He was right.
Even in my past life, I rarely used my magic for battle or vengeance. I had never wanted anything other than harmony and balance for Yahweh’s creations, as well as my own.
However, even if you back the softest kitten into a corner, you’re likely to get scratched. My magic ripped out of me, and I didn’t bother trying to control it. I let it spread through Heaven and relished in the corruption as it tainted every speck of light it touched. One moment, we were in a shining, bleak expanse of never-ending white. In seconds, the crisp white wisps turned to angry black storm clouds as I soaked them through with rot.
Art screamed as he died, and I ripped his demon out of his body as he perished. We watched him crumble into a wet pile of nothing next to the nameless angel who had tried to take the scythe from me.
Only Yahweh was able to withstand the blast, but I had known he would. Shem had not said to destroy him, which led me to believe he had plans for the God of Creation yet.
My assumption was proven correct when Shem started counting backward from ten as my death magic continued to tear into the well-dead Arteqoph.
Yahweh’s many faces contorted in rage and desperation as he weathered the storm of my power.
“Ten,” Shem began counting down, an evil smile curling across his lips.
With his forces destroyed, Yahweh seemed to have realized he truly had lost. With the look of someone who had nothing else to lose, he let his own magic explode from his body. The mist of his dead army gathered around him in a storm of flesh and bone. He wielded the storm of biomatter as viciously as I wielded my churning sea of rot and decay.
Our magics slammed into each other. Flocks of living birds exploded from Yahweh’s river of flesh, only to be torn down and turned to mold as they flew toward me.
“Nine,” Shem continued. I waited for Shemhazai to kick the scythe into the pit as Yahweh attacked, but he seemed confident in my ability to hold him off until he had finished his countdown.
Yahweh continued to grow more and more desperate as Shemhazai counted. He created larger and more violent creatures to attack us.
“Eight.” A great white shark swam through the air at breakneck speed only to explode into a spray of white decay.
“Seven.” A tyrannosaurus rex roared and stomped through the clouds with the force of a detonating skyscraper. I melted it into a puddle of ink.
“Six.” A nest of black widows appeared, and the spiders crawled up my legs, burying their vicious little fangs into my flesh. I laughed. Their venom could not harm me.
“Five.” A pack of saber-toothed tigers. I reduced them to wet chunks of rancid flesh.
“Four.” An entire fuckingherdof elephants. I laughed as I forced them to crumble into nothing.
“What is it they say about insanity, Yahweh? It’s doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result,” I taunted the angry god as I vanquished another slew of his creations.
“Three,” Shem continued. We were too evenly matched, and the angrier Yahweh became, the sloppier his attacks were.
“Two.” A violent troop of gorillas beating their chests. They barely made it a step before I reduced them to dust.
“One.” Shem finished.
Yahweh was mid-cast when his body jerked in agony. I held back on my next attack, watching curiously as the might of his magic flickered and then dwindled down to nearly a third of what it had been moments before.
What had been a violent cacophony of noise suddenly turned to a bone-crushing silence as our battle ground to a stop.
My eyes flickered down to the Sorter of Souls, and I gasped and realized it was slowing down.
Clink, grind, whrrrlll.
Clink… grind… whrrrlll.
Clink… grinnnnndddd….
Whrrrrrrrrlllllllllllllll…
The machine slowed to a near stop. Shem winked at me, and with a snap of his fingers, his shadowy hellcats manifested and swarmed Yahweh as he screamed. Without the power he collected from the Sorter of Souls, he was no longer strong enough to defend against Shem’s attack. I watched in awe as his shadow cats dragged the screaming god back toward the cross that Art had tried to crucify me to.
“Gabe, be a good boy and get him strung up. Lilith and I will be there in a moment.”
