The Black Garden: Chapter 2

My muscles slumped as the paralytics hit. On trained reflex, I slammed my emergency button: a preprogrammed, time-delayed antidote to the Violator husk’s poison. Weakness spread through my body in waves, hand shaking as I braced it up against his chest to push him away. He held onto me, one hand sliding up to grip the back of my skull, the other bluntly reaching down between my legs. A few people around us, unaware of the situation, cheered and laughed. Gooseflesh rippled across my skin, and I was suddenly hyperaware of my naked body under my clothing, trembling bird-like against the painfully thin shell of nanoweave and cotton.

The kiss became an intrusion as something in his mouth darted forward into mine. Long, thick and cold, it plunged down my throat. I had a brief taste of something sweet and foul before my mouth numbed, and a warm, pleasant feeling began to spread through my chest. My hips bucked against the groping hand, and a sudden, violent orgasm wracked my body just before I passed into a twilight sleep.

Time ceased to mean anything as he steadied me and led me, stumbling, out of the nightclub. I was vaguely aware that things were happening to my body, but couldn't bring myself to care. I was somewhere far away, floating in a blissful, warm, drugged haze... until the antidote triggered. Specialized cells in my body began to die off, trickling demon-roofie narcan into my bloodstream. Consciousness faded back in: I was upside down, swaying from side to side in a nauseating rhythm. I pieced it together after a minute or so. The husk had me slung over his shoulder. He was sprinting, panting with effort, every footfall a sharp jolt until into my stomach. The motion and pressure was too much. I retched violently as my body cannibalized the double or triple dose of force-fed sexytime drugs, puking water and bile down the back of his fancy Italian suit.

“Huh?” The husk slid to a stop, moving fast enough that the soles of his loafers churned up a cloud of dust around us. He unceremoniously slung me around and into his arms, tipping my head back. A growl rumbled in his throat.

“Urrhhnn…” I groaned and rolled over, heaving, and blearily cracked my eyes open. Stacks of plastic-wrapped rebar and scaffolding littered a large, fenced gravel lot. Crumbling concrete k-rails formed rough, unaligned lanes. A half-finished covered car-park loomed ahead of us, and as I focused on it, an awful cold, sick sensation crawled over my skin like static. The demon. It’s close.

The husk stared down at me with a mix of suspicion and animal lust. He turned his head toward the car park, swaying in place. Visible lines of strain began to appear around his eyes and mouth. He was battling with the twin animal needs that drove him: obeying his master, and fucking me. But he wasn't the only one who could do the biological drug factory thing. I took a deep, steadying breath. Sweat welled up on my skin, soaking my clothes, burning the potent cocktail of aphrodisiacs and hormones the husk had fed me like incense.

The husk's nose twitched. Then he growled, put his face down, and began to huff over my face, neck and chest. I moaned and arched against him, and he began to frantically lick my skin like a dog, hunched and feral with need.

One weakness of Violators was impulsivity. I had set a fifteen-minute timer on my purge switch before the mission, confidently, because husks never took their prey directly back to mommy. The viral replica that had replaced the husk's mind had exactly the same drives as its parent, and this one had probably stopped and fucked me two or three times on our way to this place. It was literally incapable of doing otherwise. For one thing, it was starving. It needed my energy to remain physically integral, and it got a tasty hit of that every time it screwed me. For another, it was susceptible to the same drugs it used to turn its victims into addicts who would let it – or more accurately, the demon – fuck them to death.

Snarling under his breath, the husk stole a jealous glance at the ramp leading down into the underground section of the car park, then scooped me up and bounded into the air like a cricket, landing in front of one of the broken k-rails. He threw me over it and began to jerk at my leggings, working them down over my ass and thighs. I listened as he unbuckled his belt, focusing on my breathing.

Tsariel's presence swelled as the husk hooked his thumb in the seat of the leotard and pulled it to the side, stepping in. As his weight fell over me, I closed my eyes and dialed in.

