If we make it through the night, I am going to purge this entire escapade from my memories. Under the stares of his companions on this Corpse-God forsaken mission, Oak gathered himself and stepped inside the ramshackle hovel, pushing through the pungent odor of piss, shit, and dead flesh. The floor squelched under his boots. He gagged, but managed to keep himself together. Don't think about it. You can always get new boots. Don't think about it.

A few sharp steps took him past the worn down dining table and the poorly armed doll leaning against one of the table legs. Falchion held at the ready, Oak approached the bed and the ruined man and woman fucking under the ratty blanket. Gangrene had defiled their bodies. Dead, greenish-black tissue sloughed off their hands and feet in strips and pieces, bulging in one spot and digging a hole through the raped meat in another.

The wailing and groaning never stopped, even for a moment. Oak stood above the Demon's victims writhing on the bed in mindless agony, witnessing a horror only a decayed, rotting brain could conjure. A green eye circled with puss opened, peering at him from under the tangled mess of hair covering most of the woman's face. She lay under her doomed lover and growled at Oak, showing off her black teeth and bleeding gums.

There was nothing behind her gaze but frightened, animalistic impulse and pain. The person she had once been had abandoned the shell of her body a long time ago and locked the doors of her mind on the way out. No words could reach the husk she had left behind.

The woman's lover was no better. Keening yelps escaped his throat and blood flowed steadily from the bleeding sores covering his head, dripping into the man's unseeing eyes. Lonely tufts of hair stood on his scalp like copses of trees on the plains, and red rivers formed a webway on his balding head.

I'm sorry. So very sorry.

A tremor traveled down Oak's spine, and his breath quickened. The Demon's influence hung heavy in the air, staining the very fabric of Creation with its corruption. He reached for the purity of rage, the red clarity brought forth by a single-minded, savage purpose and inflamed the wrath always pulsing inside his heart to a conflagration. The furnace of Oak's Infernal Engine belched flame inside his soul, burning brighter than ever as Ashmedai's gifts shielded him from the art of the servant of Rot and Decay.

Belphegor's spawn could go fuck himself.

Oak left nothing to chance. He swung the heavy falchion down like he was trying to put down an ox and sliced through both necks, the bedframe, and the mouldy floorboards in one swing. The writhing and the wailing seized, and silence reigned over the tragedy.

+ 2 Souls

+ 2 Fuel

Normally, the chimes of his engine filled him with joy, but the surroundings made elation a foreign concept to him. Oak lifted his blade from the putrid mess left behind by his act of mercy and burned away the filth clinging to the blade with a burst of flame. He would need to return later to burn this place to the ground.

Doing so now would only invite disaster.

"We walk dark roads, my friend. Even the stars close their eyes tonight." Ur-Namma stood in the doorway, gazing at the squalor within with a frown on his regal face. "You cannot chain a blight such as this. To lash it is to feed it. Rot knows no solution but the hottest iron. We must burn it out, root and stem, or suffer the consequences."

"I know." Oak sighed and moved away from the bed. "I just wish…sometimes I wish I was the type of man who cared. Cared enough to learn how to mend flesh instead of breaking it."

"They suffer no longer. In those words, lies a modicum of comfort."

"Yeah," Oak muttered and walked past the elf, into the heavy night air. "The night is young. Let's move, and quickly."

***

When Oak closed his eyes, the angular stone keep at the center of Al-Badra loomed over him. Gray walls dripping with dark ichor, like blood flowing down the flanks of a wounded beast. Tendrils of puss searching for virgin soil. For the innocent and the hypocrite alike.

The Rot spared no one.

Oak stepped over a body so warped by decay it was impossible to tell if the poor soul had been a man or a woman. The face had rotted away, leaving only a gaping, bubbling void behind. All senses on edge, he stomped onwards along the alleyway, Geezer following at his heels.

Wrath flowed in his veins, and he clung to its radiance with clammy fingers. He stoked his rage and felt the Corse of Bloodshed hum inside his soul. Wrath. Wrath and struggle eternal, spawn of Belphegor. The black teeth and the bleeding gums of the woman he had slain swam in his mind, mocking him.

