Chapter 18: Prison Break

Now that she had gained a precognitive ability from Abigail, Elaine went ahead to scout out the area. There were multiple blocks between them and the facility and it quickly became apparent that Albion was heavily patrolled. She considered taking down the first patrol they came across – two Ascended Cultists on Equoids – but decided against it when she spotted a Dark Young lumbering through the streets a bit further up the road. She knew her team could take the first group, but how many more would their fight attract?

So instead she doubled back and they used a combination of Elaine and Abigail's precognition, Ophelia's shadow hopping and Alexis' light bending to stay undetected.

While they sneaked, Elaine thought. There was the matter of the prisoners to consider. If they found some, they would need to escort them out. But that might end up being impractical if they ended up having to fight the cultists right after so she needed a backup plan. Her CARD would be able to send for reinforcements quickly enough, but that'd mean protecting the civilians until those reinforcements and the transports could arrive.

And then, of course, there was the matter of Jeanne.

Elaine had expected to be subordinate to the angel during this mission but Jeanne left the fighting and the decision-making to Elaine's team, specifically to Elaine herself.

Part of that was practicality. If Elaine killed something her Shard Bearers got 100% of the EXP each. If Alexis killed something she gained 150% EXP and the others gained 90% EXP. If any of the others killed something they got 100% and everyone else got 50%, except for Abigail, who got 50% extra from any kill she did not score.

If Jeanne killed something, however, the Shard Bearers would all get 50% EXP and no more, so her staying out of it was mostly appreciated.

But Elaine was not naive enough not to notice that Jeanne was testing her, trying to gauge her skill as a leader and as a fighter. The question was what was Jeanne testing her for?

She could have just asked but Elaine had a feeling that admitting that she knew she was being tested would end up with her failing whatever test it was.

**

Cassie Maxwell was not having a very good day. He hadn't been having good days for months but today was turning out to be awful even by his significantly lowered standards.

It'd started when he'd been on his way back home to New York City after attending a convention. He'd reached Albion when it had been getting dark and had decided to overnight there before making the trip back home in the morning and then in the morning the news had been filled with reports on what had later been dubbed the Invasion. So he'd hunkered down in Albion, hoping things would blow over and the army would take care of the problem. A few days later it'd become clear that wouldn't be happening anytime soon. With no streaming equipment and with electronic cash becoming less reliable by the day, funding had been getting low for him so he'd decided to work his way through the apocalypse and the nice couple in charge of the diner had let him work there. The super cute waitress uniform he'd gotten to wear hadn't been bad, either.

At first, the Invasion hadn't been that bad for them. There had been a few scary things roaming the countryside outside the village but they'd never gotten close to Albion. Back then he'd thought that was a blessing. Now he knew why they'd left the place alone: Because they had already overtaken it.

Oh, it hadn't been noticeable at first. The beggars had disappeared one by one but everyone had just assumed they had ventured outside city limits and had gotten eaten. Then other people started to go missing. Then more. And eventually people had clued in why: There had been a group of insane cultists in town. They were sacrificing people to some eldritch monster and that's why the other eldritch monsters left the place alone. A small resistance had formed and then been brutally squashed by the monsters that had been openly roaming the streets by that point.

At that point the cultists had informed the rest of the population that they could just go about their lives and look the other way when more people were taken and the people had had very little choice but to do as they had been told.

Compared to what the rest of the country was going through even that hadn't been so bad, all things considered. But the more people they took the more ravenous the cultists became for more and finally they had started grabbing people off the streets and then herded them all together in the correctional facility. By that point, only a couple hundred people had been left of the originally over 6000 people living in Albion.

Now it was two months later and they were down to sixty survivors, with two being taken every few days.

So when it became clear that another two were going to be taken today, that had been another low blow to Cassie's bad day quota. Especially since it meant lining up and then having the goat cancer fuckers hand-select two people, seemingly at random.

But it had gotten even worse when they'd picked him as one of the two. Cassie still hoped that someone would come save him but he knew that was unlikely to happen.

And of course everything had gone to hell right as he had gotten popular enough to get invited to conventions as a guest rather than as a visitor.

Just my luck.

“So”, Cassie asked the warden in his high, feminine voice. “What's the piece of shit you're feeding us to called?”

“Don't piss him off”, Kate told Cassie in a hiss. Kate was the other one who'd been taken as a sacrifice, the other waitress working at the diner, a thirty-something blonde who'd stayed in pretty good shape for having had three children.

