Halloween Horror (Pt. 10): The End Grows More Horrifying

Halloween Horror (Pt. 10): The End Grows More Horrifying

--- Audrey ---

“Right.” She inhaled before taking a steeling breath as she watched Jon stare down the Horror in a stalemate that she knew wouldn’t last long. “Val, got anymore Spell Scripts?”

“A few but not many.” The Scarecrow’s Keeper nodded before pulling out a small notepad and ripping out a few pages. “If you want more you’re going to have to grab them off the ground.”

“I’ll make them last.” She assured the other teen as she accepted the pages, before turning towards Artemis. “How much more time do you need for that seal?”

The elven teen bit her lip for a moment, before shaking her head. “Now that I know what’s wrong I can filter through what’s needed, what’s redundant, and what I can actually change. So… a few minutes to figure that out and then a few more to actually-”

A screech tore through the air as the Horror’s arms lashed out clawing through the dirt and leaving massive gashes in the ground as the monstrosity tried and failed to attack the wry figure darting forward before delivering a back spinning slash to the Horror’s wrist.

“Shit.” She cursed, before starting forward. “Just do what you’ve got to do, but get that seal fixed! Val-”

“Already on it.” The other teen told her rushing the clashing titans with her bat over her shoulder and several scraps of paper in her hand.

“Don’t rush in…” She trailed off with a grimace.

“Let’s face it, of the three of us she’s probably the only one who can hold it back in a straight fight.” Artemis tried to console her.

“A straight fight is an idiot’s fight.” She argued with a shake of her head, before taking a look at the Spell Scripts their most aggressive teammate had left her.

(Right, so according to her notes I’ve got a… Flashbang script, a Fire Starter script, a couple of Frost Scripts, and one of those Vine Scripts she apparently tapes my Stranglethorn seeds to.)

“Okay. I can work with this.” She tried to assure herself.

Looking up from the scripts she watched as Val stood in front of one of the Horror’s hands -a hand big enough to treat a car like a toy- before smacking it aside with a swing of her bat strong enough to unleash a visible shockwave through the air. A parry that she followed up by quickly throwing several exploding Scripts towards the Demon’s chest, that it only barely seemed to notice.

A quick glance towards Jon revealed that the teen had slammed his axe into another hand before using it as leverage to ride closer to the Demon’s face. At which point he leapt off and drove his knife into the Horror and hung in the air as he tried to hack away at the Demon with his axe, only occasionally burning it whenever the axe would flash with a burst of light.

“I am nowhere near the level of crazy needed to try any of that.” She admitted, feeling absolutely zero shame in the fact she would not rush a Demon. “Let’s uh, let’s figure something else out…”

“Fuck.” Artemis cursed from beside her while looking extremely pale.

“What?” She blinked, wondering what else was going wrong tonight.

“The seal is in the statue…” Artemis reminded her, while weakly pointing at said statue (that is directly below the Halloween Horror.)

“Uh, are you going to be able to… work with that?” She had to ask, knowing that the only person as outclassed as her in this fight was standing next to her.

“If I can get to the statue, I just need to… stay on the opposite side of wherever they’re attacking it from.” Artemis assured her, though it sounded more like she was trying to convince herself of that plan than anyone else. “Of course, that means I can’t let it see me sneaking around it. Which is harder than it sounds given the layout of this place.”

“Yeah.” She agreed, realizing that while they were in a fairly open space the buildings on either side of this little clearing were just close enough that the Horror could probably reach out and touch them while still remaining in the center of everything. Meaning while behind the Horror was probably safe due to the static location of the Bleed, getting past it definitely wasn’t so.

She gave the clashing Horror and teens a once over before looking around them and eventually down at the scripts in her hand. “Alright, I’ve got an idea you head left and wait for my distraction to run past.”

Artemis gave her nod. “If you get me killed, Val will feed you to the Scarecrow.”

She couldn’t help but snort at that, because (yeah, that’s probably true.)

It was something she definitely needed, especially since at no point since its escape had the Horror, quit trying to wrap its dead fingers around her mind.

Shaking her head clear, she ran the direction opposite of Artemis before taking out her flashbang script and the stranglethorn script.

Using her Willcraft she forced a few changes upon Val’s spell as she set it off causing the script to fire a single long vine out towards the Horror’s face.

A vine with a Flashbang script attached to it.

--- Artemis ---

With little doubt that the explosion of light and the screaming Horror was Audrey’s distraction, she ran past all of the fighting before sliding into place behind the statue and pressing her back up against it as she got her heart under control.

