Heroine Creation: All My Summons Are Custom Made

Once Spectra swung the Hellstaff, a slash of deep magenta light erupted from the weapon’s head, carving forward with the sound of a thousand shrieking souls.

It struck the oncoming wall of red smoke and Demon flesh, and the charging horde of Purgatory Demons were instantly divided.

Bodies launched sideways in broken clusters, limbs still clawed at air, and torsos spun like discarded refuse. The dense Gloom that rode with them split open like the Red Sea, its edges boiling and curling back upon itself as if even the darkness feared her.

Spectra beat her wings once and glided forward into that wound in the world.

The Gloom closed behind her, swallowing the path she had made, but she was already within it, at the pulsing heart of the massacre-to-be.

She stopped in the center of the parted tide, still floating, the Hellstaff resting on her clawed hand. The stench here was heaven to her, even though the Gloom was so thick the air felt solid, Spectra basked in it.

She tilted her head back, closed her burning eyes, and inhaled.

The red smoke streamed toward her face in sinuous ribbons. It entered her flared nostrils and she drew it deep, deeper, until her chest swelled with the foulness.

To any other human, this was poison absolute. To Spectra, it was an elixir of life.

The Gloom traveled down her pathways, rushing like oil through a labyrinth of capillaries designed for exactly this unholy communion.

It poured down her throat, branched into her shoulders, coiled around her spine, and sank into the muscles of her back where her wings anchored to bone.

All the channels of her body pulsed with an evident increase in power. The dark energy continued to move. Up into the sweeping arcs of her horns, and the dark bone began to glow from within, a deep crimson light bleeding through microscopic fractures in the surface.

Across her forehead, the markings brightened until they cast sharp shadows on her own face. The energy dived back down, searing through her chest, wrapping her heart in a fist of fire, then shot outward to every limb.

Her claws sharpened further, the tips growing needle-fine and smoking. Her tail coiled and uncoiled with new density, the spade-like tip cracking the air with a sound like a whip made of thunder.

Her eyes opened. They now blazed madly, like two furnaces leaking embers of fire. Spectra threw her head back and shrieked, her wings snapping outward to their full span.

BOOM!

A shockwave followed right after.

Air and Gloom and the Purgatory Demons still scrambling to their feet were flattened in a wide circle around her. The ground cracked. The red smoke fled from her in all directions, momentarily clearing a perfect arena of scorched earth.

Spectra lowered her chin, the Hellstaff spinning once in her grip before she leveled it at the rising horde.

”Wayward children of the pit,” she intoned. ”You have split from the wound that birthed you and forgotten the hand that shaped the darkness. Very well. Thy mother shall administer correction... by unmaking you.”

The Purgatory Demons had no idea what she meant. They didn’t care. Unlike normal Demons, they had no fear. No sort of emotion had been registered into their demonic DNA.

All they knew was kill. Kill. Kill!

They rose from the chaos of that first strike in their disgustingly unnatural forms. Normal Demons were hideous enough—twisted bodies, stretched maws, the geometry of nightmare—but Purgatory Demons were what happened when that nightmare was left to fester for eons in a cage of its own rage.

Hound-shaped things galloped on too many legs, their backs bristling with humanlike fingers that twitched and grasped at the air.

Some of them had heads split open not at the jaw but down the center of the skull, peeling into five wet petals lined with teeth that spiraled inward like a leech’s maw.

Some of the larger ones dragged a second torso behind them, fused at the hip, still clawing at the ground, screaming from a face that had no mouth. Their skin was the colour of old bruises, and it glistened with a perpetual wetness, as if they had been born in a womb of infection.

Humanoid Demons with arms bent backward at the elbow, external ribcages, teeth for eyes and multiple tails. Faces, when they had them, were featureless save for vertical slits that opened and closed like breathing gills, but from those slits came a chittering, insectile sound that clawed at the inside of the skull.

All of them, every single one, moved with a speed that made the eye lie. They jerked across the field in stuttering bursts, appearing three feet closer than they had been a heartbeat ago. Fucking rapid monstrosities.

They wouldn’t even pause. Wouldn’t take time to assess.

They just came mindlessly with the singular, unhinged desire to kill anything that still possessed a pulse, and if no pulse was available, they would kill each other for the temporary satisfaction.

Mad things. Truly, Lancet would have stood no chance. Not at his current state. And the Gloom space would have only lessened the chances for the Heroines.

A pack of the hound-things leaped at Spectra first, petal-faces blooming wide. She did not even raise the staff.

Every part of her body was a weapon, including her wings which had edges as sharp as blades.

Her left wing snapped forward horizontally, the bony leading edge catching three of them mid-air and bisecting them so cleanly that their halves rained down in separate arcs.

The wing continued, scythed through a fourth, and sent the fifth spinning away with its skull partially detached, still snapping at nothing.

But the sixth and seventh were already there, and behind them a wave of the chittering humanoid Purgatory Demons, and behind them the bull-thing swinging its chain, and behind all of them more, so many more, a tide that had no end.

They crashed into her space.

But it was then that Spectra’s own Demons finally arrived and collided with the horde.

Madness ensued, black and blood was everywhere in that battlefield.

Lancet and the others watched, too awed to even speak.

Naturally, Spectra’s army were not mindless beasts. They carried her purpose in their glowing eyes, and that purpose sharpened their claws and focused their savagery into a level of discipline.

This purpose made them more powerful than normal Demons. But when it came to the children of Purgatory, they had met their match.

A wave of humanoid Demons, tall and sinewy with arms that ended in organic blades, slammed into the Purgatory flank and began carving.

Their strikes were precise, aimed at joints and throats, and Purgatory flesh parted under their assault. But the enemy did not fall as normal things fall. Even with arms severed, even with torsos opened from shoulder to hip, they kept coming—crawling, biting, stabbing with broken ribs.

One Purgatory Demon, missing both legs, hauled itself up the body of its attacker by its teeth and sank them into the other’s throat, chewing through sinew until both collapsed in a twitching heap.

Bug Demons skittered into the fray on chitinous legs, their mandibles clacking with mechanical fury.

One of them, a beetle-thing the size of a warhorse, lowered its horned head and ploughed through three Purgatory Demons, impaling them on its curved prongs.

The bodies did not die. They thrashed on the horn, clawing at the beetle’s face, ripping out its eyes one by one until the great insect crashed and was swarmed under a mound of biting shapes.

Madness.

From above, Spectra’s Winged Demons dove in screeching packs and tore into the Purgatory flyers, creatures that looked like flayed bats with human hands at the ends of their wing-joints.

Aerial combat became a rain of body parts and shrieking. One of her winged demons seized a Purgatory bat in each of its four talons and ripped them apart lengthwise, only to have three more latch onto its wings and begin chewing through the membrane with the single-mindedness of locusts.

It spiraled down, still fighting, and the crash killed a dozen smaller demons beneath it.

More madness

From the churned earth behind the front line, a giant Worm Demon — one of Spectra’s — rose as tall as a tower. It reared up, opened its tunnel of a mouth, swaying like a cobra made of meat and hunger, and then it struck downward.

The mouth engulfed three Purgatory Demons whole, snapping shut on a fourth that was too slow. For a moment the worm’s throat bulged obscenely as the swallowed Demons continued to fight inside it, their claws raking at the lining.

The worm shuddered, convulsed, and then collapsed sideways, its gut splitting open from within as the swallowed Demons tore their way out, slick with slimy stomach acid and utterly, terrifyingly alive.

But before they could join the fight, the stomach acid from the worm finished it up, melting them to paste.

Mayhem. It was all mayhem.

And at the center of it was Spectra Hexerra.