“Why not? What's he supposed to do? Kill us? I'd rather that than be eaten”, Cassie replied, then turned back to the warden. “No answer? Goat got your tongue?” It was a pretty good joke, Cassie thought, since the guy's head had grown more and more goat-like over the months of their captivity. He was wearing the same clothes as the rest of the cultists, namely half-length pants and nothing but jewelry on his upper body. The only way to distinguish their ranks was by how far mutated they were and the warden was much farther along than most of them, with a goat head and goat legs that only barely still let him ride his steed. The steed was the other way to distinguish the warden. Where most of the mounted cultists had these weird half-rotten cancer horses the warden had a horse that looked, at first glance, like a beautiful snow-white unicorn. Only further inspection showed the true horror. The thing's eyes were too close together, like those of a predator, and they were bloodshot and electric blue, so blue they literally glowed in the dark. Its legs didn't end in hooves but in claws that sank into the ground. And the horn? The horn was actually two horns that spiraled up into a helix with two wickedly sharp points.

“It's a Shoggoth”, the warden replied in his blubbery voice. “And I can't fucking wait for it to shut you up.”

**

When Elaine and her group reached the correctional facility she was shocked by how unguarded the place was. Certainly such facilities existed to keep prisoners in instead of keeping others out, but the idea of someone breaking the prisoners out should have at least occurred to them.

Elaine had first been worried about it being some sort of trap but several minutes of searching had revealed nothing out of the ordinary so she had given the command to sneak inside.

The place was laid out like the stereotypical prisons seen in movies, a big courtyard and a large building for the inmates. The moment they were past the gates Elaine hurried them along. The big open courtyard could easily become a killing field if they stalled.

Elaine was first through the doors and was the first to see the cultist stationed in the receptionist's chair. In a single motion she scanned him and then sent a crystal sword into his forehead before he could sound some kind of alarm.

With the cultist dead they kept going until they had found what they'd been looking for. The cell blocks. Most were empty but soon they found the ones that had people in them. Scared, desperate, crying people.

Elaine scanned the corridor for guards but couldn't find any so she went over to the first occupied cell. Immediately the three people inside it shrank back and one of them, an older man, asked:

“Who are you?”

In response, Elaine retracted the visor of her helmet and said: “Sergeant Elaine Caldwell of the US Military. We're here to get you all out of this hellhole.”

A cheer went up and in response two cultists came running in, wondering what had their despairing prisoners cheering. Evelyn raised her assault rifle and two short bursts later the two cultists were dead.

Elaine used a combination of her crystal swords and her newly acquired proficiency with fire magic to cut open all the cell doors before typing out a message on her CARD.

Then she started to tell them to come along when an older woman said:

“Please, you can't leave. They took Cassie and Kate.”

Elaine turned to the woman and asked: “Who took them? Where did they take them?”

The people were looking at each other and an older man replied: “The bastard cultists take people to sacrifice every couple days and an hour ago they took the two waitresses at our diner, Cassie and Kate. They've got something bad in the library that they're feeding people to. Please save them.”

Fuck.

“We need to get the two who were taken”, Elaine told the group.

“And what do you want to do about the civilians?”, Jeanne asked. “You can't sacrifice sixty to save two.”

“I would ask you to take care of them”, Elaine told her. “Once Jordan and Marcus arrive you can join us again. Ideally we grab the sacrifices before whatever monster they're going to be fed to becomes an issue.”

“You'd give up your heaviest hitter?”, Jeanne asked, a hint of challenge in her voice.

“Only temporarily. And besides, it's not as though we've been relying on you so far”, Elaine replied, rising to the challenge.

Jeanne smiled. “Okay, I'll watch the civilians. Try not to get into too much trouble until I'm back.”

Then, without another word, Jeanne turned around and began directing the civilians to form up.

Elaine took her team outside immediately, pulling up the map to show her how to reach the library. It wasn't far but her team would have to go through the entire courtyard.

Halfway across the courtyard Elaine noticed the gates opening without her team doing anything and seconds later she saw why. Three mounted cultists rode in. Two of them were basic cultists on Equoids but the third worried her. The rider looked like the two cultists they'd fought the day before, the more mutated Ascended variant and his mount was... a unicorn? It was snow-white and had a coiled helical horn, arguably two horns, on its forehead, but then Elaine noticed some things that were off about it. The thing didn't have hooves. It had claws that sunk inches into the ground on every step. Its eyes were too close together, like a bloodhound rather than a herbivore, and when its lips pulled back Elaine noticed that its teeth were needle-sharp like an anglerfish's. She ran a scan on the thing while telling her team to be cautious.

