Apocalypse Cultivation 2, ch 22

Jake was in an incredibly bad mood when he rode the clay bat back to the schools.  The fact the boombox was playing “Dance Monkey” now, and he hated that song, was not helping matters.  He didn’t bother turning the boom box off, though.  It felt appropriate to be blasting music that made him want to stick sharpened pencils in his ear holes.

Blood steadily dripped from his elbow.  His burns hurt like hell.  Every time he cycled his cultivation base, his meridians burned.  He hadn’t done any irreparable damage, but it made everything hurt to generate any power, even his soul.

From the air, he could see that most of the attacking monsters had been wiped out now.  Enough of them were still attacking the school that the defenders couldn’t take a break just yet, but the worst seemed to be over.

He turned down the music and was about ready to go in and help the defenders when he saw something odd that jogged a memory.  With a frown, Jake went to investigate.  Down below were a few vans.  Their lights were off, but Jake could sense a driver in all of them.  One of them had a lot of people in the back.

And again, something about them was making him remember something that happened in Macon.  He’d glimpsed a number of vans back then that had been used by the cultists.  These looked similar.

As he got closer to the vans, his suspicions seemed to have merit.  One van drove away, lights off.  There were two vans left.  As Jake watched, some black-clad figures came out of the school, carrying sheet-wrapped figures.  They began loading them in the back of the van like firewood, but Jake couldn’t see any blood stains and one of the figures was clearly breathing.

God dammit, he thought.  His face screwed up in a deeper scowl.  He was going to have to get involved.  At least I should have enough vampire cores now,he thought.  Yeah, he had to get involved.  There was no way he was going to go through so much effort to help the people at the school only to let the fuckery he was seeing play out.  Not only that, he’d just gotten a good look at some of the sheet-wrapped bundles, and all of them were too small to be adults.

Fuck, thought Jake.  Fuck fuck fuck.

He briefly wondered how in the hell these assholes had gotten right up to the school to steal people out from under the defenders’ noses.  Jake concentrated and changed his vision in the way he’d learned when he was a mage.  Surprisingly, Veil Piercing Phoenix Eyes actually helped, making Jake’s magical senses sharper than they’d ever been before.

Jake hadn’t know that anything related to cultivation could help magic.  Wild.

In moments, he had his answer.  The vans had a glamor.  Jake could see them just fine because, quite simply, he was far too powerful for such a simple spell to work on him.  He hid in the shadows, following the black-clothed figures unseen as they went back into the school.

Jake briefly thought about just breaking the spells, but decided against it.  The defenders were still fighting and all sorts of keyed up on adrenaline.  If they suddenly saw intruders, they might just shoot.  There were kids in the vans and who knew what the assholes skulking around the school would do.

He followed the intruders long enough to make sure he was right about what they were doing.  All the innocent people in the school were fast asleep, dropped wherever they’d been and whatever they’d been doing when the spell hit.  The intruders were abducting them.

After verifying that they were bad guys, Jake started to kill them.  He came out of the shadows and pulled one of them, a heavyset man, into a closet.  The closet was cramped but Jake would make do.  He kept one hand over the man’s mouth so he couldn’t make a sound.  Then in one smooth motion, Jake sammed his claw through the man’s throat and all the way up into his brain.

Killing regular people, especially on Earth, was really easy now.  It was kind of disturbing to think about, so Jake decided not to think about it.  Some problems had simple solutions.

The spell inside the school limited all noise, so the other intruder talking up ahead sounded like murmuring.  Defenders outside continuing to fire at monsters sounded like someone rolling dice at the other end of a room.  Their shots were slowing down, now.  Either they were about to run out of ammo, or they’d won the night.  Maybe both.

Jake killed another lone intruder moved down the hallway, following where the others had gone.  He figured there were probably six to eight of them.  Bodies were heavy and they’d need two to carry one unconscious person unless they had Awakened among them.  Or unless the child was small enough.

That thought pissed Jake off.  He flexed his clawed fingers.

