The Undead Spider #97
The blade swing momentum carried the scarred leader past Jake while he rolled across the bar floor and came up behind the creature's back with a fist already moving.
The mechanical arm drove into the base of the demon's spine, and the leader staggered forward into the counter's edge with a sound like a tree falling.
Then the room collapsed into itself.
Two of the creatures from the tables were already airborne when Jake turned, their elongated limbs reaching and their needle-row mouths open, and he fired a web line at the nearest table leg and let the ceiling guide the arc of his swing.
He came through the gap between them at head height, his feet connecting with the first one's chest and sending it into the second, and he landed on a table that buckled under him and launched himself again before it fully gave way, threading through the rafters and swinging light fixtures.
Jake felt Constantine's eyes on him from somewhere in the smoke for a breath before a different set of sounds told him the man had stopped watching and started working.
"Right then, you lot," came the voice from behind the far end of the bar, gravel-dry and unimpressed. "Let's not pretend this ends well for anyone with a post code in Hell."
A crack of syllables, hard consonants in no language Jake had studied, and a flash of copper light swallowed two creatures whole and left their outlines seared into the floorboards.
Jake landed, planted, and scanned.
The room had changed. What he'd read as patrons bolting for the exits had slowed, stopped, and was now reversing, men and women in ordinary coats and ordinary shoes turning back toward the center of the room with eyes lit green from somewhere behind the iris, their mouths stretching into shapes that faces weren't supposed to make, and then they weren't men and women anymore, the flesh reshaping from the inside out in a sound like wet wood splitting.
"New additions," Jake said.
"Nergal must be having a night," Constantine called back, and Jake could hear the controlled edge of a man who was burning through his options faster than he'd expected. "That's not pocket change. That's a proper investment. Means he's serious."
Three of the newly shaped ones came at Jake from the left, their movements twitching between registers, fast in the bones but slow through the tendons, and he took the first by the wrist and turned with it, using the creature's own momentum to bring it horizontal, and then he swung -- the arm in a full rotation -- and the body cleared a table's width of space before the webbing he'd already fired caught it midair, wrapping it against a column where it screamed and burned green and strained against the silk.
The second came for his shoulder. Jake moved sideways with it and used the step to drive his knee up into the third one's ribs and watched the creature fold around the impact before he grabbed the second by the back of the neck and sent it through the column beside its companion with his left arm.
The mechanical fingers didn't register the impact. That was still strange, when he noticed it -- the absence of pain, the arm working without negotiation, just mechanics and intention.
He found his footing again and checked the room. The scarred leader had recovered from the counter and was working back toward the center, blade raised, and behind him the green-eyed crowd pressed inward from the walls.
Jake committed a swing at the leader, switched his feet midair and his left foot come down onto the leader's shoulder, stepped off the man's frame the way you'd use a rock in a crossing, and the kick folded into a flip that brought him down behind the leader's back, and he fired twice before he landed -- two web shots, both ankles -- and when the scarred man hit the floor Jake dropped a knee between his shoulder blades and leaned close.
"Stay."
He straightened and looked at the remaining cluster.
"Hey." He dusted his hands against each other, a gesture that felt out of place and was meant to. "If I kill these people, does it count?"
Silence behind him.
He glanced back.
The space where Constantine had been was occupied only by the copper-burnt outlines and the residue of a cigarette, the smoke still unraveling from the filter where it had been balanced against the counter edge.
The sense arrived a fraction late and a cold understanding settled through his chest as the creatures around him all turned in the same instant, their green-lit eyes finding him with the synchronised weight of something that had just received new instructions, and the sound they made was low and collective and certain.
He looked at his reflection in the cracked mirror behind the bar. The reflection stared back -- a man in a tan trenchcoat with messy blonde hair and a cigarette between his lips. The glamor was perfect, a sensory mask that had redirected the entire room's hunger toward him while the real target slipped out the back.
Of course.
"You've run out of road, Constantine," the scarred leader rasped from the floor, speaking to Jake. "Your friend is smart to abandon you."
"I'm not Constantine," Jake said.
The leader's eyes flickered. "I'm not falling for your tricks."
They came at him in a wave.
He went up and he swung the full length of the room above the reaching hands and the green flames that licked up from below and turned his webs to dead silk as fast as he could fire them. The webs burned through within seconds, the strands curling and blackening, and he adjusted, firing shorter, swinging lower, staying mobile because standing still in this room had stopped being an option.
