Chapter 37: Are You Ready for the Smackdown?

Hello, lovelies! Hope you’re having a great day! Don’t forget that you can buy the official ebooks for “A Dream of Summer Rain” and “Magical Girl Exorcist Squad: Love Thy Enemy” via Itch right now!

https://helena-heissner.itch.io/a-dream-of-summer-rain

https://helena-heissner.itch.io/magical-girl-exorcist-squad

***

Lacy saw sunshine through the barred window in the dead girl’s room.

“You ready for your big day?” Merab asked, applying mascara in the mirror.

Why did nobody let Lacy be alone? They could’ve just let her stay in the woods, not bothering anyone. Instead it came to this. And they all had the gall to act like it was her fault for trying to stay isolated. Assholes. “Guess so.”

“Well just remember that me and all my friends will be rooting for you.”

“I’m not really sure I’m okay with that,” Lacy said.

“That’s nice. We’ll still root for you.”

“Why?” Lacy asked. “Do you really think having to deal with me is better than Alistair?”

“Honestly? Yeah. I do. You seem much more reasonable. And you’re MUCH cuter.”

“For fuck’s sake- stop doing that! You’re a monster! I hate you!”

Merab’s reflection gave a smile that Lacy was pretty sure meant ‘am I supposed to be impressed?’ “I know that, silly,” Merab said. “It’s in your nature. Just like what I am is in my nature. And I think you’re smart enough to know that even if Alistair dies, we’ll all still be here. You have to live with-”

“The consequences of my actions; yeah, I know! I fucking get it! You know something, though? Everyone keeps telling me that, but nobody seems to think maybe I’m the consequence of their actions.”

Merab turned to face her. “I like you. You’ve got spunk.”

Lacy shuddered… But still, a part of her was glad to hear that. Something had to come after Alistair. The ghouls wouldn’t just vanish. Some would survive, unless she was willing to commit wholesale genocide.

Merab smacked her lips in the mirror, making sure her dark lipstick was evenly applied. Lacy tilted her head. It was a bit difficult to think of someone as a thing when they were right there in front of her. And on some level, it was weirdly nice to have someone in her corner.

The door opened, and Caroline appeared in the doorway. She wore a yellow sundress, a youthful number that seemed to take a few years off of her. Her hair was worn in a bouffant updo, while golden jewelry adorned her neck, her ears, and her wrists. “Leave us now, Merab.”

“You mean Princess Mera-”

“I know perfectly well what I mean!” Caroline snapped. “Leave. Now.”

Merab huffed, put her makeup in her purse, and stormed off to presumably listen to emo music in a corner somewhere. Leaving Lacy alone with the wife of the King of the Ghouls.

“There really is no way to talk you out of this, is there?” Caroline asked.

“No,” Lacy said.

“I see. Well, you’ve made up your mind. And so has he.”

Caroline escorted Lacy out the door, down onto the next floor of the house. “You don’t want this fight either, do you?” Lacy asked.

“I find the idea of it unnecessary,” Caroline admitted as they walked down the stairs. “But you’ve convinced my husband it’s the only way.”

“He doesn’t really listen to you then, does he?” Lacy said, smirking and narrowing her eyes. “That’s telling. As is the fact that you guys were basically separated for fifteen years.”

Caroline grabbed Lacy by the shoulder, turned her around, and slapped her across the face. The more things change, Lacy thought. Going into a fight with a bruise already on your cheek felt like a bad omen, but there wasn’t much she could do about it now.

“Learn to respect your elders,” Caroline said.

“Why?” Lacy said through a dead-eyed squint.

“It’ll take you far in life,” Caroline deadpanned with a smug smile.

“Just like it did for you?” Lacy said. “Yeah. Real fucking far, clearly.”

“You could have cooperated. We could have found you a wife, a daughter of the Sovereignty to seal the deal. One of my students. Or perhaps even one of Jimenez’s daughters.”

“You still don’t get it. Even after all these years. I don’t want anything from you.” Twist the knife. You need to get under these people’s skin so they’ll slip up. “The only thing I want is the corpse of the man who killed my parents cooling at my feet. And maybe the corpse of the evil bitch who cosigns all his bullshit, for good measure. I want all of you Sovereignty motherfuckers to know a fraction of the pain you’ve put me through, that you’ve put all the people whose lives you ruined through. I want you all to burn with me in the hottest fires of hell BECAUSE THAT’S WHERE WE ALL BELONG!”

Caroline considered her with a steely gaze. A moment lived and died before them.

“That’s not for you to decide, Lacy,” Drew said.

“Keep walking, Lacy,” Caroline said.

Lacy obliged her hostess and ignored her teacher.

