Chapter 516: Catharsis
Oathran moved. He launched himself from behind Cecilia, his boots skidding in the blood-slicked mud as he closed the distance between himself and the golden beast that was still tearing into what remained of Arzhen Vasiliev.
His humanoid form was already straining at the seams, white scales rippling across his forearms, his wings half-unfurled and bristling, his eyes blazing.
He wasn’t about to lose a brother to the same blind fury that had nearly consumed him.
"Eastiel!" He slammed into the lion’s flank, his arms wrapping around the massive, blood-soaked torso.
The impact would have staggered a lesser creature, but Eastiel in his full beast form was like a literal mountain. He barely budged.
Oathran dug his heels into the earth and held on, his own form beginning to shift, growing larger, scales spreading across his shoulders and down his spine, his wings expanding to their full span.
The half-dragon form towered over the lion now, white and gleaming in the moonlight, his voice thundering, cutting through the chaos. "Eastiel! Get your head above the surface! Come on!"
The crowd around them hadn’t stopped screaming. The de-evacuation had ground to a halt, civilians and hunters alike couldn’t help but to watch.
A young werefox medic who had been tending to wounded evacuees had dropped her supplies, her hands pressed to her mouth, her eyes fixed on the mangled thing on the ground.
Arzhen’s body lay in pieces across the blood-soaked earth. His remaining arm, still reaching toward where Cecilia had stood, had been torn away at the shoulder.
His ribcage was a shattered cage of white bone and his legs were twisted at angles that defied anatomy.
His face was gone. Skull completely crushed.
A beat later, a massive black werewolf burst through the perimeter of hunters and civilians, his fur sleek as shadow, his pitch black eyes full of alarm.
Arkai had arrived. He took in the scene in a single, sweeping glance. The mangled corpses, the blood-soaked lion and the half-dragon struggling to contain him. He didn’t waste a second on questions. "What the fuck is happening—?!"
"Push him away. Push him back." Oathran’s voice was preternaturally calm. He shifted his grip on Eastiel’s heaving flank, his claws dimpling the golden fur without breaking skin. "He’s not stopping on his own."
Arkai didn’t hesitate. His massive wolf form threw itself against the lion’s other side, shoulder to shoulder with Eastiel just like Oathran was.
Their combined weight and strength forced Eastiel back from the ruin of Arzhen’s body.
The lion roared in anguished fury and thrashed against them, his claws raking furrows in the earth, his bloodied muzzle snapping at the air.
But his brothers held firm.
Damon arrived with a phalanx of senior hunters at his back, grizzled veterans of a hundred rift closures, men and women who had seen corruption twist bodies into nightmares and had learned to sleep anyway.
They moved in tight formation, weapons drawn, expecting to contain whatever just came from hasty reports. What they found instead stopped them cold.
The medical area looked like a slaughterhouse floor. The earth was churned into dark mud, saturated with blood that was gleaming wet.
A headless body wearing a priestess robe, a pink haired head. And whatever body parts lay scattered across the ground in pieces, a shattered ribcage here, a twisted leg there, an arm that had been torn from its socket and flung several feet away, the fingers still slightly curled as though reaching for something.
Damon stopped walking. His hand, which had been reaching for his gun, fell limply to his side.
His mouth opened but no words came out. For the first time in his career, no, in his life, perhaps, Damon was completely speechless.
"This—"
Then he saw Cecilia.
She stood at the edge of the carnage, her clothes splattered with blood that was not her own, her pregnant belly rising and falling with slow breaths.
Her face was pale and her eyes dry. She was staring at the mangled chunks of flesh on the ground with cold daze.
"Ask around," Cecilia said without looking at Damon, flat, clinical. "Arzhen Vasiliev approached me dragging Ruby Vaiva by the hair, then suddenly ripped her head off, trying to offer it to me. Everyone here is a witness."
Damon froze. His whole body went stiff, his spine locking rigidly. But his soul recoiled even as his body stood motionless.
"In anger, Eastiel fell into a rampage and ripped the man to pieces." Cecilia’s words didn’t waver. It was as steady as the hand she had raised to crush Arzhen’s heart before the lion had beaten her to it. "If you are going to arrest him, make sure to let me bail him out."
She paused. The moonlight caught the edge of her profile, illuminating the blood spattered across her cheek, her collar, the curve of her belly.
Then she finally turned to face him. Her eyes were dark now.
"It will be manslaughter, as the law calls it?"
Damon felt his blood run cold.
Was this... the Lesser Goddess he knew?
Or was this what happened when that woman finally ran out of mercy?
"No," Damon answered, managing to calm himself. "This is self-defense."
Cecilia, who had faced him, slowly gave him a lopsided smile. This crooked curve of her lips acknowledged the fiction he was offering her.
"Well said, Brother-in-law," she said.
This woman—!
Then she turned away from him, her blood-spattered clothes swaying with the motion, and began to walk toward the rampaging lion.
The ground between her and Eastiel was a morass of churned mud and blood and things best not identified, so Cecilia looked down at it, at her shoes, and made a small, imperceptible sound of distaste.
Then she stepped into the air. She walked over an invisible platform that had materialized just two feet above the bloody earth, exactly where she needed it to be. Her foot came down on nothing and found it firm.
Her next step rose slightly higher, a shallow staircase of empty air that carried her over the carnage without so much as a drop of more blood touching her.
She reached the rampaging lion. Eastiel was still thrashing against his brothers’ grip, his massive golden body heaving, his muzzle still dripping with the blood and flesh of the man he had killed.
His roars had faded to low, guttural growls, his eyes still wild and unseeing.
He didn’t recognize Oathran. He didn’t recognize Arkai. He was still in the grip of the rampage, still lost in the red haze of fury that had consumed him the moment he saw Arzhen reach for Cecilia.
She stopped in front of him. Her right hand, the same hand that had grasped a heart with telekinesis, reached out. Her left hand followed.
Both palms pressed against the blood-matted fur of his massive cheeks, cradling his head gently. She pulled his head toward her, and the lion, despite his rage and rampage, let her.
"Thank you for killing him, East." She whispered, pressing her forehead against the bridge of his nose. "But you should spit out the blood and flesh of him from your mouth, even some that were swallowed accidentally."
Her thumbs stroked the fur beneath his eyes. "We don’t want a tummyache."