Chapter 143: Astartes: Hold Still, Bro. Let Me Rinse That Out With the AK.
Time passed.
Inside the Temple of Eternal Night, nothing remained standing except Deacon Frost at the center of the altar.
The walls, the floor, the ceiling: all of it was coated in dark red residue. Even the air had a fine blood mist suspended in it.
Astartes One snapped the chainsword sideways.
The centrifugal force flung the flesh from the blade teeth in a long arc that hit the wall and stayed there.
Both of them looked toward Deacon, who was still absorbing the last of it.
At the same moment, Hawkeye, Natasha, and Matthew dropped through the gap the Astartes had made in the dome and came up with weapons on Deacon.
"Deacon Frost. If I were you, I wouldn't try anything from here." Natasha's gun was level, her voice flat. "Whatever comes next will be considerably worse than everything that came before."
She took in the altar around her. Nothing was moving. The answer was already forming without her wanting it to.
They'd moved fast from the moment the notification came through. It hadn't been fast enough. The Blood God Ritual had completed.
This is a problem. Her eyes narrowed slightly.
She'd handled operations that qualified as major incidents. This one was producing a kind of tension those hadn't. The previous ones hadn't carried a genuine threat to the entire human population.
On the other hand: Deacon hadn't triggered the Blood Sea yet. Hadn't started converting anyone. Which meant there was almost certainly a condition that still needed to be met before he could. A precondition he hadn't cleared.
Which meant stopping him from clearing it was still a viable path to mission success.
Deacon's gaze moved across his dead and dismembered forces without any visible reaction. When it reached Matthew and the others, what it carried was contempt and something that might have passed for pity.
The power flooding into him kept coming. He could feel himself climbing, strength and capability piling on, and the sensation was intoxicating. The world felt like something he had already won.
He was no longer Deacon Frost. He was something else now. The Blood God, in the flesh.
"Poor girl." His voice had a new quality to it. Something that hadn't been there before. He looked at Natasha. "You must have had a few drinks before you came. That's the only explanation for saying something that far from reality."
He spread his arms wide. Something like delight moved across his face.
"Allow me to make a proper introduction." Deacon Frost executed a sweeping bow, the kind that required a hat he didn't have. "I, Deacon Frost. The new Blood God."
"The one true light of the vampire clan. The ultimate being. Without weakness."
"Silver, sunlight, garlic. None of it touches me anymore. Not one of those things can cause me harm."
"If you're willing to kneel now, I'll make you my First Embrace as Blood God. The founding members of my vampire empire." He looked at them with the expression of someone dispensing a tremendous favor. "What do you say?"
Not far away, Matthew listened to this and let his mouth do something brief and unenthusiastic.
Ultimate being.
The last person who called himself the ultimate being was currently cosplaying as a rock in deep space. And you're calling yourself the ultimate being?
Bold.
Natasha and Hawkeye stood in front of Deacon's pitch with their minds completely unmoved.
Partly because the pitch was genuinely terrible.
Partly because the odds were visibly in their favor right now, and he was still trying to recruit them.
To give Deacon a concrete sense of how his persuasion had landed, Hawkeye skipped the discussion, drew, and fired.
A silver-tipped arrow went through Deacon's eye socket and came out the back of his skull.
The death Hawkeye had expected didn't happen.
Instead, Deacon raised one hand, reached to the back of his head, and pulled the arrow out. Unhurried. Not a drop of blood. The wound the arrow had left closed over completely in the space of a single breath.
Hawkeye watched his attack produce nothing and spoke with appropriate seriousness. "He wasn't bluffing."
"I see it." Natasha's eyes had something careful in them.
Matthew watched the two of them go back and forth and felt something twitch at the corner of his mouth. He'd had enough. "What exactly are you two deliberating about? Just hit him."
Before the sentence was fully out, two massive dark shapes had already moved.
Deacon still had the smile on his face. The superior one, the one that said none of this was relevant to him.
He had just completed the Blood God Ritual. The power was surging through him, roaring, his perception sharpened to a point it had never been at before. He was certain he could track any movement, react to anything coming before it arrived.
Some things, though, you can see clearly and still not be able to stop.
Astartes One's frame converted into a blur under the powered armor's output. The speed was completely out of proportion to the size.
Deacon's pupils didn't have time to contract. An armored boot had already connected with the outer face of his right knee.
The crack was clean and sharp.
His right leg folded at an angle it wasn't designed for. He lost his base and dropped to one knee, the impact driving the stone floor beneath him to pieces, dust rising in a ring.
The surprise registered briefly in his eyes.
My power. My speed. The divine strength I just acquired.
How did a single kick put me on the ground?
The thought hadn't finished forming when the second shadow covered him.
Astartes Two stepped in and brought the chainsword up with both hands.
The teeth tore a screaming arc through the air as the blade came down, trailing red, directly onto the crown of Deacon's skull.
From the top of his head to his groin. One stroke.
The chainsword's teeth spun at full speed, churning flesh and bone and organ into a single red slurry.
Both halves of the body separated left and right.
They hadn't touched the floor yet when the blood pouring from the split began to move. Fine tendrils of it reached out from both sides and pulled the halves back together.
Bone relocated. Muscle fibers twisted back into alignment as though they had their own intentions. Skin sealed over at visible speed.
One blink. Deacon was whole again.
"You miserable insects!"
"How dare you!"
He turned his head toward the Astartes beside him.
The arrogant fury hadn't even finished forming on his face when Astartes One's hand was already moving. Five fingers closed around Deacon's hair like a set of iron tongs, yanked his head sharply down, and held it there.
While One had him pinned, Two picked up an AK that had fallen from one of the dead vampires, and fed the barrel into Deacon's open mouth.
Whatever Deacon had been about to say was cut off at the source.
Then came the rinse cycle.
Rat-tat-tat-tat.
Rounds poured from the barrel directly into Deacon's mouth and went wherever they pleased from there.
The noise was physically painful to be near.
As for Deacon, who was the one currently having his mouth rinsed with an AK, he had a more immediate understanding of the experience than anyone else in the room.
He couldn't share it, for obvious reasons.
He was, in fact, the Blood God's vessel now. Every vulnerability had been stripped away. His recovery was operating at a level it had never reached before. None of this meant he couldn't feel it.
Being rinsed with an AK was, it turned out, a bit much even for the new standard.
30+advance chapters at patreon.com/Eatinpieces