Caroline led her into the sun. It was a bright, humid day, clouds still clinging to the sky but broken up with sharpened blades of light. Lacy began to sweat immediately upon exiting the air-conditioned house. They went back to the town square once again, now cleared of furniture and devoid of any ghouls but the king. He still wore his long black cloak. Perhaps ghoulishness came with the ancillary benefit of not getting overheated. He stood with his arms folded, a pale obelisk looming over her town. Danny watched from the roof of the old general store, head resting heavily in his hands. Saint Cecilia’s, now covered in graffiti, stood behind Alistair. This is a bad plan, Lacy thought for the hundredth time. “You ready to fight?”

“Always,” Alistair said, a smile breaking through his stoney face. “Have you anything you wish to say before we do this?”

“Yeah, actually, I have a question: has it ever occurred to you at any point in your entire life that you’re the bad guy here?”

Alistair rolled his eyes. “I could ask you exactly the same question, you realize?”

“No, you really can’t. Because I’ve been the bad guy since the moment I was born. Everyone has always loved reminding me of that fact. They’ve never let me be anything else. And I think about that every day- before I do anything, I ask myself first if this will prove the universe right. But I guess I’ve finally run out of fucks to give, so here we are.”

“Are you done?”

Lacy continued, “No, I’m not. I just wanna say that I guess I’m not surprised- you seem like a stupid enough asshole to have never done a moment’s introspection in your entire life. There. Now I’m done. Do you have anything you wanna say while we’re doing our last words?”

Alistair laughed. “No. I believe we’ve said all we have to say to each other.”

Keep going. “What, you don’t even wanna lie to your son one last time and tell him you love him before he watches you die a slow, painful, deeply amusing death?”

“No, Ms. O’Sullivan,” Alistair said, cracking his knuckles.

Keep going. “So you’re done even pretending you care about him? God, you’re a piece of shit. Maybe I’ll go to hell for this, but I’m gonna enjoy killing you.”

Alistair gritted his teeth. Chump. “And I’m going to enjoy teaching you some respect.”

“Better men than you have tried,” Lacy smirked.

“Don’t compare me to your father, Lacy. He was a pitiful thing, dulling himself to the world rather than facing it.”

“Whoa there, I never said jackshit about my old man. That right there’s coming from you, not me. And, relatedly, I gotta say, it’s really astonishing just how much you buy your own bullshit,” Lacy said. “I look at you, and I think to myself, maybe it’s for the best that my parents beat me- at least it stopped me from being you.”

His jaw dropped, and his eyes went wide with rage.

Lacy spat in his face for good measure.

Alistair narrowed his eyes, inhaled, exhaled, then tapped his chest. His Stars emerged, crimson and violet both. Lacy did the same. Blue and purple and red Starlight bruised the skin of reality, casting neon shades over the hot day.

Lacy shot a column of fire at her opponent, and Alistair raised his hand and formed an Entropy shield. The fire slammed into it, dissipating as it hit the Entropy. Lacy added a second hand, and tapped into her rage. Her rage at Alistair for being an evil man, her rage at Caroline for supporting him and for what she’d put Danny through, at Danny for betraying her, at Gwen for failing her, at Isabella for lying to her, at Drew for dying on her, at her parents for everything they’d ever done, and at herself for not being strong enough to take it. The conflagration doubled in size, and the orange-gold flames began to burn white-blue. Lacy screamed. And Alistair was pushed back. Only a half-inch, but he slid over the ground and was forced to steady his balance.

All the while, the tips of his fangs began to peak out of his mouth.

There. Confirmation of what she’d already suspected: Entropy could only nullify a proportional amount of magic. Alistair was drawing on reserves, same as she was. Throw enough at him and he’d lose his balance. Throw a little more and he’d lose his mind.

That meant her battle plan might work.

Lacy kept up the flames and charged forward. She poured as much fire as she possibly could at Alistair while she closed the gap. When there was only a quarter-inch left between them, she canceled the fire and drew lightning through her fist. She struck a blow, the massive swell of electricity exploding on contact with Alistair’s shield. He stumbled backwards, his pale face contorting with shock as his violet shield crumbled.

Lacy reached for another bolt of lightning and hurled it at him. It took him in the chest and knocked him to the ground. Lacy stood over him, heaving with exhaustion.

From the ground, Alistair began to laugh, and his skin rippled as it became harder and stone-like. His eyes throbbed with purple light, and he dragged himself back to his feet in an instant. He summoned an entropy staff and swung it wildly at Lacy, missing and carving a path of dust in the street. Step one.

