Chương 328: Book Six, Chapter 90: The Sacrifice

Kimberly thought they were making great headway. The offerings that they had made to the Heaven King worked wonderfully to counter any magic that the cultists could brew up. Most of their opponents were unnamed, lowly hooded figures, and they acted like it. She couldn't express it, but when she put her hair back in a ponytail to activate her Scrunchie trope and her Mettle surged, she felt such confidence in a fight. Not arrogance. She didn't feel like she was unbeatable.

She felt confident in knowing what "type" of opponent she was up against. She struggled to put it into words, but she had felt it in every storyline since Stray Dawn. High Mettle was supposed to make you a better fighter, but it wasn't clear how. It wasn't like she just learned martial arts because of it. It had been Convenient Backstory that had made her an expert in self-defense. No. High Mettle gave her a sense of her opponents. Antoine had attested to feeling it, too.

In Antoine Stone and The Sunken Cradle, it had been Antoine's fighting sense that had saved the day on multiple occasions. The Vets had spoken about it too, but they hadn't described how it would feel. It was an innate understanding of how the enemy would act and react. They were movie bad guys, after all. They had a script to follow. Would they group up on you? No. These cultists took turns. Would they attack from a distance? No.

They might zoom overhead like giant crows, but the only enemy that used their shadow magic from a distance was Tom. The lowly cultist tried to punch, grab, and even kick, but their shadowy magic only enhanced their strength. They didn't try to cast spells even though it seemed they could. Kimberly grabbed an oncoming attacker by his Eternal Savers Club vest, twisted him around, and squirted red fruit punch into his mouth and nose.

He was weak, with nothing to show for his devotion to the imprisoned god but pitch black eyes. Those black eyes faded immediately. He dropped to his knees as the power of the god left him. With one glance up at the red barrier on the other side of the room, he started skittering back toward the door. The trapped giant, frozen on its back, was enough to scare him away.

A Night Stocker, one of the full-powered cultists, flew by Kimberly and would have gotten good contact, but he fell out of the air as a bullet from Kelsey managed to catch him in the chest. The bullet bounced off his dark cloak, but it knocked the wind out of him. Kimberly knew just by looking at him that he would stay down for a little while, nursing his possibly broken ribs. Because that is what he was built to do, that was a behavior that all of the cultists had.

The phrase "Licks Their Wounds" flashed into Kimberly's mind as she saw the injured Stocker on the red wallpaper, but the words didn't last for long. It wasn't a trope. What was it? A tactic? The Atlas had entries on this. She would have to look. Camden had probably memorized it by now. Kimberly and Kelsey mowed through the attackers as best they could. Many fell easily; others took their pound of flesh. Kimberly had broken fingers. Her right eye was swollen shut.

But the minions were neutralized; those that hadn't run away were busy lying on the ground. Tom remained. Tom, though, was worth any twenty of the other cultists put together. He didn't have "Licks Their Wounds." He was a real problem, and while he couldn't just snatch them up in his shadows as he hoped to, not with the protections they had put over themselves by pouring blessed fruit punch on their clothes, he was still formidable. But so was Kimberly.

Tom closed in for an attack, but she reached into the pocket of the jacket she was wearing, grabbed a few pinches' worth of Doctor Antoine Stone's fruit punch mix (which was marketed to assist in soothing all manner of ailments from stomach ulcers to canker sores), and blew it in Tom's face. Kimberly had hoped it would be a finishing move. That's why she hadn't used it earlier. They were starting to understand how movie fights went. You had to save your big attacks for the end, or else they wouldn't be big attacks.

She must have been right to do that because the cloud of sugary powder blessed by an adversarial God was doing a number on Tom. He couldn't even breathe properly without the shadows slinking away from his form and taking away from his power. With Tom dealt with temporarily, Kimberly turned her attention to Kelsey. Kelsey was trapped underneath dozens of shadowy spines, and from the looks of her, she was very injured.

The final girl's gift, dying last, didn't mean she couldn't be horribly maimed, and Kelsey was Hobbled and Mutilated now that she was the target of attacks after Riley's death. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Tom had many spells at his command. He was a distance fighter, Kimberly knew, and she had been sure to use the cultists as meat shields whenever possible.

Kimberly was expecting the credits to roll soon as Tom fell to his knees, apparently incapacitated, and his fellow cultists weren't even willing to come near the cloud of fruit punch dust that lingered in the air. But she was wrong. Tom looked back down at the offering dish and saw that Antoine was cutting himself away and would soon be free. She had seen Bobby offering oblations to the trapped god, which distressed her, but he was gone now. He had run out to find his wife instead of helping anyone.

She couldn't rely on him returning heroically, though he might still. It seemed, though, he had given Antoine a knife. She smiled. Antoine would be happy to join the fight. But then Tom had a finishing move too.

"Brothers, sisters," he cried out.

