The rattling sound of chains dragging against stone started echoing all over the hole. I didn't even need to look back to know who was behind me.
The church bastard heard it too. His eyes shifted past me, locking onto what was approaching from behind.
Suzuki stepped besides me and her demon had manifested fully at her side. I could see it clearly now. The demon was a nightmare of grey knotted muscle and it's arms remained crossed over it's chest by thick chains. Suzuki turned to it. "Syrren, go get him."
At this moment, we were all forced to be spectators. Syrren blurred and it was across the cratered floor in an instant, driving a heavy kick down at the man in the robes. He barely reacted in time, raising both arms to block and the impact forced him to one knee as the ground cratered violently beneath him.
Syrren twisted midair, delivering a follow-up that sent the man crashing through a wall. The man scrambled to his feet, jumping to the side just as Syrren's third kick pulverized the brickwork where his head had been.
When the man landed, his face was twisted in a snarl. He whispered an incantation we couldn't quite catch and suddenly multiple clones of him flickered into existence.
Syrren pulled his foot from the ruined wall and turned slowly. The chains crossing his chest fell away, clattering to the floor and as the demon stretched its hands free its demonic energy spiked and instantly reminded me of the demon from the Old Ridgemont Apartments.
The demon lunged and massive chains erupted from its palms, elongating unnaturally as it swung. They caught more than ten clones instantly, wrapping and they dissipated into white smoke when it crushing them.
Syrren skidded across the rubble, whipping the chains in a wide arc that cleared the rest of the clones until only one man remained. The demon blitzed toward him while he was off guard and pulled back a fist for a killing blow but the moment the strike landed, the man puffed into smoke.
The man appeared above Syrren with a dagger descending toward the demon's neck. Syrren raised it's arm to block and the blade sheared through the limb, sending a spray of black blood across the floor but the hand regenerated instantly, the flesh knitting together in a heartbeat.
Syrren grabbed the man by the face and launched forward, slamming him into a wall with enough force to shake the entire building and it unleashed barrage of fists but the man under its grip puffed into smoke once again.
The demon stopped, his head tilting in confusion. We were all confused by what is going on and the man's laughter began to echo from every corner of the room.
Takeo staggered over to Miyu, helping her up. "She's breathing but we need to get her out of here." he said, his dagger shaking in his hands.
"None of you is leaving here alive." the man's voice boomed and he appeared behind Takeo.
Takeo spun, slashing his daggers at him but it was just another clone. Suzuki helped me up and we limped toward the others, standing back to back in the centre of the hole.
"Is this another distortion?" I asked.
Takeo shook his head. "No, he's overlapping the clones with the actual space. This must be the peak of his technique – his Sacred Art."
"Maybe I should use mine again."
"Wait... again?" Takeo said, turning to her and his face was etched with worry. "Suzuki, you know the toll that maintaining a reality distortion takes and using it twice might kill you."
"At this rate." she said quietly. "We're all gonna die here. Syrren can't fight what I can't see but inside my distortion, he'll be bound by my rules."
I wanted to intervene but I was barely clinging to consciousness. My vision was tunneling and every heartbeat felt like a hammer against my ribs.
Suzuki stood tall, her hands trembling as she formed another had sign. "Reality Distortion: Graveyard of Final Judgment."
The fog spread across the hole but never reaching our knees and tombstones began emerging from the ground around us, engraved with names I couldn't read.
Syrren disappeared and in his place a massive stone statue of the demon appeared in the center of the graveyard. The chains binding the statue stretched downward into the earth, acting as anchors that held this nightmare reality in place. "Final Decree." Suzuki whispered.
The man was suddenly forced into visibility. He was standing near the edge of the pit, his face contorted with fury. He tried to jump to flee the boundary of the graveyard but the chains on the statue unraveled with the sound of a whip-crack and they lashed out, wrapping around his ankle and slamming him face-first into the ground.
More chains burst from the ground, attempting to pin him. He slashed at them with the dagger, deflecting what he could but the graveyard was relentless. Takeo forced himself forward, intercepting and landing a kick while the man was distracted.
The man skidded, whispering the incantation to summon more clones but the moment they appeared, the chains whipped through them and went straight for the real him.
They shoved him back and slammed him onto the stone base of the statue and as he tried to scramble away, the chains caught his wrists and neck stretching him taut against the monument. Another chain locked around his throat and the ground behind him split open – a massive black coffin rose slowly from that open ground, its lid creaking open.
Syrren emerged from within the darkness inside, grabbing the man by the torso and dragging him toward the coffin. The man struggled violently, screaming incantations and his screams were cut short as the lid slammed shut. The chains rewrapped themselves around the coffin and the entire thing plunged back into the earth.
A tombstone rose from the same spot. I leaned forward, squinting through the gloom to read the name engraved on the stone: Peter Williams.
The graveyard and the statue vanished, reality snapped back. We were back in the collapsed basement of the hospital. Suzuki fell to her knees, blood pouring from her nose again and Takeo went to her side in a second.
"I'm fine." Suzuki wheezed. "Get Miyu. Let's get out of here." She then pointed toward a narrow tunnel carved through the rubble. "That leads outside."
We limped out of that hellhole, four broken exorcists walking into the light. None of us spoke along the way out and by the time we cleared the hospital grounds, the sun was cresting over the horizon. We had spent the entire night in that nightmare.
The backup was out there parked in a line of black cars. Of course, they were on time for the cleanup.
A group of exorcists and medics ran toward us. Jasper was among the back but leaning against one of the cars, looking as pristine and punchable as ever. "You all look like crap." he said, his voice dripping with feigned pity.
"You know." I said, leaning heavily on a medic's shoulder. "A little hand while we were actually fighting in there would've been more helpful than your commentary."
Jasper turned his cold eyes to me. "Oh, I so wish you would've died in there."
I managed a faint smirk. "Well, life is full of disappointments kid. You'll learn that when you actually hit puberty."
They separated us, loading us into different cars and the moment I leaned back into the seat I closed my eyes. I woke up when the car door opened and we were back at the temple. The morning sun was too bright – stinging my eyes.
Doctors were already waiting for us with stretchers. I knew was able to walk but I let them lift me and they rolled me into a clean, sterile medical room.
A woman walked in and looked at my chart. "I see you didn't pass out like your friends." she said.
"Guess I'm lucky."
She placed her glowing hands over my chest, her spiritual energy rising and I felt a cool tingling sensation spread through my body. Her eyes suddenly widened and she pulled her hands back.
"What's the matter?" I asked.
"Your body was already repairing itself, slowly." she whispered. "But it's good because if it hadn't been, you would be dead by now."
I tried to sit up, my head spinning. "What do you mean?"
"I don't have a clue what you did back there." she said, pushing me back down. "But you pushed so far beyond your limits that your spiritual core began leaking energy into your neural pathways. That should have destroyed your body but somehow, the damage was being knit back together."
She shook her head, her hands glowing again as she resumed the treatment. "I'm just speeding up the process now and once I'm done, you need to rest for a long time."
I stared at the ceiling, her words echoing in my head. – I would have died.
"I'm all done." The woman said after what felt like an hour, she packed her kit and left without another word.
I lay there in the silence, the sunlight shifting across the floor. My body was repairing itself, the same way the wound in my stomach had did. They were too many questions and I had an experience as a detective but the more I looked into my own life the more everything felt as if it was written in a language I couldn't read.
What the hell am I? And that man back there, what did he expect me to become? But for now the questions didn't matter, the only thing that mattered was that we were still breathing.
I closed my eyes and let the silence of the temple finally pull me under.