A Curse Upon Thee 3-2B

"—AAAAAAAAAAAA—!"

Kyoto had gotten to hear the subtle sounds of his screaming the last few minutes, Finn serenading the streets he’d been getting dragged through for a solid four — maybe five? — five blocks now.

Five sounded about right.

And somewhere around block number two, his count had stopped being much of a count and settled in him like a feeling. 

"—AAAAAAAAAAAA—!"

And, weirdly enough, it sounded a lot like his own screaming voice.

"NNGGH! HANG! HANG! HANG! GUT YOU!" The Devil roared over its shoulder, flat grinding teeth on display in an unhinged mouth held together by layers of open bleeding muscle. "GUT THE MEAT! FEED TO CHILDREN!"

"—AAAAAAAAAAAA—!"

Finn still didn't really get Devils.

悪魔.

Debiru.

He knew what they were, sure. Generally. 

The broad strokes had bashed themselves into him quickly enough and they seemed more than familiar enough. Thing gets scary enough in enough heads at once and the world coughs up something with a name and a face and a heavy hankering for the internal organs of the innocent. Nothing there was out of the ordinary, really, and two weeks of putting them down had made that much pretty clear.

Those two weeks really hadn't done much for the ‘what they actually are’ part, especially considering everyone could see them and not a single person had any more Cursed Energy than normal. Really, it wasn’t like this job came with a manual or a sensei. 

Hell, he would even be fine with another Todo-senpai, minus the violence. Really, he’d almost kill for anyone who could sit him down and fill in the real gaps. But, then again, that was almost asking for too much.

It wasn’t like there were a lot of free moments for that anyway. 

Right now was especially not the moment for that.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA—"

The world went sideways again, something that felt a bit like a windowframe shattering apart over his shoulder.

“Aaaaahhhh!” That last scream wasn’t even from him, some businessman voicing his fear as he dived over a guardrail with his briefcase over his head.

"—AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!"

Okay, that one was all him.

He couldn’t help it, though. Forced to become a wrecking ball with great hair, Finn’s shoulders screamed nearly as loud as he did the moment his whole body swung out wide in a turn sharp enough to send him properly airborne and through a building.

Metal folded around him as he tore through a wall that was as much rust as it was corrugated metal. A stockroom opened up in front of him, people screaming in his face before he came out on the other side of the street dragging on asphalt once again.

Fuckfuckfuckfuck! Reinforcement didn’t make it stop hurting, as much as he layered the stuff onto his ribs and skin. He wasn’t Okkotsu-san, after all, and didn’t have nearly enough of the stuff to make the pain stop. Even still, Finn couldn’t stop reinforcing, well aware that if he let up for even all of a second— Fuuuuuuuuu-!

Well, odds were good, his non-reinforced skull wouldn’t survive a chunk of rebar meeting it head-on.

As if to test that — fuuuuuuuuuuuck — another wall came right at him with no choice on his part and no way to stop it.

Teeth grit tight as ribs met cinderblock, juryoku thick and hot through every inch of him as the block cratered to a cloud of gray. Gravity got about a second of custody of him, a breath of simple weightlessness, before the chain took him back.

Sorry! Sorry! Finn found his footing for all of a second, someone’s windshield cratering under his soles as he ran over it. Carcarcar! My bad, that's — sorry!

The Meathook Devil didn't slow down for any of it, air bursting out of his lungs in a red mist as he met another car without the chance to get his legs under him. A hood buckled into a ‘v’ beneath his back, suspension bottoming out as tires gave way.

"HANG YOU!" A pig skull skinned to bone, stretched too thick and too wide, swung back over one shoulder as it spoke as if gargling through a mouthful of soup. "HANG! YOU! UP!"

On all fours, it loped more than ran, charging through chain-link and claustrophobic alleys and past screaming civilians throwing themselves flat to avoid hook claws. “HANG YOU!” The monster was long through the front and overbuilt across the shoulder, body flayed red with a back as wide as a car hood. Forearms hammered the ground, thick as pillars, the Devil dragging itself forward with a cinched waist and barely any meat where it should have ribs.

And, in place of a ribcage, it had hooks. 

All of them shiny metal and glistening with red, half of them were punched backward into its own body. The rest were swinging loose and ringing off each other with each stride like the world’s worst wind chimes — and the thickest of the hooks hung from where a tail should’ve been.

A thick chain the same metal as the hooks, almost two dozen feet long, ended with that same hook, a beast of a thing big enough to catch a full-grown man and hang him up.

Which was pretty close to what was currently happening.

The half-ton beast was doing autobahn speeds, shouldering cars and trucks out of the way like they barely mattered and hardly slowing down much at all. It did that to pretty much everything and didn’t mind a bit; walls, doors, support beams, a bus stop. 

When that speed and this kind of strength came together, most things stopped mattering because they couldn’t stop it. All the worst parts of a gorilla shoved up and into the same bits of a wild boar, all the Devil’s ugly wet meat were just built to eat the impacts apparently. 

Which was great. Really great.

For it.

Not so much for Finn.

Or really anyone else who wanted to kill it.