When he heard weird noises coming from a room to the side he stopped to investigate.  What he found inside was one of the black-clad individuals, a middle aged man, doing something that involved removing the clothing of a young woman passed out on the floor.

Jake wasn’t sure if the man was trying to molest her, or kill her, or do something evil and magical.  He largely didn’t care.  What he’d seen was enough for some permanent punishment all on it’s own, so he brought the pomel of his sword down on the back of the man’s head, pulping his brain and instantly killing him.  He never even knew what hit him.

That done, Jake tsked at the mess and glanced at the half naked woman on the floor.  When she woke up, it was going to be pretty fucked up.  Maybe Jake could help.  He dragged the dead man over to the other side of the room and grabbed a towel off the back of a chair that he used to cover the woman’s bare skin.

Then he went after the remaining assholes.  The man he’d just killed had been in a larger space than a closet so Jake had gotten a better look at what he was wearing and…just his whole vibe in general while dragging him around.  These people reminded Jake a lot of the cultists back in Macon.  He was willing to bet there was a connection.

Great.  These guys again.  Jake reasoned it did explain where the vampires had come from, and also maybe why every monster for a mile around and then some had somehow all decided to attack this stronghold at the same time.

Jake didn’t want to rush and make stupid mistakes, but he also needed to move fast.  He kept thinking about the van that had already left with a cargo of unconscious bodies.

Finally, he found the last of the invaders in a cafeteria, dragging unconscious people around, apparently choosing who they were going to take.  Charming, he thought.

Even damaged and with most of his power tapped out, killing these people shouldn’t be a problem.  He darted forward and swung his deadly, enchanted sword, neatly cutting an older, bearded man’s head clean off.  Then he smoothing changed the direction of his momentum and ran through a woman with wispy hair.

Something must have alerted one of the last remaining kidnappers.  The man turned and brought up a soldid steel weapon, like a huge crowbar.  Jake’s empowered blade cut through the metal and bit deep into the man’s shoulder, cutting down to the collarbone.  The man dropped to the ground.

The fact Jake hadn’t just cut the main in half was proof of his power.  He must have been one tough bastard.

Then Jake spun just in time to see the last enemy, a woman, level a hand at him and shoot fire at his face.

With a quick, short flash step with razor sharp control, Jake dodged the attack.  He snapped his arm down on the mage’s shoulder, breaking it.  She cried out and tried to turn to bring her other hand to bear.  The woman snarled, her eyes wild.

Jake paused before just ripping her throat out and broke her arm instead.

Her appearance seemed familiar.  Beady eyes, bad skin, gap between her teeth…“You!”  Jake thought, The fire mage from back in Macon!  The man he’d just put down must be the strong man!  Jake’s eyes widened, and when the woman opened her mouth to scream curses, he reflexively punched her in the mouth.  Her jaw shattered and she collapsed, only half-conscious.

Some mages were the most dangerous if you let them speak to deliver death curses.  He was close right now, too.  In range.

“You’ve got to be shitting me!”   he muttered.  He spit on the broken murderer with disdain.  “It’s people like you that make everything after Purple rain a thousand times worse than it needs to be.  Murderous, opportunistic scavengers.  How does it feel to be helpless for a change, you pieces of shit?”

He wasn’t even sure if any of his enemies could hear him.  It’d felt good to get that out of his system, though.

These assholes had to be x-Screaming Demons or Protectors, maybe some of both groups.  He thought about the blockade at the nearby Walmart.  A few things clicked and Jake immediately realized where these people had likely come from.  There was no proof, just a hunch.  A strong one.

Four Winds of Heaven Purification had really given Jake a lot more staying power than he had any right to have.  He was quickly getting tired, tapped out.  The night just kept getting longer, demanding more of him.