Bladed wings exploded from my back, ripping up through the husk's torso from hips to shoulders. Twin fans of ichor sprayed out above us to fall like black rain across the gravel. Ribbons of flesh fell and fluttered to the ground around me, rapidly decomposing into seething black motes, like tiny crawling insects. Whatever they touched was stripped of color, moisture, and life.

“Phew.” I took a moment to catch my breath. Above me, the wings made a metallic slithering sound as they flicked and folded away, ten-foot extensions of wafer-thin metal so sharp they sliced through the air with a soft humming sound. After a few more seconds, the angelic manifolds collapsed like long whips, then retracted back into hyperspace. "I was going to have you wait on bodying him for about… ooh… five minutes or so, but good save."

“We foresaw that you were being controlled by your animal impulses. You would take the situation further than what was required.”

In other words, she was accusing me of being a slut. Which was… not entirely inaccurate. I reached down, adjusted the leotard, then pulled my pants back up. "Look, I… okay. You’re right. I was about to break my own rule.”

“You were. ‘Do not fuck the demons.’”

I sighed. “Do not fuck the demons.”

Tsariel patiently hung out in the back of my mind, radiating an aura of bemused compassion.

My partnership with Tsariel meant working with a six-dimensional being we call an “angel,” though she’s not religious in any human sense. We use angelic terms because it’s easier than trying to explain their true nature, and because The Commander is painfully Jewish. Soon after he founded CEIDR, we also collectively voted that it's cool and fun to think of them as angels. They are an alien species that can perceive every timeline, everywhere, all at once. Anyone limited to three-dimensional perception tends to start bleeding from the eyes if they try to dig too deep into understanding how this works. Due to the risk of catastrophic stroke, we just stick with ‘angel’ as a frame of reference, and accept that we are frightened monkeys who exist in an incomprehensible, terrifying reality in which two apex alien species - the 'angels' and the 'demons' - fight a multiversal war as old as reality itself. None of the Abyssal Response Fleet wonks really know why they’re at war, but we fight on the side of the angels because the demons eat planets and murder people, and the angels don’t.

Angels can shape any three-dimensional form, the way we’d draw a picture on paper. But they’re so vast and unfocused that pinpointing one target in our world is nearly impossible. If Tsariel were to try and hunt this Violator personally, it would be a task equivalent to trying to hit a flea on the side of a five-hundred mile Where's Waldo? mural with a dart. At some point, the demons figured this out. They learned to manifest here by parasitizing humans and other species, wiping out entire civilizations across multiple timelines. When angels discovered this, they started to present themselves to some of the survivors of those worlds. In return for killing a lot of demons, we get their abilities, foresight, and protection. And many of us - the furious survivors of worlds perishing under demonic invasions - agree to the trade.

Once all the drugs had been purged from my body, I got to my feet and took stock. I was really fucking thirsty, in urgent need of water to replace all the lost sweat and other fluids. I was thinking about options for hydration when a tremor passed through the ground beneath my feet. The demon. It had just realized it had lost contact with its husk.

“Euun, someone’s restless.” I frowned, glancing around the abandoned lot. “And big. We need a change of plans.”

Tsariel radiated mild curiosity as I considered what, exactly, the change of plans would entail. She could see the future in some capacities, but if angels could predict the outcomes of Abyssal encounters, they wouldn’t need Hunters. SEER, the Fleet’s predicative strategic AI, had ruled that there was a 0.3% chance that this demon deviated from the expected level of power and maturity. If not for what the husk had said to me, I would have put it down to pure bad luck. We have been waiting, Hunter.

Violators weren’t that smart. They were never that smart. This one should also be completely naïve. This was a non-magical world; I was currently the only ReMa agent on the planet and demons did not collectively share knowledge of Hunters. And even if they DID, it would have been about Palae’an or Khemmemu Hunters. Humans had only been in the game for about fifty linear Terran years. No… SEER had missed something in the events and the pattern of the murders. And it rarely, if ever, missed shit like that.

