Not Another Enemy Raid IX

Irwin's gambit had been a success. The sister, in their haste to capture their betrayer, had forgotten to resume the ritual.

Of course, he was still hanging on the central pillar, with eight monsters hanging at his every movement. He was sure as all hell that they would mow him down once he tried to escape.

'Escaping isn't the problem,' He thought to himself, 'It's taking Anthony with me. Where the hell is he, anyway?'

If his team had done Plan C, then that meant they couldn't find Anthony in the apartment building. The sisters would certainly kill him once the birthing of the vessel was over, but not before.

They would need him to pacify Linda, which meant that they must have him captive. Irwin knew the answer almost instantaneously as he looked to his left peripheral and saw what appeared to be rebar shaped into a cube.

A prison cell, three unoccupied with one housing a human that Irwin couldn't get a thorough look at.

"Uh, hey. Are you… are you going to kill me if I speak too much?" He asked the monsters surrounding him and, to his relief, found them only gazing at him with apathetic–more dead than alive–eyes. "Oh, thank g–Chuck. Hey, Anthony! Anthony, is that you? If so, wake the fuck up, man. Wake up, you narcissistic adulterer!"

The man's head popped up like a startled rooster, turning it towards Irwin before groaning with delight. "Ri…cthard. Here." Anthony clanged his palms against the cell bars, pleading in utter agony and with an apparent lisp.

"Good. I'm gonna get you out of here. Hang tight. Heh." Irwin giggled as the metal spikes embedded into his organs inched closer into the other side of his skin.

His eyes glowed with a purple hue as he invigorated his magical energy, powering up his damaged body whilst keeping a watchful eye at the movements of the monsters. Once he saw that they had yet to move, Irwin bought a fifty-credit Angel's Grace which was just enough to invoke Scattering Wind.

"Ol famungal christeos ordongraph!" The Enochian language used by the angels were a derivative of Latin, so it was easy enough for Irwin to memorize and add to his repertoire of language units.

He had actually learned from Lady Anastasia that the Gmicalzoma famously created by Leon Vinci and was used by most humans on Earth were actually written by his father, Men of Letter Fabian Vinci of the former Italian Chapter–the chapter was burned down by the Catholic Church under the covert urging of the Grand Coven as retaliation for raiding one of their castles.

It was a nice little factoid that kept him from floating away from his original mission as he transformed into the draft that blew from the entrance of the basement. He initially had trouble reforming into a human being whenever he became literal air.

He had once joked that he would become 'air-headed' once the spell took effect, bogged down only by a singular purpose or, in the Island Raid's circumstance, a singular emotion. This time, however, he thought of escaping with Anthony Brown and the latter winning the senatorial race; that thought snowballed into Anthony being a vice-president who puppets the American president and appointing him as the director of a government funded monster hunter agency.

His mind was as fast as the velocity of a hurricane and when the metals spikes that had been dislodged off his body dropped to the ground, he forced himself to reform into his human form.

The transformation took only a second, but that was enough for the monsters that guarded him to converge on his previous location.

His head formed first, which allowed him to see the monster's claw into the central pillar with reckless abandon, drawing blood and granite without so much as a mote of hesitation. And when they realized that he was no longer there, Irwin had already reformed into a corporeal form.

He crossed his arms and chanted once more, this time urging his magical energy into his arms.

"Ossa patris mei me pascunt robore, sinite fratres bellandi cum honore. hostem tuum me perdam et ab hoc mundo esse desinam…" He bellowed forth as a streak of purple energy protruded out his central knuckles and forming a jagged spike made out of bones and bits of enchanted flesh.

The Osseous Blade made their debut in the battlefield and Irwin would be lying if he said that he didn't love it so goddamn much.

Just the sheer sight of the bone claw made his heart palpitate, and, just his luck, he got himself a few target practices.

"Let's go, bubs!"

He rushed forward just as the monsters saw his form, swift as the wind that had carried him and deftly as a cat high on catnips. The bone claw felt weird at first, weightless at the front end yet it had a certain carry to the bone connected to his knuckles–akin to a walking stick or a gentleman's cane. Yet when a blade connected to the neck of a bony monster, he felt an energy guiding him on how to apply the proper force and how to utilize his superior angles to reduce the energy consumed by the strike.

