Evil Wears a Face

The final chamber was the largest by far, a dozen meters wide in either direction, with a welcoming committee three or four times our number composed of more mutated, semi-human, or perhaps formerly human things.

Behind them, atop a raised dais, stood their dark lord and master, strong enough to resist whatever had corrupted its brethren into mindless beasts. A broken body was sprawled at its feet. The lips were streaked with fresh blood.

It was a human with demonic corruption in its veins. An accurate and descriptive summary of its corrupted mutations would be "Vampyre." Of course, the pile of blood-drained corpses scattered around it.

The vampire sniffed the air, its eyes like two clumps of clotted blood as it studied us. It exuded an aura of equal parts arrogance and confidence, "I smell the humans," its nose wrinkled its disgust, "and filthy half-breeds."

He shook his head condescendingly like a teacher admonishing a pupil, "Humanity thinks too much of itself. You, sad creatures, are born insane and believe that the few of you can defeat me or the greatest power in existence – a power that I serve that now rewards me! I have collected my offerings to the Darkness and brought them together. The last few required sacrifices are made!"

The flickering torchlight revealed the vampire's skin to be pale off-white with cracks and wrinkles like dirty old linen. The smell it exuded was terrible, worse than anything I'd ever smelled, part rotting animal with tones of decaying vegetable.

Eight alters lay scattered around the cavern, and I recognized several of the defaced hanging icons. There was one altar for each major religion. Blood was an ingredient and a tool. Holy icons and artefacts had been drowned and disfigured with blood and clumsy blows.

The face of evil, at the heart of this den of corruption, blood lust, and madness. It had killed and gorged itself on the death of innocents and then proceeded to defile and corrupt all it touched.

It would either kill or corrupt and debase all of Humanity unless we stopped it here and now. Evil truly has a face of Darkness. And this is but one of the many.

Its eyes turned bright red with hostility, and his horde of twisted followers advanced with smooth, precise lockstep that was somehow wrong. Something was inhuman about their movements and posture as if their skeletons or feet were deformed.

Nobody waited for the order and began strafing the advancing horde with gunfire. However unnatural their gait was, they were still fast. We had trained for this. I had prepared for this as we formed a short firing line and unleashed our vindictive justice.

The carnage amplified itself exponentially as gore and entrails splattered everywhere. It was like a hive mind was watching and guiding our actions as we rose and charged, as one without words or orders. We flew and slew through the ranks of mutants, covering each other as blades, claws, and gunfire cut through the enemy's ranks.

Flesh parted with surgical efficiency, I ducked low beneath a swipe and lashed out to sever a malformed leg at the knee. Before it had time to fall, I'd lunged, tearing its throat apart with my fangs, even as my hands plunged into the chests of two of the tainted humans before me.

I pulled back and spun, throwing the two corpses aside. Tamara was suddenly airborne, her forward flip letting her feet smash into the face of something before riding it into the ground, shattering bone.

She seemed to dance a path of death through them, and I followed her lead, dropped my shoulder like a war hammer, and smashed more of the demonic mutants to the ground, where they were trampled by their own.

The taste of blood was heavy in my mouth, its heady scent like a perfume that flooded my senses. I stole a glance at the vampire and did a double-take. He was glowing with power, radiating a deep purple light as the ground beneath his feet began to bleed. Wisps of smoke danced with a dark passion and malice, slowly growing in thickness and speed around him.

A war cry echoed over the melee and blood, and Tamara was suddenly airborne. Blood flowed, defying gravity, up into a wall. Bullets struck but seemed to melt against the boiling red protective barrier around the vampire. It did little to stop her as she dived through, her claws raking open bloody furrows through the vampire's chest.

She lunged back for a second strike as the vampire flicked its hand dismissively in her direction. A bolt of red and white light punched her back, tendrils of light arching across her body.

The blood limb rose from the ground and battered her before enveloping her from head to toe. Still visible through the blood that held her high above the frantic battle, her arms snapped out, and her back arched as she twitched and jerked in a blaze of agony.

The poorly aimed swipe and follow-up were blocked before I pushed the creature back, letting the shotgun rip through it at point-blank range. Its blood splattered my face as the buckshot tore through its flesh.

My compact submachine guns rose as my fingers tightened on the trigger, spraying death into several mutants, reducing them to bullet-riddled heaps of perforated flesh. My right hand sent bullets ripping through its chest and stomach.

The smell of blood could not compete with that of cordite and gunpowder as I dropped out the spent magazines and slammed into fresh ones. The twin chemical scents filled my senses as shell casings danced a ballet of death in the dim light.

Only a dozen made it through some cloak of Darkness or shield that devoured my bullets. The few wounds I managed to cause healed in seconds. It cackled, "You shall witness my ascent, and then you will die as I feast upon your flesh and crack your bones for their marrow."

"I will keep you alive as I feast upon your flesh, so you can savour the unique, exquisite experience before I take your souls as my playthings!"

It threw Tamara aside with casual indifference, and I scrambled towards her, barely able to catch and cushion her landing as we slammed into the cavern wall. Tentacles of blood erupted from the ground and began to encircle the vampire as a river of purple energy intermingled with the twirling blood.

Our medic was dead, and so were three or four others. Tamara was in agony, her body struggling to heal a catastrophic injury. Her own body would kill itself and, by extension her.

There was no quick death for her. It was going to be slow. The open wounds across her face and neck were nothing but opened flesh, without bleeding, and it took several tries before she gave up trying to form words.

I looked around, and there were three legionnaires, a battered werewolf, and one initiate. They'd formed a protective cordon around us, firing and using grenades, incendiaries, everything. The rest were dead, and we were not far from joining them. Logic said that reinforcements should have arrived before the fight started.

Logic is such a liar. All we could do was watch the whirling maelstrom of blood and black lightning. It imploded atop the vampire, spraying blood and entrails in an explosive arc across the walls and ceiling, some twenty feet overhead.

The cavern was suddenly silent, with only the lingering echoes and scents of carnage that lingered like a bad hangover. All that remained of the vampire was a pool of blood and greenish-black fluid.

Then, the world began to shake, and it started to rumble. It began with a boom.