“Fuck Earth.  Why does this keep happening to me?”  That answer to that question, at least in this particular instance, seemed obvious.  Morrigan.  There had been too many coincidences almost from the moment he’d gotten back to Earth.  He said, “That sneaky bit–erm, goddess.”  The Morrigan couldn’t control him, but she could obviously damn sure drop him down right in the middle of ground zero, especially when it would benefit him if he survived.  Big If.

He looked down at his wounded, bloody body and snarled.  Then he glanced up at all the innocent people in the cafeteria.  The occasional, almost-done-popcorn-in-the-microwave pops of the defenders on the rooftops were clearer here, but they couldn’t catch up with the van that had already left.

Jake looked down at the two on the floor who’d murdered his parents.  These two were directly also directly responsible for his sister’s death and who knew.  He needed to go after the van, but there was something he had to do first, and he could do the right thing and leave a message.

No mercy, he thought.  No flinching from what needs to be done.  But no pleasure in it, either.  Just taking out the trash.

However, if these two suffered a bit, oh well.  No helping it.  Jake wasn’t going to lose any sleep.  He scowled and went about his work with a look of contempt.

The Grim’s sword, Bloom, rose and fell with finality.

He eyed his handiwork with equal parts distaste and satisfaction before cycling his cultivation base and flexing it in a way he would not have been able to do without the mage training in his former life.  The spell shattered.

Then he invested his voice with power.  Jake shouted, “Defenders!  You have rats in your school and your people are in danger!  I am going after some that left and this school should be safe now, but mind your back yard.”

He nodded.  That should do it.  The windows had rattled when he’d been yelling.

Time to go.

***

James rushed into the cafeteria.  Only a few defenders were still necessary on the roof anymore.  Everyone else had run back into the school after hearing the Grim’s shout.  James was still shivered in reaction.  With that awful voice booming like the trumpet of the angel of death, James could understand why people called him the “Heavenly Grim.”

Everyone all over the school was asleep.  They were starting to wake up, and some of the defenders were staying with friends or loved ones, watching over them.  Luckily, nobody seemed to be hurt, at least nobody anyone recognized.  A few unfamiliar people dressed in black had been found gruesomely killed.  James avoided looking at the scene on one side of the cafeteria.

The Grim had definitely been here.  If the dead and dying people had been doing what James thought they had been doing, he was glad they’d met this fate.

Still, he couldn’t relax, yet.  He looked around everywhere in the cafeteria, the main gathering place for most of the noncombatants.  He hadn’t seen who he was looking for yet, but there were a lot of people here.

One thing was sure–the Grim was already gone.

“James!”  Peter ran into the cafeteria, shouting across the room.  Moans of people all over the floors and benches made it hard to understand him at first.  He ran closer.  “We found Kathy!”

“What? Where?”  James let go of some tension he hadn’t even known he’d been holding.

“She’s in a room with a body.  The Grim wrote something there, too!  It’s for her.  He covered her up, but…Actually, maybe you should stay out here until she’s awake and better.  I know, uh, just trust me.”

James stared dumbly.  “Okay.”  He turned back to the gruesome scene to one side of the room.  Bodies hacked apart like they’d been hit by God’s razor.  Two of them, a man and a woman on the floor with their arms and legs cut off.  One was still alive, barely.  And a message written on the wall in their blood.

It read:

At least some of these fucks are related to what happened in Macon.  Their friends took a van full of people.  I think they are heading to the Walmart.  I am going to catch up.

If you want to mercy kill the two on the floor, go ahead but don’t cry for them.  They are murderers, predators.  They prey on their fellow man.  Don’t give them any pity.  They had none.

Follow me to the Walmart if you get a chance but I’ll try to be done before you get there.

-Jake M. aka Heavenly Grim

Behind James, Johah whispered, “The Grim.”  His voice wavered.  “Seriously…What the fuck is he?”

“I don’t know.”  James’ eyes had teared up and he felt strangely emotional.  It was welling up from his stomach and threatened to explode, to make him break down.  He forced the feeling away.  This was not the time to lose his shit.  “Yeah, I don’t know.  But whatever he is, I’m glad he’s on our side.”