With what felt like eternity, the bone blade entered the front of the monster's neck and it contiguously glided through much of its bony interior. Irwin had to duck down so that the blade could slide downwards before exiting the body through the small of its back.

Like a flesh of butter that had been passed through a hot knife, the head, upper limbs, the spine and the surrounding skin around those body parts sloughed off the rest of its body. It flopped to the ground like a wet fish while its lower limb careens off a few feet away.

The smoothness with which Irwin flayed the bony monster startled not only a hum, but the rest of its kin as well. Surprisingly intelligent and sapient, they backed off in fear as Irwin turned towards them with a twirl of his hands.

Skittering in the darkness, the monsters failed to realize that Irwin was outnumbered; their sense of self-preservation taking priority rather than the orders of their creator. The boon of sentience was the ability to see reason and its bane was the ability to reason–fear being a reasonable assumption in this scenario.

Given that they were not actively hunting him, Irwin retreated backwards with his blades aimed menacingly at the monsters. They stepped forward once for every five steps Irwin took, which meant that he reached Anthony's cell without a monster in sight.

Seeing no possible way to unlock the cell at first glance, Irwin slashed the bone claw at the rebar. It slid off easily; the sisters were clearly out of budget when they made the cell.

"Hey, bud. Let's get you out of here." Irwin entered the cell and caught Anthony when he tried to stand up, hooking the latter's arm into his neck while carefully maneuvering his bone claw to not rip the congressman's colon out of his body.

He checked his Magik Reserves and saw that it was just shy of three percent off half, which meant that he could teleport out of here with Anthony.

"But should I?" He thought aloud, the bone claw dissipating into a puff of purple smoke. The action caused the hiding monsters to step out of the shadows, snarling and growling like they weren't cowering in fear earlier.

"W-what do you mean? We have to… to get out of here." Anthony pleaded, gripping Irwin's clothes tightly. "Please… please…"

Irwin chuckled, "Look at you, forgetting about your son and wife already. I like that in a man."

Before Anthony could take back his words, Irwin's eyes glowed with a purple light. "Ol famungal christeos ordongraph!"

●●18:33 P.M. - Gordon Walker●●●

"We're not negotiating with monsters, pagan gods, and goddamn terrorists!" Bobby slammed his fist into the table, startling the poor folks that wanted burgers for dinner and the starving junkies.

"Respectfully, sir, this is not your choice to make." Scott had a rebuttal in his mouth as soon as Bobby said those words. "The boss is still in there and, clearly, all they want is Linda. His life has more value than hers."

Kubrick grunted in pain before spitting out a globule of saliva and blood, bandages restraining around his jaw and the crown of his head. "She has a baby in her belly. We aren't going to exchange two lives, much less the lives of an unborn child, for some playboy billionaire."

"Millionaire." Dean corrected Kubrick from his table.

"Playboy millionaire. Thank you." Kubrick corrected himself. "Are we even sure he wants to be saved? To be traded for a civilian?"

"Yes!" "Fuck yeah." "I'm pretty sure." "For five civilians, I think."

Seeing all four men disagreeing with him, Kubrick chose to conveniently shut up but not before sighing in disgrace. Gordon chuckled at his friend, grateful to have his company during their escape from the storage room.

Gratefulness; a strange word for him. One would expect a man of his persona and caliber to never attempt a positive emotion like being grateful, but he knew that having emotions such as gratefulness was what was keeping him alive.

He knew his reckless, violent killing spree of monsters would soon end, and with it, his life. He only needed enough time to let the new generation of hunters continue his work, enough time to make a dent in the monster's population to give humanity a fighting chance.

That was why he agreed to be employed under Richard Greythorne and why he was going along with his plans, even when they're clearly sub-par. Hell, they were forced to fight off three pagan gods and barely survived thanks to the Explosion Tags Kubrick had planted.

If not for the dozens of the miraculous health potions Richard had stored in the burger joint beforehand, then he would be a paraplegic by now or worse, being cannibalized by false gods.

Garth's voice cutting through the arguments cut his musings short, "Hey, dudes, Linda's awake."