Conquest Of The Fallen: Dark Dominions

THE WINGLEADER WAS GONE. The man in him. His soul had been corrupted, subdued, imprisoned in his own body while that of a rogue dark rover took control. At the reins of his psyche, there was nothing this Bodywalker could not do in the form of the wingleader. And perhaps, if Rafel had not naively pushed it to reveal his form, the injured sentinels on the floor would be body bags.

For this Bolta was eternally grateful. She had no doubts that she took would be crimson and gore in the tunnels if Rafel hadn't acted when he did. And now, as interim commandant she had to make the tough call.

"Faster! Goddamit!" Bolta ordered the cadets in charge of pushing the gears for the dragongates. The metalwork that would shut the hole in the mighty bulwark was intricate, and iron grinded against stone. The pace at which the grate was dropping was too slow. A scrawl.

Bolta turned down to Rafel who gave the one-eyed girl something to chew on so he could seal the large gash across the small of her back with his sizzling lightning rod.

The girl whimpered as the rod burned into her flesh, cauterizing the knife wound. "You'll be fine," he told her.

He raised his own amber-dark eyes to the steel doors slowly rolling close over the tunnel opening; he rose and summoned deathly balls of [Hellfire] to his fists. The cadets might not be fast enough. He waited, barely breathing. They all did. Inside that godforsaken place, he could see the Bodywalker charging like a gorilla for them. The wingleader had lost all resemblance to human.

The former eyes of candor were hollow. Nostrils leaked green pus—and was that maggots crawling out his ears?

It was. In minutes, the Wingleader's head had gone thin and oblong. All the previous blonde hair had fell away. The cheeks were sunken in, fingers set into arthritis. A snarling swollen mouth, purple and bloated. Teeth browned and the eyes in the face cast in sickly yellow.

The skin of the former commando looked like that of a mummified corpse. Limbs and joints stuck out at awkward angles. And the strength in those dinner-plate hands could wring the head clear off a shoulder.

The Bodywalker was pounding through heaps of dismemberment in the tunnel, hoping to catch the exit before the metal gates were full sealed. The heavy hitting of its feet made blood matter squelch on the scarlet earth.

"You guys really need to lock that shit. Or it's our heads rolling next." Bolta urged the grinding cadets in an impatient and strict tone. Her voice was gruff from where the fucking monster had landed a punch. Absentmindedly, she rubbed the aching spot below her throat.

Bodies the Bodywalkers possessed, they enhanced; like a really evil parasite. Only they were translucent and could creep up on a person, sneak attack into their bodies before they could do shit about it. Say a Bodywalker possessed a vampire just two days turned, the innate spirit juice of the creature gave that vampire the abilities of an Elder who had lived for over a millennia.

And if the person possessed was a mortal, it amped up the abilities already wielded; like now, the wingleader lifted the 400-pound iron barrel used for sorting gunpowder for cannons and tossed it at them. It sailed seamlessly through the air, landing underneath the fast closing gates. An attempt to impede the fall of the iron shuttle.

"He's blocked the progress, ma'am!" A cadet yelled.

The metal of the shaftgate collided with the iron of the barrel and made a piercing shrill sound as sparks flew. The gears could hardly move. Bolta ignored the pessimism radiating in the eyes of her surviving divisions—that's why she was the head officer. She pointed at a 9ft Amazon. "You!

Help those boys with that fucking barrel!" The super tall and well-muscled female nodded and flexed her cream biceps as she headed for the gates.

She ran the last mile, and wham! She sent her booted feet to the steel barrel, kicking it back in the same way it had come. On any normal person, the pig iron of the cylinder alone was enough to shatter all toes and the calcaneus. But the Amazon easily shook off her long leg as if dropped again to the earth. The shaftgate began grating down again.

"There we fucking go!" Bolta smashed her hands, rubbing together. "—now come on! Push those gears like your lives depend on it, cuz it does."

"May I, boys?" The hefty Amazonian girl joined the cadets. The three silver slashes on her military coat's shoulder identified her as a warden rank, of the second division. She gently took one handling knob of the gears and pushed beside the smaller cadets. Her own godly strength imbued the gears into springing and rolling fast.

Whirr! Whirr!

The gears turned as if oiled. Inside the tunnel, the wingleader was sprinting with all his might. Green veins showed through his skin. And sunken eyes shot rage at the young soldiers sealing his only way of escape. Of kill. The Wingleader's mouth spread wide like an unsightly gash on a roasting goat and the Bodywalker shrieked through his mouth:

"Yarrrhllllggg!!! Cuuuunnntts!"

With a final slam, the dunking of a netball, the shaftgate rammed into the earth. It was just when the possessed wingleader reached it, and dived, trying a final attempt to roll out a narrowing slit. Only his ham arm was able to go through. The heavy end of the shaftgate pierced through meat and bone, slicing the limb cleanly off as it entered the ground.

The Bodywalker wailed so loud the sentinels had to cover their hands over their ears.

The scream was frightful and the sonic decibels of a Banshee which no one fucking liked.

The Amazonian and her company of cadets eased off the gears and saluted at attention; the other young First Years were like ecchi servants around her imposing size. She shouted to her commando, "the tunnels are closed, ma'am. The Bodywalker is sealed in."

