Chapter 27: Break Stuff

Instead of my head exploding into tiny morsels, the mystical discharge passed through my body and left a massive crater in the ground.

Somehow, I lifted upward.

Trying to gain a sense of what was happening, I glanced down and saw my legs straddled against Hellie’s back. In the rising motion, Hellie’s upper body jerked forward as she swiftly smacked Gluttony’s Auracroft shotgun from his hand and knocked his body wildly to our left far, into the distance.

The set of sequences happened so fast. I could only imagine that Hellie had phased from the ground underneath me, pulled me into her incorporeal frequency, returned solid after the blast had passed through us, then disarmed and batted Gluttony with her powerful paw.

After Hellie landed, she raced me to the edge of Tiny Jem’s home, then lowered her head. I slid off onto the grass to the sound of crackling glass under my sneakers. Happy that we were both alive, I reached out and joyously petted Hellie’s fur.

“Come on, bitch. Come get me!” The globby tones of Gluttony’s bellicose words cut my joy short.

Without hesitation, Hellie shook off my affections and made an explosive start down to Gluttony. From my location, I only made out his shape sulking in the darkness and bellows of smoke rolling off him.

He was just too far away to see.

Hellie ran along a diagonal path from the house to clash with her taunter. To see what was happening, I shifted into Hellie’s vision. For a period, her galloping motion disoriented me, but I was able to make out Gluttony in the rising smoke encircling him. He was clenching and opening his hands, throwing his arms in and out, baiting her to move closer.

Curious enough, he didn’t have his Boomstick. I quickly scoped within the width of her vision and spotted it. It had a strange, ever-expanding, orange phosphorus glow.

My stomach dropped. He was flooding it with power.

Hellie, stop! Pull back! Don’t be dumb. He’s banking on your aggression.

But as sad as it was to say, per her pattern, she didn’t stop. Instinctively, I stepped forward, calling out to her with my body. When I did, again, I heard the grinding of glass under my feet.

I looked down. Hellie had left me in the heart of the glass I needed to make my hailstorm. She wasn’t dumb, I was. It took a second, but I fell into synch with Hellie’s plan. She was the one baiting Gluttony, making it focus on her, not me.

No longer overwhelmed by the strain of Tiny Jem’s blasts, I focused on the glass and lifted an immense mass of it a few inches off the ground. Feeling fired up, I pushed myself to build and release a push spell with vigor on the level of the one I had used to carve a ravine in the woods, but the physical pain that I felt messed with my conjuring.

Hellie was almost on him, and I could sense she was waiting on my command.

But I had to get the timing right.

It was everything.

So I held on a bit longer, anticipating the exact moment that Gluttony would summon his shotgun.

Then he gave me the signal with his words. “That’s it, you stupid hellhound. Come on! I don’t know how you survived my first attack, but you won’t survive this.”

Hellie, phase now.

As soon as she vanished, the exchange of energies between Gluttony and I was swift. As I had expected, Gluttony materialized his shotgun into his hand and released a thunderous, single discharge. It left a glowing trail from the tip of the shotgun to the obstruction in its path, Tiny Jem’s home. The concussive blast collapsed the roof and sent me reeling, but not before I had released the violent hailstorm of glass.

“No, my fucking house.”

The voice of Tiny Jem burbled out of the mouth of the smoke plumes, but not even a second later, I heard his screams of agony as the glass shards perforated every part of his body.

I pulled myself off the ground and reacclimated to Hellie’s eyes. She was looming over Gluttony’s mutilated body. All around him, I saw the residual results of my glass onslaught—gashes and long streaks in the dirt and splinters of destroyed trees scattered everywhere. As Hellie opened her mouth to consume him, his external smoke flooded out into a massive ground fog. Catching us both off guard, a jelly-like substance leapt from the obscured covering, and Hellie’s vision went dark.

I dropped her vision and darted toward them. As I got closer, I could see Hellie’s head encased by the gunk. She fought back wildly, batting and bucking against the icky substance trying to bind and blanket her entire body.

With my hands, I oscillated between a push and pull spell to detach the glob from Hellie. Lumps and chunks gave way under the force of my power but were replenished all the same.

Nearing the edge of the smoke, I stopped. It was looking bad for Hellie. Her movement had become more restrained, and she was slowing.

Words about the hellhounds from Rules of the Black Arts for Advanced Users flashed in my mind like a schematic: strengths, weaknesses, and powers. I had no clue if what I remembered would have any effect on the dark, bubbling blob, but it was the path that I had settled on. Shitty part about it: I knew Hellie would have to draw energy from me, and I didn’t know if it was going to hurt or not. But what the hell? She was at a point of no return. It was worth a shot, so I passed the idea into Hellie’s head.

Light up, girl.

Surprisingly, Hellie and I both erupted into an inferno of hellfire that swelled over our bodies. The fire burned bright and fast and caused the dark jelly substance to recoil. When the fire dissipated, I literally felt a grueling and taxing amount of energy sucked from my body. Shit, it felt like my soul.