Lacy rolled out of the way and reached for more fire. She didn’t need Starlight for it- she could rely on Dust instead. And if she burned through most of it before Alistair could do anything, he’d have no choice to rely on his Stars. It wouldn’t do much, but it was best to take as many tools as possible from him.

Alistair snapped his fingers and nullified her flames. “That first attack was courtesy,” he said, baring his fangs. Overhead, their Stars danced together.

He performed a kata with his Entropy staff, brandishing and striking with it, forcing Lacy on the defensive. She was left dodging and running, trying to charge an attack before he could strike her. More and more of the street turned to dust as Alistair raked it over.

She needed to stand her ground, so she planted her feet and infused the wind with her magic. She crafted a wall of wind and launched it forward. It slammed into Alistair, who swung his staff at it. The wind died, and so did the staff.

Alistair’s smile kept growing wider.

Lightning was too draining to spam it, and fire was too easily neutralized, and wind, at least how she was using it, wasn’t strong enough. That left her a few options.

The lingering sounds of violence, of fist and flame, of struggle and destruction, were abundant around them. Lacy latched onto them and began painting over the scene with them, ignoring the shocks of pain in her arms and hands. Whirling whips of soundwaves wrapped and warped around Alistair, and he groaned in pain as the tendrils of noise struck him. He went awash with heliotropic light, and the ground grew unstable.

Lacy drew upon her own Starlight, letting it burn her insides as she pulled wind in all around her, forming a vortex with herself at the eye of the storm. A gyro of dust and ash swirled around her as the ground began to give way, but she pulled more and more debris towards her in the process. She reached out into the town, into the surrounding forest, and brought as much towards her as possible. Given the time of year, that meant acorns, and lots of them. All the while, Alistair’s Entropy-storm grew, and the ground fell apart beneath her feet.

The wind settled, and Lacy stood on a section of ground five feet lower than where she’d been before. Beneath her feet, everything was ash, and a rain of acorns pelted the dusty ground.

Alistair stood at the edge of the crater- it was all ash up there as well. His chin had extended, and claws had come to dominate his fingers. “Do you surrender?”

Lacy flipped him off, and then sent her magic into the earth, reaching for the many, many acorns she’d brought with her in her storm, and remembering the feeling she’d gotten in Gwen’s backyard when she made a garden bloom.

Step two. Two dozen trees sprouted around them. One tree in particular launched from the earth directly below Alistair’s feet, knocking him asunder as full grown oaks shot up from the ground and stood tall and proud.

Danny screamed. Caroline hissed.

Alistair groaned, a starving animal who’d just lost track of his prey.

Lacy made herself scarce, darting around the trees, grinning at her own accomplishment. The sheer amount of rain she’d brought to town with her had made this possible, along with the field of fertile ashes. As she went, she did the spell again and again, summoning more trees, cultivating a small forest in the center of town. Her arms and chest screamed in pain, and a fog on par with the worst kind of dysphoria swamped her mind.

A purple pule shot forth from the top of one of the oaks. The tree imploded in a heap of ashes, and a thudding mass hit the ground.

Lacy smirked.

Step three.

She whispered everything, then lashed the soundwaves to different parts of the forest as she ran through it, tapping trees to bind her speech patterns to them. She cranked up the volume as loud as possible, and sent her voice out into the forest, coming from four different directions.

“Hey, loser! Over here!”

“No, over here!”

“Awooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!”

“You fucked up, old man!”

She circled back around to where she started, and scrambled up a tree when Alistair’s back came into view. He stood atop a branch two dozen feet in the air, scanning the woodland that now occupied the town square for any sign of his prey. His head shifted with each different sound, searching for the disparate sources of Lacy’s voice. She needed something quick, efficient, quiet- now was the time for lightning.

Step four. She forced a deep breath, her chest throbbing, and she reached for her Starlight. It burned her arm like hot metal as she conjured lightning and aimed it at Alistair. The pain subsided for a moment when she struck Alistair clean in the back with her bolt and sent him toppling to the ground, a smoking pile of limp flesh.

Lacy pumped her fist, then grabbed her arm as another bolt of pain shot through it. Her balance betrayed her, and she fell from the tree. Panic surged through her as she fell, and she struggled not to scream- if she gave away her position, she was dead either way. She took her good arm and grabbed hold of a tree branch, only for it to snap under her weight. Her face contorted with fear as she summoned a gust of wind and pushed directly against the ground. It slowed her landing to a small thud, but the pain shot up both her arms and forced her onto her belly. It was like glass cracking beneath her skin, trying to slice its way out. She breathed slowly and heavily as she dragged herself to her knees, her arms limp at her sides. She twitched her fingers just to make sure she still could, and she opened her ears to the nearby sounds.