Still though… hard to kill doesn’t mean can’t be killed. Finn’s fancy new shoes clipped a signpost and folded the poor thing flat. Not the same.

Yeah, he’d been repeating that one in his head for about six blocks now in between all the screaming and cursing, just hoping it was true.

"G-G-GUUUUT YOU!” The butcher’s tag flapping on one cheek as it growled loud. “GUT YOU GOOD!"

“I heard you… nggghh!” Blood flew free from his mouth as he did his best not to bite his tongue any worse than it was. “The first time!”

The thing answered him a squeal, hog-like and delighted like it was feeding time, before it tore through a bicycle rack and sent a woman screaming for cover.

Both hands lived on the chain, a gash across the side of his chest where the Devil had tried to gut him at the start of all this. Since the warehouse, it had gone through the leather and nearly punched through his own rib, at risk of splitting him from hip to pit.

Without the worry of that, he could at least grip the links tight, ignoring the slick of blood and street water all over it as the length pulled him forward. Every twist and turn was the Devil doing its best to shake him off the end, every jerk and juke sending his feet off the ground and slamming him into whatever the Devil didn’t take down in its path first. 

"MEAT! MEAT ON MY HOOK! OPEN YOU UP AND MY CHILDREN EAT!"

"I hear you!" He got another arm's length up, a grunt under his breath. "Texas Chainsaw Massacre over here, man!"

"OPEN! OPEN AND HANG!"

"You said that!” A hard right into an alley sent Finn exploding through a chunk of wall, grit blinked out his eyes as he kept pulling. Hand over hand, he forced himself up toward the length of chain. “Say something else!”

Finn bounced off a mailbox as the Devil went through the intersection sideways, another low drag to the ground tearing sparks off the asphalt with the hooks. A good twenty feet of chain was the whole distance in front of him, and it took three more impacts and a head-first flight through a fence to make ten of them.

“FEED — FEED MY CHILDREN!"

“Those things are not your kids!”

The Devil squealed loud and high, its voice rasping into a breathy laugh as its shoulder tore through a vending machine at full run. “CHILDREN MINE!”

Seven feet more, six, five…

Fuck it. Finn clicked his tongue. Close enough.

His right hand let go of the chain, coming off his hip with Slaughter Demon. The fur handle sat in his palm like an old friend, held in a reverse grip as it came free of the sheath. A lunge took him forward, last five feet of chain cleared as two hands drove the blade right down into the flayed meat of the Devil’s shoulder blade.

The Devil shrieked loud and bucked, letting loose another squeal that sounded nothing like the piggy little happy noises it’d been making for a while now.

"OFF! GET OFF!

“You started it!”

Its whole front end up slammed sideways into a building, Finn forced to eat plaster as he was treated like a rough piece of gum on the bottom of a shoe. A twist took it to the other end of an alley, scraping its unwanted passenger down a row of parked bikes.  

“I PEEL YOU! SLOW! SLOW!"

"What about this is slow, man?"

"SLOOOOOW!"

Brick exploded outward, red dust choking the air as Finn held on even tighter. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon…

Nothing about this was normal; not the Devil, not the fight, and nothing else. 

It was just the weirdness of the life he’d been forced into after the Enchanted Forest, and not just the weird Curse-like monsters this world called Devils. He’d already been sitting in Storybrooke in 2011 with a head full of Kyoto in 2018, seven years in the complete opposite direction and on a completely different continent.

But Kyoto was at least familiar territory; home turf that he recognized since that first night in the rain, staring up at the lightbox. Sort of.

Except then a guy at a konbini had a newspaper resting on the counter and the date on it said May 4, 1997.

Fourteen more years backward for a grand total of twenty-one behind on his whole life, and now he was sideways into a whole different world with its own rulebook.

No Curses here, not a single one.

Two weeks and Finn hadn't picked up a single thread of Curse Energy, the normal bit people usually gave off dissipating away into the air like it never existed. He had to get used to these things instead, these Devils that everyone could see.

No Curse Energy needed.

People here knew about and talked about them and made it their job to fight them.

Normal people.

With offices and business cards and cheap ads on the TV talking about the deals they offered for getting rid of Devils. Killing these things was an actual job you could put on a tax form, or just get paid cash under the table by some guy who just wanted a supernatural corpse.

Which was where he came in.

“CHILDREN!” The Devil twisted again, all four hooked feet planted as it tore up a solid few meters of road with its turn-around. “DADDY’S COMING!”

Oh, we're going back? Finn’s eyes widened again as it picked up speed. We're going back.

"MY HOUSE!" It got up to speed again in about a second and a half, and Finn hung on with his feet flying out behind him like a flag. "MY CHILDREN! WE HANG YOU TOGETHER!"

The warehouse came up fast, the same shitty corrugated steel structure with a half-missing roof that the Devil had pulled him out of and the charge only quickened. The loading door came apart on impact, half-broken rails sent flying as the Meathook Devil met it headfirst.

“Fuuu-!”

