The Undead Spider #98
The kick connected with the side of Nergal's neck. It sounded like striking a stone and expecting it to give and it doesn't. Jake's leg absorbed the impact and sent the signal up through his hip and into his side, and Nergal turned.
Not staggered. Turned.
His head moved on his neck like a turret moving on a mount, slow and considered and entirely without urgency. His eyes found Jake where he'd swung out and caught a steel beam overhead, hanging there with his legs still extended from the kick. The runes on Nergal's skin pulsed once, and the temperature in the construction site dropped a register.
"Do you understand," Nergal said, his voice moving through the air at a frequency that had nothing to do with volume, "who I am, human."
It wasn't a question.
Nergal moved the axe across his body in a wide flat arc that pulled the air along behind it. Dark energy trailed in a shroud that ate the light as it passed, and the force of the swing arrived before the blade did.
The pressure wave hit Jake's chest and broke his grip on the beam, and then the flat of the axe connected with his side and the world turned sideways.
He caught webbing on the way out, two lines crossing each other at oblique angles, and they slowed him enough that he didn't go through the scaffolding on the far end of the site so much as into it.
The steel gave and groaned around his shoulders as he hit, and he held there for a moment in the bend of the frame with his ribs sending information his brain was slow to process.
Below, where he'd been, the arc of Nergal's swing completed itself through empty air, and Nergal watched its return with the patience of something that had never once needed to hurry.
Constantine's voice came from somewhere low and behind the concrete pillar.
"Bollocks. Just as I was starting to like him."
A pause.
The sound of fabric settling over shoulders -- a coat being shrugged on, collar turned up against the cold.
"Looks like it's you and me again, old friend."
🕸️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕸️
The trenchcoat changed things.
It settled over Constantine's exhaustion like a piece of armour, and what came out from behind the pillar wasn't the man who'd been managing the situation.
He lowered his hands.
His shoulders dropped. His chin came level with the ground.
Nergal looked at him. The runes on his skin brightened.
What came from Constantine's palms wasn't the careful, measured bursts he'd been throwing -- the maintained barriers, the precision-cut syllables, the spending-only-what-you-can-afford approach of a man who'd been fighting a war of attrition for longer than any one body should sustain.
What came was copper light in a wave, full and unmanaged, and it crossed the distance between them fast, striking the demon's chest and driving him back a full meter on concrete that cracked under his heels.
Constantine didn't stop moving. He came around the edge of the pillar and his free hand was already drawing the next sequence. The shapes his fingers made carried their own grammar.
The second wave hit while the first was still fading, and the third overlapped the second, and Nergal planted himself and took them and the runes on his skin burned bright enough to read by.
The movement had nothing of a fighter in it and didn't need to.
Constantine moved, putting, all the weight and momentum behind the hands, the feet finding ground only long enough to shift the angle, his body covering distance in a way that was difficult to track.
He'd always held back. That was the fact of it, and he knew it. He'd told himself each time that it was strategy, that the careful management of what he had was wisdom and not fear, and the trenchcoat on his shoulders had been through enough of those places to call out his bull crap.
He was through pretending the careful approach was anything other than a way of keeping one foot out the door. At some point a man had to stop running and face his own shite, and this was apparently the night.
Nergal caught the fourth wave on his forearm and the dark energy on the axe flared in response. He came forward through the light and swung low, a horizontal cut that Constantine stepped over. The wind of it caught the coat's hem.
He came back down with both hands driving copper energy into Nergal's upper back with the full weight of his descent behind it.
Nergal took it. He shook from it. He turned from it slowly.
"You've been a stake in my arse since Newcastle," Constantine said, and his breath was coming hard now, controlled but hard.
His hands repositioned.
The runes around Nergal's mouth shifted. His head tilting at an angle that suggested consideration without suggesting anything human.
"Newcastle." The word came out like coal from fire -- warm at its core and blackened at the edges. "You stand there in that coat and talk to me about Newcastle. You, John Constantine."
Nergal took one step and his foot left a circular fracture in the concrete. "Stop pretending to be a saint." Another step, the fracture pattern spreading from his heel. "You have done worse -- far worse -- to that little girl, than anything I did."
The trenchcoat lit up.
It wasn't a decision Constantine made -- it happened from the chest out. The energy moved through the coat's lining, and the light that came off it made the copper waves look modest. The ground around Constantine's feet cracked in a ring. Nergal stopped walking.
He stood in the light and took it. The axe came up in a block and the dark energy on its blade met the output from the coat and the space between them screamed at a frequency that rattled every loose piece of steel on the site.
Nergal's runes shifted and he pushed through it, absorbing, enduring, his feet finding new ground as the concrete gave way and he didn't go down.
"That," Nergal said, enjoyment threading through his voice, "always gets you fired up."
Constantine's hands came down. The light in the coat's lining pulled back, and what was left was the man, standing in the dark of the site with his breath coming in uneven intervals and his fingers closing into the fabric at his sides. His face turned away from Nergal at an angle that had nothing gracious in it.
"Given up already."
Constantine's shoulders went down and his hands opened at his sides and for a moment he was only a man in a coat with too much weight behind his eyes, standing in a place he had no business being.