“Okay, just keep calm. Just keep calm.” She told herself as she blatantly ignored what everyone else was currently doing. Namely the fact that they were all attacking a massive Demon that stood barely five meters away from her.

A screech from above and a series of explosions on the other side of the statue had her very much wishing she’d taken the time to research proxy casting. (Why, why did I say I prefer to get my hands dirty when Miss Edme asked about it? So what if they’re boring and indirect, at least you wouldn’t be trying to cast beneath a Demon’s a-)

She slapped her cheeks.

“No. Don’t get distracted.” She told herself as she forced back the hysteria that she knew was being forced upon her. “You know the problem now. You can solve this.”

She pushed her senses into the statue and began once more going over everything she could make out. “Okay, so the seal was originally designed to split the Demon’s power in three, but after a hundred years each piece has regrown into a full Horror without anyone realizing it. This means that most of these add-ons are built upon this initial principle of a three point Spell Engine, meaning each modification had to account for every other seal and work in tandem with anything added to those other seals.”

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(Right now that I know what I’m looking for, here's the cleave function just above the network connections in the base of the statue. And while nothing really connects to the cleave function, everything connects to the network function proving where everyone was focused.)

“This also means that the reason venting the seals seems to help maintain their power, is because we’re reducing the amount of resources one seal gets freeing more for the other two.” She grimaced as she also realized why she couldn’t just slam that vent shut. “If I just drain everything into this seal and slam the gate shut, I’d be risking the other two seals opening without anyone the wiser. Especially since this seal is physically damaged, requiring even more resources than normal to keep it active even in this sputtering state.”

A quick and risky peek around to the clawed up portion of the statue, allowed her to get a better look at the damaged parts of the Spell Engine. “Yeah, the only reason this hasn’t fallen apart is because so much of the magic is being converted into maintaining the Spell Circuits within the engine. Something it’s probably only able to do because of how old and engrained all of this magic is, though it’ll probably only last a few more years now that there’s a source of decay.”

She glanced up towards the Bleed where only half of the Horror had been able to escape, because the damaged seal was still trying to do its job and keep the Horror trapped. Even if it only had the efficiency to trap half of it with the resources it had rather than the entire thing.

(Alright, so this means my best option is to try to both repair and reinforce the damaged circuit in the hopes of increasing the engine’s overall efficiency and hopefully allowing it to drag the Horror back inside the seal.) She figured as she took a step back from everything, before letting her eyes drift down to the cleave function. (Though there may be an… easier way.)

(While the cleave function is responsible for the majority of our current problems, it does provide for the simplest fix to this mess in the fact that it would contain half of this Horror’s power making it easier to deal with. Which should make it fairly easy work once the Scarecrow gets here.) Of course that plan hinged on whether or not the Scarecrow could kill the Horror before the Demon’s competing Domains brought it back to power, at which point there’d be one slightly weaker Horror completely free to do as it pleased.

(And it's even riskier given how there will technically be two Horrors feeding on him, even if one of them is less capable of doing so due to the seal. I mean there had to be a reason the Scarecrow wanted to stay away from this thing while it was still sealed.)

Both options were just as likely to work as they were to bite them all in the ass, the only major difference was whether or not the others could hold the Horror back long enough for her to finish repairing the seal, or if they were fast and strong enough to put the Horror down before it could drain the Scarecrow’s power.

Just as she came to a decision and began reaching out with her magic, a horrific screech tore through the air, sending a chill down her spine as it became too hard to breathe, and even harder to think as twisting fingers grasped and crawled throughout her mind.

--- Valentina ---

“Fuck.” She cursed, pretty sure that her ears were bleeding as the world spun around her.

Just as she was about to reach for one of her more medically inclined Scripts, the little fairy she’d seen flying around Whitaker flew up in front of her face before flying little circles around her, filling her body with a sort of cool-warmth that stole away all of her aches and pains.

“Right, figured that was what you were doing.” She’d seen the fairy flying around Jon for the majority of the fight. Most prominently whenever the Horror had managed to hit him with a blow that she just knew had to have shattered something important, only for the other teen to get up and walk it off as if it were nothing.

The little fairy gave her a nod before dashing off towards Jon who briefly met her gaze.

She gave him a nod and he gave her one back.

(Well, at least he agrees we’re on the same side now.) That was significantly better than a couple points in the fight where she was pretty sure he nearly turned his blades on her for getting too close to him.