“How should we do this?”, Abigail asked.

“No chance of ambushing them with us out in the open like this”, Elaine said. “I'd say we take out the two gophers first and then we focus down the unicorn rider. Alexis, think you can distract him until we can join you?”

“You got it”, Alexis said, summoning both her spear and her horse and climbing into the saddle.

“Who the fuck are you?”, the head cultist yelled as he saw the group of armored soldiers preparing to fight.

“US military, bub”, Elaine told him as he approached. “I could read you a laundry list of crimes we're gonna gun you down for, but honestly the goat cancer on your chest is the only reason I need.”

“Wow, five chicks in biker outfits and a horse, that's the best the army can muster? Guess we signed up with the winners after all, huh boys?”, the lead cultist said and the other two chuckled.

“Evelyn, Ophelia, if you would?”, Elaine said.

Evelyn raised her right arm, made a grasping motion and then yanked down. In response a bolt of lightning, thick as her forearm, rushed out of the clouds in the sky and slammed into the rightmost rider. Something about him was able to resist the lightning, so he got only slightly charred and dizzy instead of being reduced to a burnt corpse, but the half-rotten mount didn't fare as well and was turned into rotten barbecue. Its stomach ruptured and its legs gave out and the rider tumbled to the ground, off the smoking carcass. Abigail pulled out her bow and, before the rider could right himself, shot an arrow straight into his center mass, which blew him up entirely.

Ophelia, meanwhile, had shadow leaped to the leftmost rider's back, created a shadow flare and shoved it into the rider's back, burning up both the rider and his mount in black flames.

All of this took roughly three seconds from the time Elaine had spoken.

“Not so tough now, huh?”, Elaine asked the leader, who narrowed his goat eyes at her and then balled his fist.

Elaine got her swords in front of her to protect against a Darklight attack but instead the Equoid whose rider Ophelia had killed erupted into spiny tentacles and Ophelia had to scramble to get away from it before the tentacles reached her. Then he summoned a Darklight construct. Like advanced light magic, Darklight could be used to create solid objects and he had used it to create a long-handled mace. He urged his unicorn forward and the beast started rushing Elaine, who flung herself to the side. She blocked the mace with four of her six swords and used the other two to slice into the unicorn's spindly legs, but the beast just kept on galloping, the wounds closing up before her eyes.

But that was fine for Elaine. Because right behind her came Alexis on her horse, her left on the reins and her right gripping her spear and charged at the cultist, sweeping her spear through a horizontal arc as she went and cutting off his head, which went tumbling off his body.

Elaine was about to congratulate Alexis when a tentacle shot out of the tumor over the cultist's heart, snatched the decapitated head out of the air, placed it back on the stump and the wound bubbled, then disappeared.

And then Aenbharr bucked and thrashed, almost throwing Alexis off, as Elaine realized that the unicorn had literally bitten a piece out of him as the mounts had passed each other.

The cultist turned around, his mount's mouth bloody and chewing on a raw piece of meat and the cultist opened a portal atop Abigail and simultaneously shot three beams of Darklight out of his mace, targeting Alexis.

Ophelia shadow leaped and slammed Abigail out from under the portal before a swarm of spine-tipped tentacles would have shredded the brunette while Elaine leaped for Alexis, trying to block the Darklight attack.

Neither of them succeeded fully.

Ophelia had managed to throw Abigail out of the line of fire but the tentacles still managed to shred her legs before she sent a shadow flare at the portal, closing it and saving herself.

Elaine did manage to interpose herself between the cultist and Alexis, but her swords didn't manage to block all the beams and one of them burned through her shoulder and Alexis' arm.

Abigail was terrified. So far all the fights she'd been in had been pretty one-sided in her side's favor but this cultist was clearly smarter than anything they'd fought before and they had to fight him without the element of surprise.

She wanted to use her Song of Healing but was scared he'd send another one of those beams at her. But then she remembered her shielding ability and went for it. She summoned the lyre and, to her surprise, she immediately knew how to play the foreign instrument and used the newfound knowledge to perform a song for her team.

All her life she'd found crying to be therapeutic. Melancholy was her way to cope with the worries of the world. So when she thought of songs of healing she thought of songs that could make people cry. When she'd sung the girls You Raise Me Up, that was one of the songs that always managed to make her cry. Another was the song she started then. The lyre was almost a rhythm guitar, so of course her mind immediately jumped to Auld Lang Syne, a song of times long gone by.

As she sang a green glow surrounded her, slowly spreading out as she raised her voice.