The wind snaked between the oak trees, newfound leaves torn loose and thrown asunder. They drifted to the ground, whereupon

A foot came down on

One of them.

There.

Lacy’s head jerked twenty degrees to the right, and she focused her ears and heard feet dragging against the ashen ground.

And then she heard Alistair say, “Schrei der Toten.”

For a moment, nothing happened. Lacy forced herself off the ground, only for her knees to immediately buckle. She pushed against the ground with her hands, all pins and needles, and summoned all the willpower she could. She’d used far too much magic far too quickly- the trick with the trees was clever, but it had been costly. So had all the sound-spells; even when she wasn’t creating sounds ex nihilo, it was exhausting to use alongside other types of magic. This was a bad plan, but it was working so far. Just so long as she lived to see it through.

She raised herself to her feet, and hauled herself forward.

She got a hundred yards before she heard it:

“Liam!”

Lacy jerked to a stop. Her father’s voice.

“What do you think you’re

Doing, boy?! Running

around like this, trying to kill

a man! We taught you better

than that!

A spell. It had to be a spell. Alistair had killed her father, so that was why he was able to-

“Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting.”

Right in front of her- her mother’s voice. This was Alistair’s doing- it had to be.

“I can’t believe you’re embarrassing us like this, going around as

you are. You’re not fooling anyone, you know. You’re not even fooling yourself- even you should be smarter than that.”

“Now you decide to fucking talk,” Lacy said. She sped up, and tripped over her own aching legs and landed flat on her face in the dirt.

“You never had much of a brain between those ears of yours, did you?” her parents spoke in unison.

She hadn’t heard them speak in years, and never would again, but just hearing their voices stripped her of months of built-up confidence and righteous anger. The desire to lie there in miserable, useless self-pity was immense. But the noise found her anyway.

There.

There you are.

Lacy found new strength in her legs and lungs and charged forward, a second wind offering cool relief from the fiery agony of overexertion. Alistair was coming up behind her, so she banked right to get around him and flank him.

She ducked behind a tree and stood in wait.

After a few minutes, Alistair arrived.

His Stars hung in front of him, guiding him to her. His fangs had grown longer and sharper, as had his claws, while his face had warped to a monstrous degree. His eyes were now a solid red highlighted with purple, while his skin looked increasingly like stone. His back was hunched, and he’d begun to drool.

Both of Lacy’s parents spoke at once: “you’re nothing but a disgusting faggot. You deserve to be alone, and you always will be.”
Lacy gritted her teeth.

And apparently, for Alistair, that was enough to give her away: “Toter engel!”

Lacy was barely fast enough- the tree withered as she jumped out of the way of the death-angel. Alistair locked his monstrous gaze onto her, and when he opened his mouth, the screams of Lacy’s mother and father came out. Lacy froze, her rage and panic spiraling inside her, shutting out all other thoughts and all other emotions.

She surged her power through the earth and extended tree branches to reach for him, punctuating it with a conflagration. She screamed all while she did it, hoping it would ring louder than the death throes of her parents from the mouth of the man who killed them.

A purple shield erupted around Alistair and turned her attacks to ash, but not before revealing the most monstrous version of Alistair yet: down on all fours, snarling, deformed lumps and bony protrusions all over him. Even with his Stars, there was a limit on how much Entropy magic, perhaps how much magic in general, he could use while still maintaining his humanoid form. He was at his limit, same as Lacy.

He charged at Lacy, a howling beast. Lacy reached for fire, for earth, for water, for lightning, but couldn’t- the pain overwhelmed her, burned her when she reached for more Starlight. Her heart…

Stopped.

One moment she heard it beating inside her chest, and then the next moment it was gone. The most hideous silence she’d ever encountered in her life, more horrifying than her mother’s silence, more horrifying than the silence of the Liminal Void. The most basic validation of her own life, of her own continued existence, had vanished.

And she only had herself to blame for it.

She dropped to her knees. She tried to say something, but all that came out her mouth was a low groan.

Alistair slammed into her, hitting her in the chest and restarting her heart, forcing air down her throat as she landed on her back. It was like being doused with ice-water on a hot day. The pain in her chest had never been worse. Life in the raw flooded through her. Her Star pulsed over and over again in time with her heartbeat, as if the universe itself needed reassurance she wasn’t dead.

Not that it would matter in a moment.

The beast loomed over her, jaws extended, fangs bared, ready to feast.

New footsteps- a new heartbeat. Caroline. She snapped her fingers, and said some words in a language Lacy didn’t recognize. A flash of green light struck Alistair, and he fell unconscious atop Lacy. She screamed until a burst of light hit her as well, and she slipped into a deep sleep as she heard Drew whisper, “Not your call to make.”