Old Testament: The Beelzebute Grimoire (4)
Thud. Two legs that had leapt from a helicopter not yet on the ground struck the earth, one after the other.
She lifted her eyes, and there was the woman waiting on the helipad. A colonel's insignia rode her uniform, together with several ribbon bars, the Navy Cross among them. For her apparent age the rank was exceptional, and even set against that rank the decorations were exceptional still. This went beyond a unit ace. The impression was of a war hero, with real battles already behind her.
"Wouldn't it have been better to wait until we'd landed, Sir Bartholomew?"
"I could not spare even that much time. Did it pose a problem?"
"Nope! It's brisk. I like it."
The colonel offered a light salute as she took in the figure who had come off the helicopter — Han Seoyeon — and Seoyeon returned it in kind. She was no soldier, but thanks to her father, military drill had been carved into her very bones. Set beside the other woman's easy manner, it almost seemed as if she were the true soldier, and the colonel only someone who had changed into the clothes.
"Anyway, it's an honor to meet you. Colonel Rachel Evans, Second Anomaly Response Special Unit, United States Naval Forces Japan."
"Han Seoyeon Margarita. I have heard the name of Leviathan often enough. ...Though I am not yet a formal Apostle. I am a Gravekeeper."
After a brief handshake with Rachel Evans of the Leviathan unit, Han Seoyeon flicked a glance that said, plainly enough, to get on with the escort. Evans was not particularly thrown. She only smiled, baring her fangs.
Today was the first time she had met Han Seoyeon face to face, but she already had a fair sense of the sort of person she was. Someone who jumped from a helicopter because even the time to land was a waste was hardly the type to squander minutes on small talk.
"Yes. I'll take you straight to the command post."
Given the post she held, Evans was well used to eccentrics. Press the point, and she herself was frequently filed under that same heading. So she resolved to carry out the task of guiding Han Seoyeon without a word of complaint.
"As you're already aware, Sir Bartholomew, you'll be taking a detached force."
The short briefing went on as they walked.
"How many?"
"About two hundred. All of them Holy Knights under the Vatican's direct command, armed with cold steel."
Seoyeon nodded.
Han Seoyeon herself was the sort who laid hands on every piece of modern military hardware without hesitation. From her father she had even inherited the temperament of believing in firepower first and seeing what followed. This time, though, the matter was a little different. To place an "army" in Han Seoyeon's hands meant one thing, and one thing only.
Strip away the grand phrasing, and it was simple enough. An immortal army: each time the soldiers died, Seoyeon's power raised them, and the advance went on. A tactic of driving home an assault as near to infinite as a tide, and crushing the enemy by force.
Even so, there was a flaw. Ammunition, at least, was not infinite. The condition for a unit to be designated Armata Strigoi was therefore that its supply be endless, or that it need no further ammunition at all. A company of Holy Knights fighting chiefly with cold steel fit that condition exactly. Most of them could heal themselves or their comrades with holy power besides, which kept to a minimum the wretched case of someone dying the instant they were restored, their wounds too grave to survive the resurrection.
Trading words as they went, the two descended the stairs from the roof. At the end of a long corridor they came to an iron door, shut fast.
"Colonel Rachel Evans. I've brought Sir Bartholomew."
Colonel Evans knocked hard and spoke toward the inside. No answer came, but she threw the door open all the same.
Something on the order of a dozen people sat within. Maps lay spread across the table, every manner of marker set upon them. Images and charts papered the walls, and a screen was receiving a live feed.
Han Seoyeon ran a light look over the figures mid-meeting. Not many faces she knew, but some. A thick-bearded man sitting silent with his arms folded. A Japanese youth in a school uniform, who broke into a grin and waved the moment their eyes met. A Black man in a cardinal's vestments. And, on a laptop at one corner of the desk, a familiar mark glowing on the screen.
...And a man clothed in the pure white permitted to only one person in the world, the triple crown upon his head.
"Margarita, presenting herself before Your Holiness."
The instant she found him, Han Seoyeon snapped her heels together and saluted. He, if anything, wore a troubled smile, as though it were rather too much.
"It's been a while, Seoyeon."
Only after he had returned the salute, however perfunctorily, did Seoyeon ease her posture.
...She was still holding parade rest, but that was better, at least, than freezing solid in the salute itself, Pope Dionysius II thought.
"Well then. Now that Margarita is here, let us begin the council on the invasion of Hell in earnest."
"I will say this beforehand. The situation is not good."
So declared the lord of Hell — a human, a frog, and a cat, three heads grown upon a single body.
"Of course, anyone who had not already grasped the situation before I opened my mouth would have been thrown out long ago."
Bael said it while looking over the faces gathered in the command post.
"...Because Belial has gone and stuck himself completely to their side."
Whose mutter had that been? Bael paid it little mind.
