully moved, and I yanked my leg away at the last instant, stumbling hard to the side as claws scraped air where bone should have been.
My breathing turned ragged. My heart was battering his ribs like it was trying to escape.
Enough.
If that hit—
No. Don't think about it.
I plant my foot, grit my teeth, and pour everything into one point.
I drew in what little spiritual energy I had left and forced Overdrive to swell through my body. The pressure of it made my vision flare. The force gathered in my fist, dense and heavy, threatening to tear my arm apart if I pushed any farther.
The ruby-eyed demon felt it.
He jerked back, lips curling as it spat out a harsh string of demonic syllables, thick and guttural.
"Duverroietee beutte…"
Meaning "Presa podrida."
Meaning "Rotten prey."
He jumped away from my range, wary for the first time.
My mouth twisted.
"Eat dirt."
I scooped a fistful of rubble from the street and launched myself forward with Overdrive, my damaged body driven by raw force and fury alone. The ground seemed to snap backward beneath me as I closed the distance in a burst of violent momentum.
Then I drove his fist straight into the demon's face.
The dirt exploded across his mouth and eyes. His head bent back at an absurd angle, the force of the hit distorting his upper body, but he did not fly away. He held his ground.
That was worse somehow.
The ruby-eyed demon's hand shot out and clamped around Gabriel's arm.
Not hard at first. Almost gentle.
Then the grip tightened.
"…Got you."
The demon rose slowly. He pulled himself upright, bones realigning with soft, sickening clicks, dragging me with him, as if savoring the helplessness of the moment. His expression was unreadable, but his eyes were bright with calculation.
A dark structure erupts around us—stone, iron, something ancient and wrong—and before I can react, I'm thrown backward into it.
Cold and pressure slammed into me from every side. The world around us warped, the street bending into a choking chamber of spiritual distortion. I was driven down to one knee, then forced onto the ground as the crucible compressed the space between us.
The unstoppable demon and the lesser demon started immediately, rushing me while I was down.
But then the ruby-eyed demon lifted one hand.
They stopped.
Silence.
Even the demons' breathing seemed to vanish.
The ruby-eyed demon turned his head slightly, not looking at the others so much as commanding the air itself. Then, in perfect English, clear enough for me to hear every word, he said:
"He is elusive. We lack time."
A pause.
"…Go after his familiars instead."
The words struck me harder than the crucible.
Because of what the demon said.
Because of how calmly he said it.
My eyes widened in panic.
"No—"
This was not mercy. This was a choice.
The ruby-eyed demon was already turning away, one hand sweeping through the air as if summoning something from the cracks between worlds. A shotgun formed in its grasp, black-metal and cruel, with a bayonet fixed beneath the barrel like a promise. He moved with deliberate speed, as if he had already finished with me and was now merely cleaning up the remains of the encounter.
"No—no, no, no, no,no-pleasee—"
The demon swiped the shotgun through the air.
The crucible split.
A thin rip of distorted light tore open in the chamber, enough to make the world beyond visible for an instant. I saw the broken street. Saw the firelight. Saw the battlefield stretching away in fragments.
And on the ground near the edge of the tear—
One of the ruby-eyed demon's pistols.
I lunged for it.
My injured body screamed in protest. I nearly fell flat, caught myself on one hand, then dragged myself forward on one knee, teeth bared, blood in my mouth.
I snatched the pistol, turned, and screamed at them with everything left in myself.
"TOUCH THEM, AND I SWEAR TO GOD I'LL KILL YOU!"
Then I fired.
Four shots cracked out in rapid succession.
The bullets punched into the demons with visible force, holes tearing through flesh and shadow.
And yet they kept moving.
My heart lurched. For one terrified second, I thought I had missed.
He fired again anyway.
Click.
Empty.
"I SAID STOP—!"
The crucible rip widened as the demons began to withdraw. I roared in frustration and shoved the last of my Overdrive through my body, forcing it beyond what my spiritual energy should have allowed. Pain detonated through my chest. I coughed up blood. My jaw locked so hard my gums split and started to bleed.
"NO… NO, NO, NO—"
No. Not like this.
I threw myself forward one last time, aiming for the ruby-eyed demon's head.
I was so close.
So close that I could see the shape of his eye, the faint reflection of my own fury inside it.
Then the unstoppable demon stepped in front of my path like a wall born of pure malice and slammed a fist into my abdomen.
The impact erased the air from my lungs.
I was launched backward in a sickening arc and smashed into a stair rail with enough force to make my spine feel like it was trying to fold in on itself. Only Overdrive kept me from breaking completely. Without it, I knew my back would have shattered.
I slumped against the metal, one arm hanging uselessly, breath coming in thin, wet gasps.
The demons stepped through the rip.
The ruby-eyed demon turned once before leaving, his shotgun still held at his side like a ceremonial blade.
I reached out after them, fingers shaking, rage and disbelief and terror all knotted together in my throat.
The rip in the crucible sealed shut.
The street went still again.
Too still.
I tried to stand, failed, and nearly vomited from the force of the pain rippling through my body. The world tilted around me. My ribs burned. My ankle throbbed. My arm felt distant and wrong.
"DON'T TOUCH THEM—!"
The ruby-eyed demon's voice drifted back from the other side of the closing tear, calm as a verdict.
"Until we meet again."
Then they were gone.