One final buck sent Finn flying, Slaughter Demon tearing free from the things back as he left its back at speed. He spun free across pockmarked concrete without a weapon, arm in front of his face. Skidding through a puddle of something that was maybe water once upon a time, the sorcerer rolled twice and came up on one knee a solid thirty feet into the warehouse.

A hook came down out of the dark where his head had been, spiraling out of the rafters. Finn was already in motion, up under it, a bright red sparking to life between his fingers as he brought them together.

He couldn’t manage to pull on his Lapse, no time as the thing on the other end of the hook came with it with a giggling screech. The shape of something with a tarp lashed over a ribcage that was probably a dog’s at one point, three arms of mismatched length and all of them skewered together with wire and hooks as it charged back at him again.

And it wasn’t alone.

Almost a dozen of the ‘children’ were still roaming the warehouse, less than half the number he remembered when the Meathook had sent him on a lap around the neighborhood. All of them were too wet and wrong to be anything alive, even coming apart and putting themselves back together as he looked at some of them. Ew.

"FINN!"

Green light flared across the warehouse, lighting up a whole section as Mal called his name with actual relief in her breath. “I though the pig had eaten you!”

“You’d love that!” He put a flaming fist through the tarp dog, Spark Strike ending whatever little screech battle-cry it had left in its nonexistent lungs. “Wouldn’t you?”

“No!” A blast of green went off, something screaming on the far side of the floor. “Who’s gonna cook for me if you’re gone?”

…this girl.

Mal leapt up with a yelp, the girl in question suddenly above it all on a stack of pallets with green fire crawling up her wrists. Her flame went out into the crowd and cut a thing in half hamburger-style with another screech.

Despite that, it didn’t stop.

Not until Mal burned a hole clean through what was left of its chest until enough of it had gone to ash that it couldn't hold itself up anymore.

"Mal! Rafters!"

"I see the rafters!"

"Then stop looking at me and look at the—"

"Boku ga yaru yo!" Her hand came up and green went out of it and something up in the dark came apart and dropped forty feet onto the floor in three pieces. "Behind you!"

Finn groaned out. “I know.”

The Devil was already coming. “GUT YOU AND PEEL YOU AND HANG YOU!” 

It broke across the open warehouse floor, oversized arms eating concrete and that chain snaking behind it until it filled nearly Finn’s whole field of view.

No weapon. He clicked his tongue. No problem. Hands rose in front of his chest, idex and middle straight, as Finn laced his fingers on instinct. “Kaijin no Honō—!” 

Utahime-sensei had once mentioned how a Cursed Technique made up four-fifths of most proper sorcerer’s skillset and, without one, he’d likely struggle. And she was not wrong. Unless you were a true freak like Todo, you needed a CT to do most anything.

Thankfully, that wasn’t his situation anymore. Red bloomed to life fully the way it did when the shape was right and the Cursed Energy was flush in his gut, hot enough to boil the sweat on his face. 

Flash Forge flared to life, cursed fire compressing between his knuckles; going thin, tapered and narrowed to an edge before splitting across his fist. A half-second later, eight narrowed blades of red flame sat in the gaps between each of his fingers, edges hissing and flickering. 

"Shuntan!"

He let them go, all eight on a narrow arc into the Devil’s body — chest and shoulders taking each one into their meat.

The thing's whole front end went up as all eight blades went up at once, packed-in garbage acting as fuel. With another nasal squeal, the Devil stumbled forward and skidded, front leg buckling beneath it; the beast dragging against eight feet of floor on pure inertia as it tore at its own smoking flesh.

There.

Finn was already in motion, bursting into the air as his hands gathered together one more time in a Ram sign he knew how to make by heart. “Shuntan!” Cursed fire shaped itself again, this time wider and longer as the Devil's throat was right there at chest height.

With another squeeze of red, a ninth blade formed in his fist — long and broad in the form of a sword; a short-lived weapon but dangerous still.

The heavy boar-shaped head came off and hit concrete with a splat, the Devil still talking and mouth still working with threats until the words slid apart like its neck. The massive body swayed for a near-second, knees buckling under it, until the body went down to join the head.

Across the building, every other hook went slack at once.

The things up in the rafters just — dropped. All of them, all at the same instant, hitting the concrete and coming apart on impact into what they'd always actually been: meat and wire and somebody's coat and a length of pipe and a car door and a dog's skull, spilling out across the floor in separate heaps that didn't move anymore.

The whole warehouse went quiet except for chains swinging.

Finn stood in the middle of it with fire still guttering off his knuckles, blood down his whole right leg, and threw his head back.

"THAT'S how you do it!"

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Devil You Know – 200 GP
Defeat a Devil rated Index 3 (Medium Threat).

ROLL: Mystery Egg – 400 GP
Pokémon Reborn | Control
A mysterious egg that, with care and time, will hatch. What it hatches into is the mystery, but it's guaranteed to be something strong. In this jump, it will hatch into a Pokemon universally considered to be one of the exemplars of its type or niche. You get a new egg at the start of each jump that could hatch into another powerful Pokemon, or a powerful beast relevant to the jump you find yourself in. Naturally, whatever hatches from the egg will be completely and utterly loyal to you.

Grimoire Points: 300