Book Six, Chapter 90: The Sacrifice

Kimberly thought they were making great headway.

The offerings that they had made to the Heaven King worked wonderfully to counter any magic that the cultists could brew up. Most of their opponents were unnamed, lowly hooded figures, and they acted like it.

She couldn’t express it, but when she put her hair back in a ponytail to activate her Scrunchie trope and her Mettle surged, she felt such confidence in a fight. Not arrogance. She didn’t feel like she was unbeatable. She felt confident in knowing what “type” of opponent she was up against.

She struggled to put it into words, but she had felt it in every storyline since Stray Dawn.

High Mettle was supposed to make you a better fighter, but it wasn’t clear how. It wasn’t like she just learned martial arts because of it. It had been Convenient Backstory that had made her an expert in self-defense.

No.

High Mettle gave her a sense of her opponents. Antoine had attested to feeling it, too. In Antoine Stone and The Sunken Cradle, it had been Antoine’s fighting sense that had saved the day on multiple occasions. The Vets had spoken about it too, but they hadn’t described how it would feel.

It was an innate understanding of how the enemy would act and react. They were movie bad guys, after all. They had a script to follow.

Would they group up on you? No. These cultists took turns.

Would they attack from a distance? No. They might zoom overhead like giant crows, but the only enemy that used their shadow magic from a distance was Tom.

The lowly cultist tried to punch, grab, and even kick, but their shadowy magic only enhanced their strength. They didn’t try to cast spells even though it seemed they could.

Kimberly grabbed an oncoming attacker by his Eternal Savers Club vest, twisted him around, and squirted red fruit punch into his mouth and nose. He was weak, with nothing to show for his devotion to the imprisoned god but pitch black eyes. Those black eyes faded immediately.

He dropped to his knees as the power of the god left him. With one glance up at the red barrier on the other side of the room, he started skittering back toward the door. The trapped giant, frozen on its back, was enough to scare him away.

A Night Stocker, one of the full-powered cultists, flew by Kimberly and would have gotten good contact, but he fell out of the air as a bullet from Kelsey managed to catch him in the chest. The bullet bounced off his dark cloak, but it knocked the wind out of him.

Kimberly knew just by looking at him that he would stay down for a little while, nursing his possibly broken ribs.

Because that is what he was built to do, that was a behavior that all of the cultists had. The phrase “Licks Their Wounds” flashed into Kimberly’s mind as she saw the injured Stocker on the red wallpaper, but the words didn’t last for long.

It wasn’t a trope. What was it? A tactic? The Atlas had entries on this. She would have to look. Camden had probably memorized it by now.

Kimberly and Kelsey mowed through the attackers as best they could. Many fell easily; others took their pound of flesh. Kimberly had broken fingers. Her right eye was swollen shut. But the minions were neutralized; those that hadn’t run away were busy lying on the ground.

Tom remained.

Tom, though, was worth any twenty of the other cultists put together. He didn’t have “Licks Their Wounds.” He was a real problem, and while he couldn’t just snatch them up in his shadows as he hoped to, not with the protections they had put over themselves by pouring blessed fruit punch on their clothes, he was still formidable.

But so was Kimberly.

Tom closed in for an attack, but she reached into the pocket of the jacket she was wearing, grabbed a few pinches’ worth of Doctor Antoine Stone’s fruit punch mix (which was marketed to assist in soothing all manner of ailments from stomach ulcers to canker sores), and blew it in Tom’s face.

Kimberly had hoped it would be a finishing move. That’s why she hadn’t used it earlier. They were starting to understand how movie fights went. You had to save your big attacks for the end, or else they wouldn’t be big attacks.

She must have been right to do that because the cloud of sugary powder blessed by an adversarial God was doing a number on Tom. He couldn’t even breathe properly without the shadows slinking away from his form and taking away from his power.

With Tom dealt with temporarily, Kimberly turned her attention to Kelsey.

Kelsey was trapped underneath dozens of shadowy spines, and from the looks of her, she was very injured. The final girl’s gift, dying last, didn’t mean she couldn’t be horribly maimed, and Kelsey was Hobbled and Mutilated now that she was the target of attacks after Riley’s death.

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Tom had many spells at his command. He was a distance fighter, Kimberly knew, and she had been sure to use the cultists as meat shields whenever possible.

Kimberly was expecting the credits to roll soon as Tom fell to his knees, apparently incapacitated, and his fellow cultists weren’t even willing to come near the cloud of fruit punch dust that lingered in the air.

But she was wrong.

Tom looked back down at the offering dish and saw that Antoine was cutting himself away and would soon be free.

She had seen Bobby offering oblations to the trapped god, which distressed her, but he was gone now. He had run out to find his wife instead of helping anyone. She couldn’t rely on him returning heroically, though he might still.

It seemed, though, he had given Antoine a knife. She smiled. Antoine would be happy to join the fight.

But then Tom had a finishing move too.

“Brothers, sisters,” he cried out. “There is no more time! Sacrifice the promised offering, or yourselves if need be, whatever it takes!”

The ten or so remaining cultists acted immediately. Those that could fly did so; the others ran to the other side of the room. Now, Kimberly knew why they licked their wounds when injured instead of reentering the fight. They had to still be alive for Tom’s backup plan.

Why had she not finished them off? Why had she allowed them to live? She had been too soft. Her character wouldn’t have done that.

The first cultist that got to Antoine didn’t quite manage to grab him or sacrifice him. Antoine had a knife, and the cultist was low-powered flesh and blood. By the time Antoine was done with him, he was a little less of the latter.

Two of the other cultists picked up their bleeding ally, and together they launched themselves into the reality veil.

Antoine was caught by surprise. He was so prepared to defend himself that it took a moment for him to switch gears and try to stop them.

One after another, they began sacrificing themselves. And it appeared to be working, the red lightning flashes started to speed up.

“No!” Kimberly said. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. I thought you needed him!”