I collapsed to the ground and yelled out to Hellie, “Get out of here now.”

I saw her pause, confused, but she followed my command and ran off. At the same time, I felt the slime of the goop rushing over my body.

“You’re dumber than I thought, sending your nuclear option away. You all but guaranteed your death. I’m going to enjoy rotting you until you are a husk.”

Gluttony’s words seeped into my thoughts as the warm blob oozed up to my neck, paralyzing me.

Before my mouth was covered, I shot back, “No, I put my finger on the nuclear button! And I’m the only one who can take it off, so release me if you don’t want all of your precious collection utterly destroyed.”

“What?!”

“I’ll let you in on something: Hellie and I have a protected mental connection that no one but us can hear. When I told her to get…what I really told her was…to go down into Tiny Jem’s museum and take her sweet time breaking his collectibles.”

The slime stopped just under my lip, which I puckered tightly—and, I suspected uglily—to keep it from entering my mouth. There was rustling and trembling, a struggle to continue—but the ick receded, as did the smoke. Before me, I watched Gluttony and Tiny Jem’s forms shift rapidly between them. In the end, Tiny Jem took control.

“It’s still my body, motherfucker,” Tiny Jem cried out as the smoke dissipated.

Unfortunately, with the smoke gone, Tiny Jem lifted off the ground and stood in front of me, completely naked. He had his hand covering the nasty wound on his abdomen—made by the sword—unhealed and leaking blood. I considered it a spiteful parting gift from Gluttony.

“Call your bitch off. Fuck, where’s my cell?” From his confused actions, it was still safe to say that his human form was baked as ever.

“There’s no sense in activating the panic walls. She can phase, remember? Hellie’s already in there. Can’t you hear?”

“I surrendered. Tell her to stop. We can work together. I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

I didn’t say a word.

After Tiny Jem ran off, I picked up the Boomstick. During his wobbling journey to the house, I saw him pause for a moment, realizing what he had stupidly done as he doubled over in pain.

“Heal me, you motherfucker. If I die, we both die, you dick.”

Despite their shared body, Tiny Jem and Gluttony were conflicted. I understood that the moment I heard Tiny Jem pleading for help. I also caught on that Tiny Jem had steered the body when he took over and pitched me out of his house for destroying his authentic superhero costumes.

In the end, Tiny Jem had done what all gluttons do: sell themselves out for the stuff they consume.

I took my sweet time walking back to his house for three reasons. I swore my life force had been depleted. Two, I was in freaking pain, and three, I wanted to give Tiny Jem time to watch his prized possessions being ripped apart.

Walking up the deck, I followed Tiny Jem’s blood trail inside the house and down to the lower floor that contained the museum. From the looks of the splattering on the marble floors, he had lost more and more blood as he got closer to his destination.

When I entered the grand room full of several generations’ worth of memorabilia, I immediately spotted Hellie. She was serene, lying in a pile of rubble, chewing on an authentically clothed mannequin. I didn’t even try to deduce its movie origin.

The faint sounds of sniffling and moaning drew me to Tiny Jem. He was on the other side of the area, sifting through the junk pile at his feet.

Everything in this once glorious collection—one-of-a-kind movie props, posters, toys, original edition comics, and signed memorabilia—had been shredded by either her razor-sharp teeth or claws.

My heart ached, considering I was also a fan of entertainment. Unfortunately, none of it was salvageable.

But I quickly changed my tune after I heard Tiny Jem and Gluttony’s voices overlapping and babbling.

“People were willing to sell their souls to create or own these precious treasures, and they were all mine. They were magnificent conduits of esoteric origins and messages. All overflowing with the delicious energy I loved to feast on.”

Tiny Jem continued to hobble through the museum, picking up anything he could salvage. He had a mass of garbage in his arms that continued to shed each time he added something new.

Finally, he stopped. After picking up a broken action figure, he sank onto the floor and into his own pool of blood. Then he turned his attention to me.

“I remember enjoying slitting the throat of the man who tried to hardball me over this. Screw you, Malvic, you liar! It’s okay. I’m happy knowing you’ll be the first to fail.”

He then started laughing and covered himself in the junk nearest to him, almost as if he were trying to siphon the last bits of residual dark energy that remained.

“My brothers and sisters will resurrect me when they become the new gods.”

“Hellie, I’m sick of hearing his voice. Eat this son of a bitch.”

Hellie raised her head from gnawing on her movie prop chew toy and instantly pounced on Tiny Jem.

As much as I loathed the bastard, it was excruciatingly hard to watch him being torn limb from limb and to see the scattering of his flesh, bone, and blood. Hellie’s chewing made his body bob back and forth, and after a short while it became surreal, like a rocking and broken human prop from a movie. But above all it was the sound that resonated with me the most. Hearing the snapping, grinding against Hellie’s teeth, and the guzzling of his bits down her throat almost made me vomit and close my eyes.

But I didn’t turn away, because I had six more, just like him, to go.