Ur-Namma walked in the middle of their company while Sadia and Yakubu brought up the rear. They had left the main street behind out of concern for discovery and embarked on the alleys shadowing the big road leading towards the center of Al-Badra.

A sound bounced from one rotting wooden wall to another, weakening to an echo of an echo before it reached Oak's ears. Shuffling feet. Croaks ripped out of tortured throats. Shambling figures held aloft by unnatural strength. "Incoming," he whispered and lifted a fist.

A dark form lunged from a rooftop on his right, bone tipped claws seeping with corruption aimed at Sadia's heart. The girl screamed in fright, her magic forgotten in the face of a fate no sane mind could conceive.

Yakubu stepped up to the task and didn't disappoint. In a maneuver that would have sent an arena full of people roaring in approval, the Koromite cavalryman speared the first bearer of the Demon's blight through the chest, catching it with the wings of his spear and swung it down to the mud, before uncoiling from his lunge and smashing the second blighted off its course with his shield.

Shrieking in mindless sorrow, the blighted scrambled to its crooked feet, flaps of rotting skin swinging with every tortured movement, revealing the inflamed and dying flesh beneath. Its weeping eyes told a tale of pain beyond mortal comprehension.

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A searing flash of red lightning pierced the shadows and the yellow miasma cloaking the alley, and sent the charred corpse of the second blighted tumbling to the mud. Sadia breathed hard, face twisted with disgust. "Fuck!" the little spellsinger cursed, her left hand shaking and sparking with power. "Thank you, Yakubu."

"An honor, spellsinger." A pleased smile dragged the corners of Yakubu's lips upwards and the warrior jabbed the leaf-shaped blade of his spear into the first jumper's throat to make sure it stayed dead. "Gloria in Excelsis to the Hounds of War."

From the corner of his eye, Oak could see Ur-Namma nodding with approval. Wonders never cease. The elf has finally found a soldier worthy of respect. Not that Oak blamed him. He had chosen Yakubu for this undertaking for good reason. The Koromite was competent to a fault. And apparently a cultist of Glorious War to boot.

A horde of blighted turned the corner some fifty feet ahead and rushed towards Oak and his companions, rotting faces stretched into mockeries of the human form. The former citizens of Al-Badra charged down the alley, foaming at the mouth to sink their blackened teeth into sapient flesh.

"YUCK!" Geezer yelped and retreated to Sadia's side, growling at the approaching avalanche of foul madness.

Ravenous as a forest fire. Hotter than a furnace. Oak called for the fire inside his soul, and his Infernal Engine roared to action. A thick cone of flame leapt from the fingers of his extended left hand, engulfing the first ranks of shrieking blighted. Melting flesh ran down their hideous bodies and the greasy hair on the monstrous victims of the Demon burned like candle wicks.

And yet they came, weeping and wailing, their tears evaporating in the heat of the flames. What fright could death and suffering hold for any of these cursed souls? Agony lived in every twitch of their defiled muscles and ravaged sinews.

Their bodies were accursed temples of pain.

Putrid claws covered in puss reached for Oak, seeking to rend his flesh. He planted his feet in the mud and swung. With a flicker of his falchion, he cut two blighted in twine, sending their bisected corpses tumbling to the ground. The stink of rotting, diseased intestines and decay made his eyes water. More shambling monsters followed in their wake.

Oak switched tactics. His pyrokinetic blasts scoured the charging horde, smashing skulls, snapping limbs, and pulping chests with telekinetic hammer blows shrouded in flame. Ur-Namma fought by his side like an elf possessed, his longsword snatching away lives like the scythe of the Reaper himself. The ancient elf moved without hurry, precise cuts and thrusts flowing into each other as seamlessly as breathing.

A hand covered in inflamed, weeping sores made to grab Oak by the arm and drag him down. A flash of elvish steel cut it off. Another leaped at him from a nearby rooftop, but a bolt of red lightning smashed it into the wall and set the blighted aflame. Black ichor dripped down the wall in unison with peeling strips of white paint. All the while, Oak sent forth flaming hammer blows of pyrokinesis in a staccato beat of death, blasting the blighted to smithereens.

