The corpse-hawks shrieked, beaks of bloody bone open wide, milk-pale eyes bulging in rotting sockets. The fleet opened fire, cutting a swath through the cloud, black blood spraying as razored steel tore the air. The beasts came on, not slowed by mortal wounds, only tumbling from the sky when their wings were too shredded to keep them aloft. The Everstorm pack swooped through them, cutting like chainblades, ripping heads from necks and wings from backs. The sky was filled with screams, with the popopopopopop of the shuriken-throwers, the hiss and woosh of flame-spitters lighting the dark. Above it all, Raijin pounded his drums, lightning spreading across the clouds like cracks in the face of the sky.
The Earthcrusher hit the Yomi horde like an avalanche, cutting a swath through a dozen demons with one sweep of its arm. Blood like a river, an ocean, gurgling screams and shearing bones. But where one demon fell, another two took its place, charging headfirst into flame-spitter fire, withering bursts of shrapnel from the iron-throwers. One gigantic, headless monstrosity collided with the ’Crusher’s belly, latching hold with tentacled arms as long as buildings. The behemoth staggered, a hundred smaller gibbering demons hitting its legs and climbing; a rising tide of open, shrieking mouths.
Inside the cockpit, Kin cursed, fighting to keep control of the war-machine beneath the weight of the demonic tide.
“Portside hydraulic pressure dropping!” roared Misaki from her console. “They’ve sundered one of the lines!”
Damage reports came one after the other.
“Shrapnel-throwers seven and ten disabled!”
“Legs seven and five unresponsive!”
“Loading bay! Get to the loading bay!”
“Godsdammit!” Kin swung one of the Earthcrusher’s arms, feeling the impact rock the goliath, painting the viewing portals with great sluices of black blood.
Shinji’s voiced crackled over the PA. “Kin, demons are at the loading bay doors! If they breach, there won’t be anything left of the Earthcrusher to blow!”
Kin blinked the sweat from his eyes, swung at the seething mob again and again. His voice was a whisper. A prayer. Not to the gods roaring in the skies above, but to the girl who now held all their fates in their hands.
“Hurry, Yukiko…”
*
Yukiko pressed low to Buruu’s back, watching him tear a corpse-hawk’s head clean off its shoulders as they flew past, wheeling and spinning through storms of rotting flesh. The sky was black with them, screaming, shrieking nightmares on leather wings, claws like knives. The thunder tigers were faster, fiercer, but there were so many of the creatures that individual might meant nothing. The pack split apart, sweeping and diving through the air, dismembering one foe only to be pursued by a dozen more. A Morcheban dam fell from the sky, half a dozen hawks tearing at her belly and ripping at her eyes. Tuake had his wing sheared off at the shoulder, roaring in agony as he tumbled to his ruin on the ashen earth below.
The pack regrouped near the fleet, keeping close to the withering hail of death spewing from the shuriken-throwers. Yukiko could see Ginjiro at his flagship’s prow, roaring commands to his crew. A Phoenix corvette called Flameburst lived up to its name, exploding into a billowing cloud of fire as it was torn from the clouds. The Honorable Death loomed close by, Hiro storming across the deck with his Elite Samurai, hacking at the corpse-hawks who’d managed to break through the ’thrower fire and attack his crew. The Guild ship Resplendent Glory was spiraling out of control, her decks overrun by seething black, the piercing screams of men being devoured alive rising above the roar of engine and storm.
Hana screamed over the slaughter. “Yukiko! The Earthcrusher is being overrun!”
“I can see it. But there’s too many of these godsdamned things!”
Spiraling through the scent of ozone and death, thunder crashing in time with her pulse. She could feel wind in her feathers, blood on her claws, the acrid tang of the kill in her mouth. Sweeping through the sky as easily as fish through a rushing stream, Buruu’s heart pumping in her chest, her eyes in the back of his head. Rolling and swooping and roaring, feathers crackling with wisps of lightning, blasting dozens of horrors from the skies with each burst of Raijin Song. Hana chopping and slicing with her chainkatana, Yoshi blowing withered heads off rotting shoulders with his iron-thrower. Slow and bloody work, but on they flew, the girl and her thunder tiger and the pack around them, closer to the deepening dark.
And then the darkness moved.
A ripple in the impossible black, the shriek of a thousand tortured gulls across a bleeding sky, a knife of burning ice in her mind. Yukiko hissed, Buruu and the pack broke away as a thing rose up from the hellgate, too horrifying for her eyes to focus on.
A vast winged shape, hundreds of feet across, twisted and monstrous. Its stink hit Yukiko like a punch to the face, vomit rolling in back of her throat. It was a horror wrought of corpses—the bodies of dead birds, maggot-riddled, two eyes burning with freezing blue flame, the beating of its wings like a hurricane laden with the suffocating aroma of death. And she knew it for what it was: the tortured spirit of every sparrow that had fallen choking from blood-red skies. Every crane or eagle that had spiraled from the clouds with a lungful of poisons and a bellyful of blood, reborn in the Hells, bringing death now to those who had destroyed them and all their kind.
It screamed again—the agonized wail of ten thousand denizens of the air, dying in pain beneath a burning red sun.
“Great Maker,” Yukiko breathed. “Protect us now.”