Admittedly, the only reason she wasn’t holding her usual grudge for the hostility and near-friendly fire was the fact that it seemed more an ingrained reflex than anything intentional. (Well that and the giant Demon.)

They’d both been chipping away at for several minutes now, but every injury they gave the Horror it would simply regenerate while acting like nothing had happened, if they’d managed to visibly damage it at all.

Though being more familiar with Demon biology than most she didn’t let this discourage her, given how every injury healed was still a piece of the Demon’s power spent. (I just wish we could do something more damaging than physical wounds.)

One of the trickier parts of Demon biology was the fact that they weren’t ‘physical’ in the same way a human was, but instead more a sentient -or more dangerously sapient- mass of magic. Meaning they were as physical as the [Concepts] that they were derived from.

As such physical injuries could harm them in the same way they’d harm whatever said [Concept] which is why the Demons comprised of more ethereal concepts -such as [Fear]- were harder to harm than the ones with more physical concepts such as [Beast] or [Metal].

In fact, because the Horror’s primary [Concept] seemed to be [Fear] the injuries they were inflicting upon the Horror were likely less because they were damaging it and more because they were proving they weren’t [Afraid] of it. Which in turn weakened its conceptuality as something [Horrifying] and ate away at its strength, due either to their own [Strength] making it less scary -as was her case- or because the other’s [Courage] worked as an anathema to its [Fear].

Unfortunately, since [Courage] was also the anathema of her own affinity with [Fear] she lacked anything that could be used to inspire courage or bravery and thus increase the damage they could inflict upon the Demon.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw the Horror pull back its arms as a black miasma began to pour from them before lashing out towards the two tiny teens. And she infused her bat with magic, triggering one of the numerous and reusable Spell Scripts she’d carved into it, and allowing her to swing with enough force to smash one of the hands into the ground with enough force to leave a small crater beneath it.

Seeing movement out of the corner of her eye, she leapt back as Jon slammed his axe down into the Horror’s hand with another explosion of light, causing the Demon’s flesh to sizzle and burn as the fact that it was just an overgrown Bruiser was drawn to light.

For a moment these injuries held, before reality seemed to glitch and they all faded in a static haze leaving the Horror’s hand unmarred.

“Fuck… How much longer, Espanta?” She asked her own pet Demon as she felt her frustration building.

(“It’s taking a bit longer than I thought.”) The Scarecrow growled. (“Since it screamed all of this thing’s Creeps have reorganized and started sprinting that way. I’m picking them off as I go, but even with the other Hunters dealing with them enough will slip through that you’ll be surrounded soon enough.”)

“Shit!” She cursed, knowing that while they were keeping the Horror distracted they could only do so for so long, especially if they had to deal with the thing’s minions as well.

Briefly, she considered keeping this information to herself, knowing that telling the others would give them a jolt of fear for the Horror to feed on. At the same time however, she knew keeping the information to herself would lead to one of them being ambushed because they weren’t expecting the Demon’s reinforcements.

“Fuck…” She groaned, before raising her voice. “Scarecrow says that screech a minute ago was a call for reinforcements, Creeps are on their-”

Something tackled her to the ground, and more in reflex than actual intention did she manage to put her bat between the beast’s teeth before it could bite into her flesh.

“Oh, fuck you cabrón!” She growled at the Creep as she had to grip both ends of her bat to hold the thing back.

A spray of blood hit her face as a knife repeatedly tore into the werewolf chimera’s throat before the Creep was shoved off of her.

Whitaker seemed to hiss at the dying beast before turning towards her and offering her a hand up as she spat out the blood in her mouth.

“Gracias.” She nodded, taking the hand before immediately pulling him down and rolling them out of the way of the Horror’s hand as it tore through the pavement behind them.

He blinked up at her, seemingly surprised she’d bothered to save him.

“De nada.” She told him as she picked both herself and her bat off the ground. “Now get off your ass. We’ve got a Demon to kill, cazadorcito.”

She looked up and the Horror looked down on her with a sadistic smile on its face as the Demon’s minions began to line themselves up upon the edge of the rooftops and the darkest alleys around them.

A veritable army of terror and darkness comprised of dozens of chimeras, their corpses painfully twisted and mutilated hybridizations of the animals that made them up. Chaotic caricatures that would happily rip them apart limb from bloody limb as they scarred themselves into the darkest nightmares of all damned enough to look upon them.

She couldn’t help but scoff as she pointed her bat at the Demon. “Not impressed, puta!”