"There is no more time! Sacrifice the promised offering, or yourselves if need be, whatever it takes!" The ten or so remaining cultists acted immediately. Those that could fly did so; the others ran to the other side of the room. Now, Kimberly knew why they licked their wounds when injured instead of reentering the fight. They had to still be alive for Tom's backup plan. Why had she not finished them off? Why had she allowed them to live? She had been too soft. Her character wouldn't have done that.

The first cultist that got to Antoine didn't quite manage to grab him or sacrifice him. Antoine had a knife, and the cultist was low-powered flesh and blood. By the time Antoine was done with him, he was a little less of the latter. Two of the other cultists picked up their bleeding ally, and together they launched themselves into the reality veil. Antoine was caught by surprise. He was so prepared to defend himself that it took a moment for him to switch gears and try to stop them.

One after another, they began sacrificing themselves. And it appeared to be working, the red lightning flashes started to speed up.

"No!" Kimberly said.

"This isn't how it's supposed to go. I thought you needed him!" Tom wasn't attacking. He wasn't mindless and would talk to her. She knew that instinctively. High Mettle had its uses beyond the basics.

"Last time we did," Tom said.

"But this time, I thought we might need a backup plan." He looked over at the wall where they had placed all of the information related to the deal they were making. Among those items was a long typed document. It was a contract, Kimberly realized.

"You changed the deal," Kimberly said.

"I'd say we gave our patron a bargain," Tom said.

"We would either deliver the second-rate huckster, or else we would sacrifice ourselves. Ten lives for the price of one is quite a deal. It's not perfect. It's not what we wanted. But the price of creating a better world is that maybe you don't get to live in it… or at least not this version of us." They had planned to keep their memories. By sacrificing themselves, they wouldn't be able to. They didn't care. More cultists began forcing themselves beyond the veil.

"I guess you didn't find out the truth then," Kimberly said.

"Your perfect world is only going to last until someone else gets tired of it and replaces it the same way you did." Tom was holding back tears.

"By god, you're right," he said.

"I suppose that means that I will have to be there, and I will have to make sure that no one ever changes it." He burst to his feet and, despite the attack that Kimberly had laid on him, he managed to launch himself into the air, his cloak billowing. He was running straight toward Antoine. Kimberly acted as fast as she could, running after the cultist. Red lightning was shooting out of the sky; the ritual was almost complete.

Tom was able to summon shadow to yank the knife out of Antoine's hand before he even got in range of an attack. He then latched onto Antoine, preparing to sacrifice him. But he never got the chance.

"Kimberly, no!" Antoine screamed. Because she had been racing after Tom, but when she got in range of him, she just kept on going. She stood right next to the red veil and looked up at Antoine.

"Kimberly, don't do it," Antoine repeated.

"Please, no! Let it be me!" But Kimberly was going to do it, and Carousel knew it, because it cut to a flashback that everyone appeared to be able to see on the red wallpaper, including, it seemed, Tom himself. A flashback of Kimberly standing between the legs of a gigantic statue and offering herself to Heaven King Gough. Back in the throne room, Tom looked at her curiously, not quite understanding what was happening.

"I'm sorry, but I can't let them kill the people I love. Not this time," Kimberly said. She let a few tears fall down her face. Tom attempted to summon shadow to stop her, but his time On-Screen was being taken up by shots of Kimberly abandoning her friends, of her mourning them. His shadows didn't obey him. Once back On-Screen, Kimberly fell backwards, casting herself into the red veil. They couldn't get greedy.

Riley warned them that only Kimberly could make this sacrifice because only she had the redemption subplot. The protein bar that had been offered to the Heaven King was enough to disrupt the ritual, but an entire human completely obliterated it. As Kimberly faded from existence, the entire red veil began to crack, but not in any useful way for the being trapped within it. Instead, the cracks only succeeded at destroying the veil itself and trapping the deity once more.

Tom attempted to sacrifice Antoine by flying him into the veil, but the wall did not accept the sacrifice. He dropped to the ground with Antoine, his powers diminished. He was back on his feet in moments, running into the cracked veil and attempting to cross back over. But the red light was fading, and nothing he could do could change it.

"What happened?" Tom asked, exasperated.

"Take me! I sacrifice myself; take me! Lance!" he screamed.

"Lance, I can't hear you. Where are you?" But it was no use. The red veil faded, and all that was left was a cracked, rocky surface emitting only enough light for the cameras to see the two remaining characters. Antoine readied himself and found the knife that had been stolen from him, but he didn't wind up needing it. Tom had lost the will to fight and had, in fact, lost his status as an enemy altogether. He was a broken man, weeping on the ground.

Antoine, too, was mourning the loss of Kimberly and Riley as best he could while trying to hide his sheer joy at not having died in the storyline. After Carousel had gotten some footage of Tom's reaction, the needle on the plot cycle switched to the end, and Antoine went Off-Screen. Tom stayed there on the ground, cheek pressed up against the rocky wall that used to be the red veil, crying and staring at Antoine. Antoine knelt beside him and said, "I'm sorry about your brother."

Tom didn't answer, but he nodded solemnly before he rose to his feet and walked out of the cavern slowly.