The Corse of Bloodshed hummed inside Oak's soul, feeding strength and hardiness to every fiber of his being in accordance with his wrath. Despite their insistence to claim his life, Oak cut a path through the blighted with savage swings of his two handed falchion. A red hue cloaked the world, and his heart simmered with bleeding rage.

Every strike of Oak's blade flowed easier than the last, snapping from victim to victim with brutal force. He was a fox in a den of hares, a ratter cleaning house. No vermin would suffer his wrath and live to see a new dawn.

Sadia's voice rose over the battle, seeking to bend Creation to her will. Thanks to the Ears of Amdusias, Oak perceived her kneeling in the mud, chanting a spell with one hand raised and the other stuck to the ground. Geezer stood by her side, growling at the blighted, his tail between his legs.

Whether it was the Demon nudging them, or the blighted themselves sensed the danger, the end result was the same. Things which had once been men and women jumped from the surrounding rooftops, aiming to cut off the chant at the source.

In doing so, they faced a father on a warpath and found themselves wanting. Yakubu drew a storm of steel around Sadia and Geezer with his spear, the point flicking from the throat of one blighted to the next, never wavering in the face of death.

"Officium et familia!" Yakubu roared, his shield splattered with ichor and blood. "Gloria in Excelsis to the Hounds of War!"

If they were watching, Samael's 66th Legion had to be shitting themselves with glee.

A ripple swept across the alley, and Sadia rose back to her feet with a shout. The earth under Oak's boots cracked and withered, becoming the sunbaked surface of a plain under the midsummer sun. Moisture flowed past him, sinking into the mud under the feet of the charging blighted, softening the already soggy earth.

In the span of a heartbeat, the horde of blighted were up to their knees in mud, stuck in place and struggling to make progress.

Oak had never let an opportunity for easy kills go to waste, and he wasn't about to start now. Standing on the edge of the newly formed mud pit, he cleaved every shambling monstrosity strong enough to extract themselves from the mud in two and smited the rest into charred pulps of flesh and shattered bone with blasts of pyrokinesis.

Soon enough, silence fell over the battlefield and the bodies of the fallen lay still, some propped up by the unyielding grip of the mud they had sunken into. Oak breathed hard, savage joy bubbling like boiling broth in the corners of his mind. He closed his eyes. The heartbeats of the meatbags around him thundered in his ears and he could see their blood-filled veins dancing on the surface of his eyelids.

Blood and offal. The slaughter is your temple and hallowed is thy name, Ashmedai, Demon of Wrath.

It was hard, but Oak dragged himself back from the brink, from the edge of the Pit of ruin at the bowels of his mind, and fought off the Butcher's blood soaked grip. He emerged from the darkness, a pounding headache pulsing behind his eyes.

Still breathing, and so are my friends. Funny how a bridge between moments can be as fragile as that.

His engine chimed.

+ 16 Souls

+ 16 Fuel

Not bad at all, for such light work.

"SORRY." Geezer nudged his hand with his snout and whined quietly. Oak scratched the hellhound behind the ears with fumbling fingers, trying to soothe the dog with his touch.

"Don't be. I wouldn't want to bite these abominations either," he replied.

Sadia walked up to them, wiping sweat from her eyes with nervous, groping fingers. The little spellsinger leaned down and petted Geezer, muttering words of comfort to the dog. The fact she hid her own shaking hands inside the hellhound's coarse fur was surely just a coincidence on her part.

Oak cleared his throat. "Good thinking with the spell, Sadia."

"O–oh, please, it was nothing."

"It was a tactically sound decision, and you performed the spell perfectly under pressure," Ur-Namma said, wiping his own forehead with his sleeve.

"He is right, girl." Yakubu clapped Sadia on the shoulder. The Koromite looked fresh enough to fight another horde back to back, if the situation required it. "Keep it up."

Sadia's eyes widened comically. Ur-Namma's praise was a rare treat. It looked like she might faint from sheer pride.

Ur-Namma tactfully ignored Sadia's emotional turmoil and stared at the filthy blade of his longsword in disgust. He pulled out a rag from the pocket of his jacket and got to swiping the blade clean. Oak just burned away the putrid fluids clinging to his falchion.

Not everyone could be as awesome as him.

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