“What do we have?” Nyx said calmly, feet crunching over the gravel of a lonely dirt road, and fingers playing with a cherry lozenge. The stereotype would be the ‘hard boiled’ cop with a cigarette, but she wasn’t about to go home to her kid smelling of tobacco.
“Another cult, Ma’am.” One of the officers said, “seems very small, perhaps another one off, rather than anything connected.”
Nyx rolled her eyes. These damn things had been popping up left and right recently. Not too surprising all in all, what with the slow but inexorable spread of information that had been occurring. Any manner of deranged individuals would want to try to tap the spectral for power: criminals, the deranged, the desperate, even stupid kids. And Nix was often involved in cleaning it up.
“We know how many, or how armed?”
“Not with certainty, we doubt there’s a lot of them, given the size of the place, but as for armed, well it’s the sticks, everyone’s got guns.”
As if to confirm this fact the door of the cabin they were staring at popped open and Nyx saw the tell tale glint of a barrel.
“COVER!” She shouted and a half dozen agents dove for threes or rocks. Nyx herself however, simply turned around and waited.
She didn’t have to wait long before she felt the sharp pinging of reports against her back, bullets tearing through her long coat, ripping the fabric as they did so. She braced against the impacts and calmly waited for her assailant to empty his mag while making a mental note to order a new coat.
Once there was a pause in the shooting what was left of her trench coat exploded. Shredding in al directions as a clockwork mass of pseudo living brass and silver exploded out The serrated edges of the coppery metal pointed accusatorily at the gunman, while silver feathers expanded out, fully obscuring Nyx from view. A part of her wondered what the crazy in the cabin was thinking right at this moment, she was looking the other way so couldn’t see his face. For the moment anyway.
Once unfurled her wings snapped forward in an instant going from extended behind her to in front of her in a blink of an eye. Gale force winds were generated as they moved, but more to the point, Nyx was moved as well. She was hurtling like a missile backwards and towards the cabin. With a twist she turned in the air, a metallic foot kicking the ground, less to propel her forward and more to keep her up and maintain momentum. The winds coiled in close around her moving up and forward again in this angle they worked less like wings and more like a boxers arms, shielding and ready to strike, and strike they did.
Nyx had flattened the spines on the wing ‘knuckle’ to avoid being lethal, but a massive metal contraption plowing itself into her targets chest was still unyielding and vicious. She felt the reverberations though her appendage as ribs cracked and the cultist was propelled backwards. His gun stayed right were it was though and clattered to the floor as its owner tumbled and slumped into the cabin’s interior.
A part of Nyx wanted to blast through the door, reduce it to splinters as she made her triumphant entrance like an avenging angel, but unfortunately for her action star cred, she wasn’t an idiot. Her wings may have been bullet proof, but they weren’t omnipresent, and if she got surrounded, she could still get shot. She spread her wings and slammed them against the cabin wall on either side of the door to stop her rapid forward motion and scooted to the side taking cover behind the wall. She motioned to her people and they moved in, quickly surrounding the place and pointed guns and flashlights through every window. It was over rather quickly after that. What was left of the hap dash crew inside had seen their buddy get flattened by a woman with a rather more impressive wingspan than most, and now had guns in every window. They surrendered quickly enough.
Those that were still ‘normal’ or mostly, were arrested and taken off for examination and questioning. The cultist’s ‘focus’ however, got somewhat more special treatment. The bumpkin was a coyote of some description. Salivating like a rapid beast, and staring up at Nyx with eyes that were all the wrong color, and one of which seemed to have two pupils. He seemed strained, like one who had spent the last week pulling all nighters and compensating with meth. Probably a side effect of having two ‘souls’ rammed into the same body.
Demonic possession in its traditional Hollywood form was thankfully impossible, or mostly. A body with a soul couldn’t host another one. You had to get the soul out first to make space for the new one. That usually meant doing something lethal, which made the body itself not work so well. A bit of a catch-22 that probably helped limit the damage the ‘demons’ could do substantially, even before organizations like the one Nyx now belonged to existed.
The loophole that Lazars had exploited back doing his invasion was to implant people, quite against their will, with cyberware, then possess the cyberware and use it to puppet their bodies. It was more than a little horrific and many of those they had saved form this fate… didn’t cope so well afterwards.
What these twats had done was a bit nicer, as far as it went. The soul of the person had to willingly sort-of step aside, making room for a new passenger, or passangers. It didn’t really work, neither fully in control and the strain damaging the body in the process, but on the plus side it meant the cultist couldn’t use unwilling victims. That said on the down side they also didn’t need to get their hands on cyberware with functional neural interface technology.
“How many of you are in there” Nyx calmy said, popping her lozenge into her mouth.
“The Reckoning is coming!” The thing spoke with multiple voices.
“Not what I asked.”
“You will all burn.”
“Scary…” Nyx deadpanned, “Now are you going to…”
“We are legion, we are the tide, and we will pick our teeth with your wings, angel!”
Nyx rolled her eyes and promptly used the metal end of her wing to break the possessed cultist’s nose. If this dumbass couldn’t even tell that she wasn’t really an angel then talking to him, or them, was useless.
The man, or men, or however you define it, was shoved into a tube like ‘cell’ on the back of one of her crew’s SUVs. The tube was thoroughly treated for exactly this purpose. It was reinforced titanium and bullet resistant glass to contain any physical force that may try to escape, and the swimming sea of runes emblazoned on its surface would keep anything from trying to get out though more, insubstantial, means.
All in all it was a rather boring arrest, which was almost impressive in a way considering the mission involved arresting a demon possessed cultist. That was her job though, and boring was good. With any luck she’d get home in time to tuck in her kid.
Nyx folded up her wings and climbed into the SUV to ride back to base. Paperwork, and a new coat, awaited her.
