Rings hunting me outside, a casino filled with crows on the inside. Surely this was the better option. I wasn’t fully convinced as I watched black feathers drifting down from the second floor balcony that overlooked the first. Each whirring machine in the casino was decorated with shuffling, beady-eyed birds. My dramatic entrance had caused a few of them to take flight and wheel around the ceiling.
I stayed completely still. After a few moments their agitation settled. I scanned the room for their master, the Crowman that I’d impersonated in order to infiltrate the Jiezhi operation, but if he was here, he was hidden. The contrast of the far-too-intelligent black feathered animals and the opulent gold-trimmed tables and chairs they perched on was striking. It was as if I’d interrupted the scene of a painting.
A single crow took flight and swooped close to me. I raised an arm defensively, but it was merely making an investigatory pass.
Okay, stay calm. I moved softly across the thick carpet of the casino, hoping that the lights and noise of the gambling machines would be distracting enough that I wouldn’t draw interest. The birds closest to me cocked their heads. Do they recognize me? Were they communicating with the Crowman right now?
I didn’t get to ruminate any longer. Bullets whizzed past, beating a diagonal row of holes into the second floor balcony causing the crows to launch into the air. I peeked around a slot machine to see a group of Rings breaking through the windows with guns and malformed Cast limbs. It didn’t really matter which Ring they belonged to at this point. Everyone had some guns, there were always a few that had taken Dice, and everyone wanted to hurt everyone. The Tree preyed on the ire that each faction had for their rivals, that was built up over years of fighting over territory.
The crows descended like a waterfall of oil, pouring down from the second floor en masse, sweeping towards me in a wave of shiny feathers.
I dropped to the ground just before the wave hit, impacts thudding against my head and shoulders. I raised my head a second later and a beak drove itself into the eyehole of my helmet, stopping just short of my eye. It got stuck and I had to rip it free.
The birds were becoming living missiles with enough intelligence to aim for weak points. I filled in the gaps in my armour, restricting movement and vision for the benefit of total protection. It didn’t stop them from trying, throwing their bodies against me with the force of an ocean current. I leaned against the battering flow and stood.
The world was black feathered bodies and little else. Occasionally I saw the muzzle flash of a gun, ineffectually fighting back against the crows. A person staggered towards me, wrestling with birds tearing at his eyes and ears. For every bird he pulled away from himself, two more attacked the same spot. He succumbed to the pain and collapsed at my feet, swallowed by the swarm in seconds. The Tree pulsed.
I moved laboriously in a random direction, hoping to at least find a wall to orient myself. But before I found anything, the crows dispersed. One moment I was leaning against an avalanche, the next I stumbled forward as that constant pressure dissipated, crows exiting the building through broken windows. I discovered that I had barely moved from where I had started in the center of the room. Blood of humans and birds alike soaked into the carpet, blotting out the pre-existing patterns with a solid dark crimson. The Rings hit by the attack had scattered around the main floor and now struggled to rise and regroup.
A row of heads appeared from over the second floor balcony. A two phase attack. I dove for a row of slot machines as the Jiezhi opened fire on the vulnerable Rings below. Tufts of carpet and shards of gambling chips flew into the air as a salvo of bullets ripped into the group.
The slot machine tipped down on top of me from the force of the barrage. I caught it and was faced with a flashing yellow screen that read “WINNER”. I let it rest there as a shield as it spit casino chips in a pile at my feet
Caught in the middle, I was in the worst possible place. Some of the Rings on the first floor had found cover from the ambush and were now returning fire. A Jiezhi was hit in the head and dropped like a puppet with cut strings, tumbling to the first floor where he lay in a lifeless heap. Then the Jiezhi ducked down and the crows returned, this time surging in from the broken windows. The scene again devolved into a blinding storm of wings and talons. I made a break for it, ducking out from my cover and pushing towards the front entrance, sidestepping Rings that were suffering from not having the protection I did.
Something loud enough that I could feel it rippled through the murder. The crows nearby seemed disoriented and hurt, dropping to the ground to writhe, leaving a temporary bubble in the storm. At the center stood a familiar figure. Alek was standing with a man’s neck in one hand and a fistful of crushed crows in the other. He wore different clothes from the Alek I’d seen at the university. He was grinning as he battered away crows using the corpses in each hand as weapons. He opened his mouth, veins in his neck bulging and I could feel the shout shake the floor. More crows dropped and the storm thinned out.