"Good," Nergal said, and the axe lifted, and the runes across his body blazed all at once. "Because this is where your road ends, Constantine."
The axe started its descent.
And stopped.
Nergal's brow moved first -- a single furrow, the expression of a creature encountering something it cannot immediately file. Then his eyes tracked down to his axe hand, which was moving backward, and continuing to move backward past the point where his shoulder's rotation should have ended it.
He found threads there, thin and crossing each other at odd angles, wrapped around the haft and his wrist and the back of his hand, pulling him, the pull steady and building.
"What is--"
He felt it at his neck, then at his ankles, and when he tried to step through it the step didn't finish -- his foot lifted and the thread at his ankle held the return.
Nergal was standing on one leg with his axe hand being drawn back behind him and his free hand coming up to find more threads, and they were coming from a direction he couldn't isolate because the direction kept changing.
Then he saw it.
A figure in the air behind and above his extended axe arm, swinging on a wide arc, legs already twisting for the descent, the mechanical arm leading.
Jake's elbow came down onto the elbow of Nergal's raised axe arm with the full mass and momentum of the swing compressed into one point. The crack of it moved through bone and joint and the arm dropped, and Jake swung back out before Nergal's free hand closed on the space where he'd been.
The arc returned.
The same point. The same elbow. The arm dropping further this time, the joint losing integrity in a way that translated up through Nergal's shoulder, and the axe in his grip shook but held.
Again.
Nergal's free hand opened and hell flames poured from his palm in a broad wash. Jake swung through the edge of it and the web lines on that side burned and thinned and he switched grip, new lines firing before the old ones gave, keeping the arc alive.
He came back for the fourth time and the mechanical arm delivered the same point with everything behind it and something in Nergal's axe hand gave and the grip broke and the axe started to fall.
Jake let go of the web.
He dropped with it, the mechanical arm reaching, and the axe was heavy. When his fingers closed around the haft the downward pull nearly folded him in half, but he fired two lines below and let the swing carry the momentum out and up instead of down, and he went with it. The axe's weight swung him wide and high in a long arc over the site.
He pulled it into his chest at the apex.
The mechanical arm took the weight. His other arm steadied it.
Then he came down.
The swing brought him over Nergal's head and he let the arc die at the right moment and dropped the last distance with the axe raised. The blade came down on the crown of Nergal's skull, and the sound it made was the sound of something meeting resistance that should have been final and wasn't.
The blade planted and held there, half-buried, and Nergal's hands came up toward it, groping at the haft.
Jake landed on Nergal's shoulders, both feet, and drove his weight down through the haft.
The blade moved. Nergal's hands found the haft below his feet and pulled. Jake jumped from the shoulders and caught a beam overhead and came down onto the haft again from above with both feet and his full weight on the descent. The blade moved further, and Nergal's voice had become something that wasn't language.
He repeated it. And again. Each time the blade moved and each time the resistance was different, something structural slowly failing in a way that the runes on Nergal's skin were no longer able to entirely compensate for.
Then the copper light arrived.
Constantine's beam came in low and sustained. It moved through the crack the axe had made and found the channels there and pushed.
The next time Jake came down the resistance was different, something gave, and the blade went through, and kept going, and he rode the haft down through Nergal's body as the demon lord split, the two halves separating with a sound like a fire going out all at once, the heat that poured from the division point dry and enormous and gone within a breath.
Jake hit the ground on one knee.
The axe was in both hands, the mechanical one bearing most of the weight. He stayed there for a moment, knee down, breathing, the haft still warm under his fingers.
Then he stood.
"You throw a mean spin," he said to the parts of Nergal dissolving like embers. "But I am meaner."
Constantine looked at where the demon had been. Then at Jake. Then at the space again, as though checking his arithmetic.
"For a minute there," he said, his voice carrying the ruin of a man who'd been holding his breath without knowing it, "I thought you were a goner, mate."
"You owe me," Jake said.
"Alright, alright." Constantine found a cigarette from somewhere inside the coat and the lighter followed it with the ease of long habit. "No need to get heavy about it. After what you've just done -- that's more than a favour owed. That's a drink. A proper one."
He lit it and the flame held his face for a moment, and what was in his expression wasn't the performed ease. "I've been saving a bottle for the night I had a genuine reason to open it, and mate, if splitting a demon lord down the middle in a construction site doesn't qualify, I've set the bar too high."
"Celebrate after you've repaid me," Jake said. He turned toward the space where Nergal had dissolved, the axe resting across both forearms. "First -- is he dead?"
The question sat between them. Constantine exhaled and watched the smoke go.
"Dead's a complicated word for something like Nergal," he said, the London in his voice flattening the edges into something close to honest. "What you did, I'd call it an eviction. He was never fully here to begin with, which is the only reason defeat was possible at all."
He took another drag. "He's back below the line. Dealing with whatever passes for wounds on something that doesn't technically have wounds."
Jake turned the axe over in his hands, the blade dark and trailing residues of the copper light Constantine had pushed through it.
"You should keep that," Constantine looked at the at. "You look good swinging it."
Jake held the axe and said nothing.
"I need a spell," Jake said. "A cloaking spell."
Constantine adjusted the coat on his shoulders.
"Right," he said. "I suppose you do."