One came off the floor and matched his altitude, gray-translucent like the others but with a membrane spread between its elongated arms, that served as wings.
He let it come, let it reach, and at the last moment he spun around it and fired a web at its trailing ankle and used the arc to slingshot it back down into the bodies below, and the crash of it bought him four seconds and a clear line to the broken door.
He took it.
Outside the air was cold and sharp and he was three stories up before he'd fully processed the exit, the navigation thread already pulsing in the corner of his vision, the route blinking and active, and he followed it.
It led him toward a construction site a few blocks away, the skeletal frame of a new building rising into the gray sky like a rusted cage. As he approached, he saw a faint, grey-blue light flickering between the steel beams, followed by a sudden burst of crimson that didn't match the demonic flames he had seen in the bar.
Jake perched on the edge of a crane, his lenses zooming in on the scene below. Constantine was there, backed against a concrete pillar, his hands glowing with a desperate, failing light as he held a barrier against a figure that made the other demons look like children.
The giant stood nearly eight feet tall, his body a mass of dark, knotted muscle that seemed to absorb the surrounding light. He didn't wear armor, but his skin was covered in a network of glowing red runes that pulsed with the rhythm of a heavy, ancient heart. In his right hand, he held an axe -- a massive, sawtooth thing made of a metal that looked like frozen smoke, its blade weeping a dark energy that ate away at the concrete floor whenever it touched.
As soon as Jake saw the axe, the hunger in his mind flared into a white-hot roar. The familiar physical pull that made his hand ache and his fingers curl toward the weapon without his permission.
"Look, I've explained this," Constantine was saying, a new symbol spinning into place and holding for two seconds before it fractured. "The debt isn't mine anymore, is it, technically speaking, given what you did to the Newcastle lad, you've got to factor that in, there are rules even in Hell, mate, you wrote half of them yourself--"
The enormous figure raised the axe and the air pressure changed.
"And here I thought you were escaping," Jake said, his voice carrying over the wind as he dropped from the crane and landed on a steel beam twenty feet above them.
Constantine's eyes flickered upward, a flash of genuine surprise crossing his features before he adjusted his grip on the magic in his palms.
A burst of crimson flames blew to his direction from the demon lord's free hand. Jake dropped below the flames and held suspended himself upside-down with a web.
"Your new friend is welcoming."
Constantine didn't stop working, his fingers weaving a new pattern even as the giant's shadow loomed over him.
"Good thing you found me mate," Constantine grunted, the words sounding like they were being squeezed out of a vice. "Was starting to think you'd decided to stay for another round at the pub."
"Really," Jake replied, his lenses fixed on the giant with the axe. "Were you counting on it when you left me with the bill."
"Can't blame a bloke for trying to get out of trouble," Constantine said, a sharp, cynical edge to his voice as he braced himself against a sudden surge of pressure from the giant's aura.
"I don't," Jake said. His eyes tracked back to the axe, the pull of it working at the edges of his attention like a sound just below hearing. "Curious how you plan to get out of this next one though."
Constantine let out a sharp, guttural shout and slammed his palms together, a wave of blue light erupting from his hands and striking the giant's chest. It didn't do much more than stagger the monster for a second, but it was enough to buy a moment of space. Constantine scrambled back, his feet kicking up dust as he tried to find a better angle, his eyes darting toward Jake as if measuring the worth of his presence.
The giant recovered instantly, his feet planting in the concrete with a force that left cracks radiating from his heels. He swung the axe in a wide, horizontal arc that carved through the concrete pillar as if it were made of sand, the dark energy trailing behind the blade like a funeral shroud. Constantine threw himself to the ground, the wind from the strike ruffling his hair as the pillar collapsed above him, sending a cloud of dust and debris into the air.
Constantine rose from the dust, coughing and spitting blood, his hands already moving again. He looked at the giant, found Jake's new position, and a crooked, bloody grin spreading across his face.
"Don't just stand there watching the show, mate," Constantine shouted, his accent thicker and more rasping than ever. "Get in on the fun and maybe we can sit down for another drink."
"You're lucky I know your reputation," Jake was already in the air, swinging towards Nergal. "But try tricking me again and I'll do what this demon lord is failing to accomplish."
The axe caught the light again and the pull in his chest tightened.
He was going to need that axe.