Bolta finally released a breath she didn't know she had been holding and Rafel dropped his flaming hands. The comet glow on his fingers rescinded. He listened to Bolta dish out orders to the divisions. She first congratulated the Amazonian for thinking fast in the face of almost certain death and helping the junior cadets hold the line.

Then she addressed the about sixty sentinels remaining of the force to pull into a shield formation behind her and Rafel.

"...your only job right now is to protect the druids as they block the leak in the wards. Keep the circle around them and our injured. Never let it break. If a friend should fall, let another take his place." She looked up at the planet Rarjah slowly slipping back out of the way; the darkness was breaking.

"Hear me friends, the long night is breaking. The dark is lifting. The Holocaust Spell is coming to its end. Hold steady, sentinels of Corynthia and we will again see the sun dawn on our fallen brothers!" Bolta finished. Her inspiring words were gulped readily by the young guardians of the academy who had seen more than enough share of grime and gore for one day.

The druids in the midst of the shield formation began the runic chants, and Bolta turned back to face forward. To the only other person left exposed, Israfel. They both stood in front of the colossal hearthstone of the dragongates.

"Let me out, you brew of bastards." The Bodywalker cussed, throwing out heads from the obsidian bars. It tossed them across to anger Bolta into letting him free. A ploy he hoped would get him on the other side. But Bolta wasn't stupid.

She swallowed down the bile rising in her throat, forced down all her hate and tears at seeing the severed heads of young boys and girls angrily stoned at her like playthings, and turned to Rafel to say,

"That thing just slaughtered two-thirds of the Sentinel Corps. It corrupted the body of my wingleader. My friend. Please tell me there's a way we can get rid of it?"

Rafel looked across the short distance to the stout blackness of the smaller shaftgate under the imperial dragongates; the solid cast iron sheet that was keeping the Bodywalker imprisoned.

"Yes, there is." He replied Bolta. "But you're friend isn't coming back."

Bolta looked from his clean strong chin to the creature warbling perverted curses and tossing out daggered mortal parts angrily behind the shaftgate. It slammed its bald, ugly head on the bars. A head so ripe with cancer she should make out sutures of the skull just in looking at the scalp. The Bodywalker swore profanely. "What're you looking at, wench?

If you don't let me put, I'm gonna start fucking the few corpses of your friends that are still intact.

Don't you want something to bury?" The apollo-red eyes danced crazily.

Bolta sighed.

"My friend is gone," she said simply, and to Rafel: "Do it!"

He nodded and stepped five paces forward, putting space between him and her. He raised his hands to the shifting eclipse. And just as the sun was slipping out, he raised his voice too.

"HELL ARTS! I command the FLAMING FORGE OF VULCAN. An infernal bath, to purge the dark spirit of Bodywalker. PLANES OF HEL, HEED THINE PRINCE!"

SWOOOOOOM!!!

A great whirlwind of pure red fire charged forward at his summoning. It blasted outward from his glowing body, growing like a larger avatar with horns and twirling with force enough to uproot the hair off heads. It was a tornado of flames, reaching high into the brightening sky.

It roared in its own voice, and the soldiers in the shield formation behind froze at the wails of souls in purgatory they could hear in it.

A hundred fiery faces tumbled in the whirlwind of fire.

The cyclone ate up everything in its path, leaving the earth scorched, soot-black, and raw like peeled skin. The fires surged for the shaftgate.

Rafel was using his [Fire Demoniac] skill, and could feel his mana core burn within his chest. In his case, both core and heart were one. The roaring blaze slammed into the hard metal of the gate. The pig's iron melted like wax. Many behind gasped; only dragon fire could do that.

"Fuck." The Bodywalker mumbled just before its lips were peeled off by a thousand degrees firestorm. As the flesh went red and turned to ash, carried off by the obliterating purge, Bolta saw the true face of the wingleader in the consuming fires. The demon was gone. In the flames licking through red, sizzling muscle, she saw the burned head of the man nod at her.

And then even in the pain of being roasted alive, the man's lips, burned to the teeth—he was mostly skeleton behind that door—still pulled apart and shrilled out.

"I have no fear of death. Thank you, lieutenant."

And it was the first time Rafel had seen the daughter of Zeus cry. Bolta closed her eyes.

When she opened them again few seconds later, the whole tunnel was gone. The Bodywalker was gone. The wingleader, gone. The eclipse finally relapsed as the planet, Rarjah rolled away, like a tombstone off a sepulchre. The Holocaust Spell was passed. It was six hours seventeen minutes later.

It was dusk. And the evening sun came shining through; on the new and improved wards of the eastern dragongates, on the sentinel survivors in combat greens catching their breath, on Rafel who finally dropped his hands to quench the firestorm, and on the red embers of earth where a tunnel filled with blood and a crazy evil spirit had once been.

The ambulance carriages arrived one minute later.

Healers and paramedics dived between rows of the survivors, offering assistance:

"Are you okay? Do you feel anything broken?"

"Hold up your hand for me?"

"Oh that's a serious gash."

Rafel heard all the voices in the back of his head. He didn't even know he was injured until a nurse appeared at his side with two paramedics. They pulled a long robe over his naked body; the scourge of fire had burned away all his clothes. The little nurse said to him, "we need to get that checked out sir."

Rafel looked down to the scar running across his collarbones to his pecs: a jagged slash. He let himself be lowered into a stretcher and wheeled off under the noise of more ambulances arriving, blue and red twinkling lights sparkling in nightfall.