And as she kept singing and playing her lyre the phantom sound of bagpipes accompanied her.

The wounds on her companions crept closed as she kept singing, even Aenbharr regrew the piece of flesh the unicorn had bitten out of him, and by the time the cultist knew what was happening, the whole team was healed up again.

He scowled at them, at least as much as the goat face allowed for scowling, and shot three beams of Darklight at Abigail.

Ophelia made to intercept the beams with a shadow flare but she was moving noticeably slower than normal so the first two beams shot out unhindered before the shadow flare tore into the third. The third dissipated but the first two shot towards Abigail and splattered against an almost invisible shield, leaving nothing but concentric ripples along its surface.

Abigail could feel the shield absorbing the hits. She could tell that it wouldn't be able to block infinite strikes like those but it would still be good for a couple more and her eyes crinkled, as much of a smile as her singing allowed, as she realized that the Musical Barrier had already proven its worth.

And then she broke off the song and switched to a different tune, one of her more experimental pieces. It was still a cover, but it was the sort of thing a lone songstress didn't usually cover. But in this situation she thought some Stratovarius wouldn't go amiss and decided that Hunting High And Low would be just the song for taking on a mad goat man on a cannibal unicorn. Instead of a green haze, a red haze saturated the area and the phantom bagpipes were replaced with drums beating out a heart-pounding rhythm and as she plucked her lyre the sound it made morphed until she thought she was playing an electric guitar.

Elaine used the enhanced strength and speed to rush forward with a shadow leap. She kept a respectful distance of the unicorn's horn, which Abigail could now see dripping with a pearly-white fluid that she assumed was the poison the scan had warned about, and tried to sink one of her swords into the cultist's tumor, but he twisted away and she hit his shoulder instead. The unicorn reared back, trying to stab her, but she shadow leaped right back again and sent two more swords and a laser beam at the cultist. One of the swords hit the unicorn in the flank and the other the cultist batted away with his mace before twisting the weapon to absorb the laser beam.

He growled and led his mount into a charge, straight for Abigail.

She knew that her shield wouldn't protect her from the brunt of that charge but she stood her ground, trusting her allies to protect her as she kept singing.

Ophelia felt horrible. She'd forgotten just how badly the touch of sunlight affected her as she'd managed to avoid it for over a year but now direct sunlight hit her thanks to the damage to her armor. Her legs were already fixed again but that didn't help with the armor. To her surprise the armor seemed to be repairing itself, the hole in it slowly creeping closed, but it was a slow process, much slower than healing her flesh had been.

It wasn't as if the sunlight burned. Sufficient sunlight could give her a sunburn in a flash but the current overcast weather wasn't bad enough for that. No, sunlight robbed her body of its supernatural abilities, bringing her body down to just her enhanced stats, which was why she hadn't managed to block the Darklight in time. She was glad Abigail had bought the shield ability because the other downside of being hit by sunlight meant that her regeneration was down to its basic level, meaning her Umbral Embrace would be significantly weakened, so serious injury would be that much more dangerous to her entire party. She might be able to wrap herself in shadow magic and get her vampiric abilities back but that would require concentration.

And then that cultist just went for a charge on the singer and Ophelia decided to be slightly more reckless. She shadow leaped onto the unicorn's back, right behind the cultist, and instead of hitting the cultist she shoved a shadow flare into the mount's flank.

The beast faltered. It bucked and thrashed, trying to put out the supernatural flames. The cultist swiped at Ophelia but she simply shadow leaped back away again and Alexis used the opportunity to wreathe her Areadbhar in sun-fire before throwing it at the cultist like a javelin.

She had never used that trick before so of course Alexis was more than a little surprised when the spear went through the cultist and lit him up like a roman candle, immolating him in less than a second.

Unfortunately, this left the very wounded and very mad unicorn to rampage. It charged Alexis, intending to gore her and the blonde only barely managed to dodge its horn but one of the clawed forelegs tore deep into the flesh of her arm, only glancing off the bone thanks to her superhuman toughness.

Undeterred, the unicorn charged at Elaine, who needed to use all six of her swords and a shadow leap to get clear of the beast.

Evelyn, meanwhile, rushed over to Alexis and released part of her Soma, making the healing rush into Alexis and closing her wound in a matter of seconds before she summoned her Vajra and used it to channel a massive bolt of lightning from the sky that surged down into the unicorn, drawn into its horn as if it were a lightning rod.