The smartest thing to do would be to break the radio silence and recontact the Fetch Quest, then wait around until my team arrived. But there were issues. The reconnection to the network, then the fracas of the branchship sending down reinforcements and gear, the necessity of creating a field hologram to mask the area and prevent civilians from investigating the area… by the time we were ready, there was a good chance the Violator would sense the sudden weight of our attention and flee deeper into the city. Then we would have to do this dance all over again, with a different operative who would be in even more danger than I currently was. Not just because the demon already knew we were after it, but because I was uniquely qualified to kill the damn thing.

I groaned with the effort it took to rein in the main character impulse, and called my damn unit.

“COMMS, we’ve got a problem down here,” I said, as soon as the connection went through. “SEER was way off course. The husk knew we were after it, knows what a Hunter is, and roofied me in front of God and everyone in the middle of the club. I’m pretty sure I still found the entry to the Violator’s lair… I’m comfortable enough to check it out and see if the information helps SEER recalibrate. Regardless, I’m not sure this Violator is as small or as alone as we think it is.”

There was a heavy pause.

“…. Rrroger that, Z. What’s your status?”

“Status is good. My goddamned pussy is killing me, though. Guy must have had a cock like one of those fucking gas-powered SWAT rams.”

“I sure appreciate that detailed review, Z. AbyssNex has copied in your report, stand by for new orders.”

 I let out a terse sigh through my teeth, and leaned back against the k-rail to do what all soldiers in every conflict in the multiverse spent most of their time doing. Waiting. Around five minutes later, Digger got back on the line. He didn’t sound entirely pleased.

“SEER swears up and down that the demon is a one-or-two man job,” he said, his crisp radio voice uncharacteristically reluctant. “But it AND DWO-6 unit command have elected to override AbyssNex on this one, though. New orders from DWO-1-6 are as follows: Objective one, approach the entry to the lair with caution and gain visual to report any anomalies. Objective two, assess the Abyssal signature and check for Breach Leak. Do not approach combat alone outside of an emergency scenario.”

“Roger, got it.”

“Oh: also, CEIDR-Nex just voted to send down a full team following your report. Fetch Quest Contact-2 will throw down a holomask, ETA ten minutes. The rest of DWO-6 will be down as soon as the mask is up.”

Interesting that SEER had elected to override its own report. All of that was good news for me, though, and bad news for the demon.

I looked down at my clothing. It was not suitable for hunting a full-grown Violator, but it let me move quickly and would protect me against most spines, claws, acids and bases. I was going to have to trust Tsariel, my ReMa and my neural wetwear, and rely on speed if shit went south. The problem was calories. Magic, manifolds, bio-cybernetic implants, and just general hand-to-hand combat burned a lot of energy. I had gone into the op charged up on several packs of calorie-dense energy gel and a sports drink and was still running at a surplus, but the heavier the fight, the more demanding it was on my body.

“Alright. Quickly and quietly, in and out.” I redid my ponytail, tucking it up and under to reduce its profile, then reached out to my left without looking and wrapped my fingers around the hilt of a sword. This sword, the Long Hunt, was a 'persistent manifold': a weapon that always looked and functioned the same each time Tsariel handed it to me. Unlike me, it was not particularly aesthetic. The Hunt was four feet of curved, monomolecular diamond composite: a dull greyish blade with a flanged guard capable of catching and breaking lesser swords, and a foot-long hilt that could be used one or two-handed. The pommel had a three-inch spike at the end, the ideal length for introducing local atmospheric conditions into the brains of most species. A pair of charms hung from a loop at the base of the spike: a #10 scalpel blade, and a silver cockroach.

“Okay…” I sighed. “Let’s go see what the hell we’re dealing with.”

Next chapter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/black-garden-3-118203597