Just as he had said, things were far from good. Any real chance against the Church had only ever applied when the fight was Beelzebute against the Church and no one else. Even that balance had already been tipping the other way — and now Belial, who had to be reckoned Beelzebute's equal, had entered the war as well.
"Even so, it is not as if we have no chance. That is my calculation."
What had been a war between the Church and demonkind had become a civil war within Hell, the Church merely lending one side a hand. Bael went on in the same unruffled voice.
Belial might stand among the strongest of demons, but his subordinates were not of that order. They might have been, once. Not since the World Wars. There was something tremendous in the craft of it: collapsing nearly to utter ruin, then swelling back to bulk in a breath by taking in demons newly born. Put another way, though, it was bulk and nothing more.
"In caliber as demons, our side holds a clear advantage. Of course, once one considers that we must face the Church on top of that, it will by no means be easy."
But it was not impossible.
The Church, too, could not commit its full strength without restraint. If anything, now that Belial's reinforcements had been added, it was likely to send even fewer troops than it had originally intended. The need to think of "the days after" was one of the openings in the Church they could dig into.
"Moreover, in prophecy we hold the advantage as well."
In demonology, one of the powers commonly ascribed to a demon is the seeing of the future. Among those who had joined Beelzebute, demons of that sort were thick on the ground, and Bael — one of the four quarters at its head — possessed the keenest insight of any demon. The other side, whether Belial's camp or the Church, would of course field prophets of its own. Comparing power against power, however, Bael was certain their own side would prove overwhelming.
"Our chances are more than sufficient. We will take Margarita's head. ...Let us speak of that, from here."
With that, Bael swept the assembly once more, and at the last his gaze stopped on the one seated in the corner.
The aberrant being with a fly's head — Beelzebub — met those eyes with his compound ones, then slowly rose.
"In essence, the enemy's offensive is two-pronged."
At his gesture, innumerable flies swarmed in from every side and packed the table solid. Then they writhed and shifted until they had drawn the shape of a great map.
"The northern offensive, in which Belial's host and most of the Holy Knights will take part. This is the main effort. We judge that Cardinal Adam Greenie fights on this front."
At one point on the tabletop, maggots sprouted without warning and painted the spot stark white. The north of the map.
"And the southern supporting effort, composed of Paladins."
A white mass formed again, this time somewhere in the south — a little smaller than the one to the north.
"Hammer and anvil?"
The mutter drifted up. Looking only at the shape of things, it certainly seemed so: a large force built chiefly of infantry, and a comparatively small one that lived by its mobility. A worn-out classic, and effective for exactly that reason.
"No. Both of them are anvils. Is that not so, Beelzebub?"
"It is so."
Bael shook his head, and Beelzebub's fly-head clicked its jaws in agreement.
"Slowly, but sturdily, they push. In raw numbers the other side holds the advantage, so it is the most effective course open to them."
Of course the enemy had commanders, and they had strategy; they would not simply bull straight in. They would advance while working this tactic and that. From what he had glimpsed of the future, that Pope appeared to be seated in the command post. Seen upon the map, though, it amounted to the same thing as shoving ahead with blunt stubbornness. Answering those smaller maneuvers belonged to the commanders in the field. It was not a matter to argue here and now.
A moment later, several large flies appeared again and darted this way and that across the desk.
"And the air units. Their role is to shift between the main effort and the supporting effort, lending aid to each."
They would likely be the busiest of the lot. Bael added it to Beelzebub's account.
"Even the Church would have found it difficult to divert a large air force without the surface world taking notice. The personnel and equipment committed to air support ought to be comparatively few."
And so a small air arm would race madly up and down the front, playing firefighter. These, too, could not be called a hammer.
"Lastly, some two hundred personnel who appear to have been designated Armata Strigoi. Jude Thaddaeus and the next Bartholomew are presumed to be among them."
A force to tear about as it pleased while the anvils held the line. At Beelzebub's words, a low groan went around the room.
In short, an elite unit with two of Apostle rank inside it. The hardest enemy of all to answer.
"In short, then, this one is the hammer?"
It was then that a gentle-faced androgynous youth, silent all the while, cut in. Baal-zephon — one of the four quarters of Beelzebute.
"What foolishness are you speaking, Baal-zephon?"
Bael's three heads stared at him as if the very notion were absurd.
A hammer — what a darling little word that was.
"The moment it strikes, that unit is finished. Until a chance to intercept it appears, keep well clear of its path."
This was that kind of war. While the anvils dragged the front out long and slow, either the meteor would smash every last one of them in the end, or — somehow, before that — they would find an angle and intercept Bartholomew Margarita. A war with no outcomes but those two.
"...Are we sure picking this fight was the right call?"
"Be quiet, Nisroc."
...Sometimes, the only sage in the room was simply ignored.