Then I laid eyes on the Crowman. He was looking for something, his brow furrowed as his gaze swept across the first floor. I needed to hide, but it was too late. He locked on to me, mouth curling into a snarl.
From bad to worse. The Crowman opened his mouth in some utterance and in that moment, every crow that remained in the room flew towards me. I was driven to my knees by the weight of birds flinging themselves at me with vengeful fury. The world became blurry movement and shadow. The Tree pulsed again and I found the rage to fight back. You hurt me too. I did what I had to then, and I’ll do it now just as readily. Spikes erupted from my armour and crows impaled themselves blindly on them. I let the heat under my skin burn outwards and eat up the crows, stealing their strength. A different, painful burning pierced my right arm. I’d been shot. Another bullet glanced off my side, breaking open a hole which was soon filled by tearing beaks.
Of course they wouldn’t care about shooting a few birds in the process. I grew roots from my ankles to the floor, stabilizing my footing. Then I absorbed some of my armour, making it thinner and completely absorbed parts of the back. I threw myself backwards, breaking out of the armour and leaving it as a standing, empty husk, like I was shedding my shell.
The crows split between the two targets, giving me some reprieve. The constantly shifting murder meant that getting an accurate bead on me was difficult and I used this to my advantage, taking on painful pecking that ripped away small chunks of my skin in exchange for cover that I used to make my way to the wall.
Pawing my way along it, I found the push bar of a door and stumbled through it. Thankfully I’d been right and this was an exit. I glanced back one more time before the door swung shut. Alek had made it to the second floor and was flinging his enemies down, all the while being hit by bullets and still moving. He looked as animalistic as the birds.
I made my way down the side street, clutching my wounded arm. It felt like a burning coal had been pushed into the bone and I was blinking back tears, trying to breathe properly. The sun had set, leaving streaks of red light to smear into darkness. The barricades were in sight, a row of tall rectangles that looked like part of a ritualistic monolith in the red tinged night.
Up ahead, a large woman kneeled over top of an unconscious man, the blood of her fists mixing with his mangled face. She looked up from her handiwork, revealing her Shape. A mouth surrounded by grey lizard-like scales and some fluid with a blue tinge dripped from between her needle teeth.
I moved forward and she spat a glob of the blue fluid onto the road in front of me. It bubbled on the pavement.
“I don’t care about you,” I said. “Let me pass.”
An exit door to the casino swung open. Crows spilled out from the opening like they were being vomited out from a hellhole. There was a flash within the cloud of shadows and I gasped, feeling the bullet hit my shoulder and sink deep inside.
The cloud dispersed and the Crowman stood there, clothes disheveled like he’d been robbed, handgun leveled at me. He eyed me with utter disgust.
“You took my face,” he said.
I hardened my armour, blinking cobwebs from my vision. My right arm hurt so badly. “You got your guns anyway,” I wheezed. “So what’s the big deal?”
“The trust my comrades had in me was like steel, our bonds were stronger than blood. You took that,” his hand shook and he had to grip the gun with both hands to steady his aim. “And I can never get it back.”
The acid-spitting woman looked between us, unsure of what to do.
I readied myself to move, forcing myself to breathe in deep, through the pain.
Then there was a blur of something at the edge of my vision, followed by a terrible tremble that traveled from the road and up my legs. The Crowman flinched as blood spattered his face.
I turned to where the woman had been kneeling. What. She was still there, kneeling. But she was dead. Her head was gone, all that was left was the stump of her neck, which slumped against a dark shape. It was a leg, thick and powerful, twice as wide around as my arm, with bony joints. It had pierced through the man’s chest as well, boring a bloody hole down to the pavement.
The thing shifted slightly and I counted seven other legs, all aligned in two rows. The thing’s skin was black as night and each leg ended in an ebony white hoof. The hooves looked like human skulls, except the teeth went all the way around the skull and there were no facial cavities. Several of these hooves were stained with brown dried blood.
My eyes traveled up to the wide and muscular body. On one end it curved upwards into something like the torso of a human. But at the points where there should have been arms and a head, there were only featureless stumps. The torso faced me, the headless neck tilted slightly downwards, like it was watching me without eyes.
The monster pulled the hoof free, blood hanging off of it in strings.
The Crowman uttered one word before slamming the door shut.
Demon.