Heroine Creation: All My Summons Are Custom Made

The Hellstaff in her hand became a smear of crimson light, spinning, thrusting, cleaving. She cracked it down on the skull of a leaping hound and the body erupted, every bone in its frame shattering simultaneously and blasting outward in a porcupine spray.

She swung the staff in a backhand arc and the head of a humanoid Demon separated from its shoulders, flew twenty feet, and was caught mid-air by a bug Demon who crunched it like a fruit.

SQUASHHH!

A Purgatory Demon lunged at her right side and her wing folded, then snapped open like a trap, the edge slicing it from groin to crown in a single motion. Another came from behind and her wing simply reversed its beat.

The bony struts punched through its chest and lifted it off the ground before she flung it away with a casual flex.

She flew. Even surrounded, even with bodies pressing in from every direction, she flew. Her path was a blur, and anything in that blur became ribbons.

When she was surrounded by six chittering things, she spun like a demon tornado and they were all turned into a fine red mist. When she flew high, two hounds held onto her leg with their jaws.

She looked down, scowled, and kicked once. Their heads came off and stayed with her ankle while their bodies tumbled back to the earth.

But they were unrelenting. Unhinged. The defining truth of Purgatory Demons was not their strength but their absolute refusal to stop existing.

The more she killed, the closer the survivors pressed, clambering over the corpses of their own without hesitation. They did not feel fear. They did not feel pain as anything other than a prompt to bite harder.

A bull-thing, its chest split open from an earlier strike and its internal chain dragging loose, charged through a wall of her Demons and rammed her from the side.

Spectra’s ribs absorbed the tremendous impact and she grunted, turning to retaliate. ”You dare?!!” But in that half-second of distraction, three more Demons leaped onto her back.

A hound latched onto her wing joint. A humanoid wrapped its double-jointed arms around her throat and pulled. Another, the spider-like thing, stabbed its needle legs into her shoulder.

”Ughh! You mad things!”

She tore them off. Her claws ripped the hound away along with a chunk of her own wing membrane, and she crushed the spider in her grip, but the humanoid held on even when she snapped both its arms at the reverse elbows. It simply bit into her trapezius with its vertical mouth and started sawing through muscle.

”Argghh! Curses!”

Spectra struggled to free herself. But more came. Too many. The tide rose. They leaped from every direction, and for all her speed, for all her monstrous power, she was one body in a sea of hunger.

The Purgatory Demons climbed one another to reach her, forming a living pyramid of claws and teeth and completely buried her.

Spectra’s form vanished beneath a mound of dull crimson flesh and grasping limbs, her wings pinned, her staff-arm forced down, her shriek muffled by the weight of Hellfyre’s dreaded monsters.

On the distant rise, Astensia half-drew her Blessed Blade. Golden light swirled around her hand as she prepared to intervene.

”No.” Lancet stopped her. He wasn’t even looking at her, but he knew the Ironwill Knight would try to intervene. Lancet’s eyes remained fixed on the mound where Spectra had disappeared. ”She told us to wait. We have to trust her to be competent.”

”She is being devoured,” Astensia said fearfully.

Thor stepped forward, hammer sparking. ”Master Lancet—”

”Just wait,” he said again, and there was iron in it now. His jaw was tight. His knuckles were white on the Guillotine’s hilt. But he did not give the order. ”We have to trust each other to do what they say they will do.”

Lancet narrowed his eyes. ”Spectra is not done.”

Everyone glanced at him, then after taking a deep breath, they all turned back to the battlefield.

Nothing had changed. Spectra was still swallowed under the mound. But then it started to shake. A tremor ran through it, then another.

Thin cracks of red light shone through the gaps between bodies like the birth of a terrible star. And then, a shriek of rage shattered the air.

The mound detonated. And a powerful crimson pressure wave poured out of the center and flattened the grass for a hundred yards.

Purgatory Demons flew in every direction, some in one piece, most in several. The blast cleared a crater in the battlefield, and at its center, wings spread so wide they blotted out the red sky, Spectra rose.

”I knew it,” Spectra smiled.

The Heroines all watched with stupefied expressions.

Spectra’s body was a roadmap of wounds—bites, gouges, the slow bleed of dark ichor—but her eyes burned brighter than ever, and her teeth were bared in a scowl of pure, transcendent violence.

”INSOLENCE!” she roared, and her voice had shed its seductive purr entirely. This was the voice of the Mother of Hel. ”YOU WOULD LAY HANDS UPON THE HAND THAT BIRTHED THEE? THEN LET ME SHOW THEE WHAT THOSE HANDS CAN DO!”

A Purgatory Demon, the same bull-thing that had rammed her, charged again with its gut-chain swinging. Spectra cheaply caught the chain in her bare hand, ignoring the barbs that sank into her palm, and yanked.

The creature stumbled forward. Her other hand closed around its head—fingers sinking into the wet, bruise-colored flesh, claws puncturing the skull plate—and she pulled.

She hadn’t pulled out its head. Or any part of its body. No, Spectra had pulled something deeper from the Demon, something mere hands shouldn’t be able to touch.

Out of the Demon’s body, Spectra dragged a crimson shape, translucent and flickering like flame, tearing free from the beast’s flesh.

It was the Demon Soul.

The red, spectral thing stretched like taffy between her grip and its physical shell, the body going rigid and limp in turns as the connection strained.

With a sound like wet leather tearing, the soul came free.

Spectra held it above her head, a twisting mass of red light and hate. The soulless body collapsed, a husk with no purpose.

”A pesky little thing thou art.” And then, causally, she just hurled the soul across the battlefield. ”Depart from me! Join your new brethren!”

It struck a cluster of Purgatory Demons and did not dissipate. It rose, reshaped itself into a spectral mockery of its former body, and turned on its kin.

The Demon Soul began to fight for Spectra, its attacks passing through flesh to tear at the souls within, and the Purgatory Demons—so relentless against the living—recoiled in shrieking confusion.

Spectra did it again.

She grabbed a spider-thing by its bulbous head, claws sinking deep, and ripped its soul out through its vertical mouth.

She flung it into the fray. A humanoid with the external ribs: she tore its soul out through its chest cage. A hound, still gnashing even as she pulled its essence from its spine: she sent it howling into the battle, a ghost of its own fury now turned against its brethren.

One by one, she claimed them. Her movements became a terrible rhythm: grab, pull, hurl. Since the bodies of these Purgatory Demons were too wild and too mindlessly savage to be tamed in life, she tamed their souls.

She had found a way to control these things before the literal lords of Hellfyre. A true Mother.

From then on, the tide changed.

Her own Demons, those who still stood, rallied around her. The Worms crushed clusters of the enemy. The Winged Demons, now fewer but fiercer, dove with renewed purpose. The humanoid blade-limbed ones formed a phalanx and pushed forward, their strikes now coordinated with the spectral Purgatory Souls that fought beside them, an alliance of the damned.

And Spectra, at the heart of it all, was winning.

”She’s doing it,” Kestrel said as they all watched. ”She’s killing the entire army.”

”Unbelievable,” Thor whispered, completely astonished. ”Could she truly be the most powerful amongst us?”

Lancet, meanwhile, was not being awed by Spectra’s power any longer. His eyes were narrowed, peering deeper as if... ”Something is wrong,” he said.

Everyone looked at him. ”What is it?”

Lancet peered deeper as his eyes. When he saw what he had been worried about, he felt his heart drop. ”She’s overheating. The Gloom has started to burn her out.”