The beast's horns were blasted off and it staggered drunkenly and Evelyn used the moment's dizziness to grab one of Elaine's crystal swords out of the air and ram it into where a real horse's heart should have been, then she crossed her Deva Arms in front of her to protect her real body from the beast's death throes. She prepared herself to blast it with another lightning bolt but it finally dropped to the ground, its last bit of energy spent.

**

Cassie had assumed his day couldn't get any worse, but he was coming to the conclusion that things were just going to keep going downhill. Because clearly getting fed to something with more teeth than brain cells didn't suck enough.

He'd spent months in Albion but he'd never actually seen the correctional facility library before. Apparently it was a sprawling one story building, two side wings and then a larger back wing. Kate had said that from above the building looked kinda like an airplane.

Maybe that had been true at one point. Now the building was overgrown with something bizarre. The substance was black and glistening, the same color and texture as those canker trees that had begun to walk the streets two months back, and it grew all over the building like mold. Except not like mold because mold didn't have veins and a pulse. Yes, the stuff, whatever it was, pulsed as if it had a heartbeat.

When the warden had brought them over Cassie had hoped he'd just be chucked into a maw and be done with it but instead him and Kate had been handed over to the high priest, who then escorted them through the library, preaching his insane nonsense to them all the while.

The high priest would have been singularly disturbing even when seen in a normal place but in this cancer mold den he was positively nightmarish.

At first glance he looked like a satyr, with long furry legs that were bent backwards and ended in cloven hooves. His head was relatively free of mutations except for the goat eyes and the curled ram's horns. The guy had a Shenandoah beard, the classic Abe Lincoln style that wrapped around the jawline while leaving the face itself bare, and together with the curly hair on his head it gave the impression of a mane.

But when Cassie looked closer he saw the disturbing part. The man's skin looked like it had a deep tan at first but in truth the texture was reminiscent of burn scars, brown and bumpy and dried-out, with dozens and dozens of crisscrossing purple veins running all across it, pulsing in time with something that clearly wasn't a heartbeat. Cassie knew it wasn't pulsing along with the heartbeat because his heartbeat was loud enough to hear and the sound was wholly out of sync with the pulsing of the purple veins. Like the other cultists he had a large tumor over his chest, clearly the source of the pulsing veins, but unlike the other cultists this one's tumor didn't look grafted on. It had sunk into the chest cavity and the only evidence of it was that there was a slight bump over his right pectoral muscle that make it look as if he had one breast. Oh, and the grasping tentacles that came out of it and wrapped around the priest's torso, couldn't forget those.

Cassie shuddered whenever he laid eyes on them. When Kate and him had been handed over the tentacles had reached out to stroke their cheeks. They hadn't been slimy. They'd been leathery and ever-so-slightly sticky and if by some miracle Cassie made it out of this he knew he was going to scrub his cheek with bleach and a chainsaw.

Cassie was used to a certain amount of creepiness. He streamed himself playing video games, mostly JRPGs, so of course he knew full well that there were a bunch of creeps among his viewers.

Cassie could deal with those. He'd been great at shrugging off or making light of even the weirdest comments and during events he was always friendly and pleasant, though, to be fair, it helped that the biggest creeps didn't go to those events and so whatever he had to deal with at those was harmless. But these tentacle monsters and cancer mold growths were just too much for him.

Kate had managed to cheer him up by pointing at the cancer mold and mentioning that she'd had to clean up far more disgusting stuff behind the fridges at the diner.

Kate was much more put together. Her kids had been with their father for the weekend when the Invasion began so they were safely in one of the big refugee camps, so by Kate's logic whatever happened to her was fine. It wouldn't hurt her children anyway. Her only real regret was that she hadn't been able to find a way to save cute little Cassie from the same fate.

She'd practically adopted Cassie as her fourth kid after the Invasion, even though Cassie was barely twelve years younger than her own thirty-four.

And now they were both going to die.

Kate just wished the bastard would get on with it. He'd been blabbering endlessly and now he was making them wait in some weird little antechamber while on the other side of the door something was squelching and groaning.

**

Elaine was shocked. Of course she had no problem with someone using her crystal swords but so far nobody else had dared to touch them. And having something she'd been controlling telekinetically grabbed and used by someone else had been beyond jarring. She shook her head and decided to focus on her notifications instead.

Elaine surveyed the situation. The enemies were all dead and her team was fully recovered. Everyone but Evelyn and Abigail had suffered damage to their armored suits. Evelyn had used up half of her Font of Soma and Ophelia would need to wrap herself in shadows to get her preternatural abilities back since the protection of her suit was compromised for now.

But other than that they were fine and could keep moving, so she directed her group towards the library.