the Final Cut

Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.

Part IV

They fought their way upward and forward, against a growing tide of foes. Nathan’s prediction was proven true immediately, the opposition progressively increasing in numbers, variety, and frequency of attack. There were flyers, with a seven-foot span of pterodactyl wings and flexible snake-headed necks, spitting poison and screaming as quarrels and green flame struck them from the air. There were hulking ogres with great spike-studded war clubs, slow and dull-witted but capable of soaking up enormous damage before reluctantly expiring. There were more of the blue-skinned beast-demons that Xander had first killed, now arriving in pairs and attacking from different sides when possible. There were packs of smaller creatures, shaped like javelinas but the size of Dobermans, squealing and slavering and all but trampling one another in their drive to reach the humans. There were things that dropped from the ceilings, things that darted out from apertures in the walls, things waiting in pits that opened up ahead of them or sometimes almost under their feet.

Such numbers would easily have overwhelmed the rescue party if they had all come at once, but instead they arrived in increments sufficient to challenge but not bury the four men. Perhaps those were the rules (programming) of the ‘game’; perhaps the involution could generate or direct only so many at a time; perhaps the denizens were bound to certain segments of the overall construct, and could attack only within their own territory. For whatever reason, the humans fought and fought and fought, straining to meet the odds but never finding them too great.

Despite retrieving his ammunition whenever he could, despite the duplicate quarrels from his own deceased duplicate, Giles eventually ran out of anything to fire from the crossbow; he would have discarded the weapon as useless, but Ethan tried and succeeded at a new trick, loading the crossbow with his own power so that it would launch bolts of magical force. (Handy, that; too bad there was next to no chance such a technique would work outside the involution.) Xander, as his skill and experience grew, traded his axe for the sword Giles had brought for the moment he could no longer wield a distance weapon (and, mortifyingly, forgotten in those moments when he was trying to kill Nathan), and used the blade’s longer reach to practical and bloody effect.

Ethan had changed as well, perhaps from determination to distinguish himself from his new twin or perhaps in adjustment to the altered situation. Setting most other spellworks aside, he had focused his will into creating a force-light version of the kattari of India (later misnamed the ‘fist blade’ or ‘Bundi dagger’), and fought alongside Giles with the foot-long weapon projecting from one hand and a fifteen-inch spell-shield from the other. His physical skill was less than that of the new enhanced Xander or even of Giles himself, but he met every attack with total commitment and utter ruthlessness. Sometimes Xander would leave his self-appointed rear-guard position to fight at Giles’s left while Ethan covered the right, the three of them working slaughter with an unexpected unity of purpose that far surpassed what they had managed when it was … well, only the three of them.

The greatest difference, however, was in Nathan. Already somewhat attuned to their surroundings by his essential nature, the others handling all the physical combat allowed him to concentrate solely on the mystical aspects, and his growth in power was even more dramatic than Ethan’s had been. He could detect, disarm, and dismiss spell-traps with easy virtuosity, nullifying or bypassing a dozen per minute; he could cast a paralysis spell on a single adversary, or a tanglefoot field on groups so that they moved as if mired in tar; he found a way to augment the glowballs with the green flame so that he could throw fireballs that would burst with a flare of white heat, enough to dispatch anything smaller than the massive ogres. Where Ethan had been able to float, Nathan could actually fly (albeit at no more than brisk walking speed), soaring above the fray to launch magical attacks at their foes from above while his cohorts fought below him.

“Fella,” Xander said to him after one such performance, still breathing hard from the labors of the clash just finished, “it’s too bad you didn’t come with a mirror-Spock goatee: that, and a high-collar red cape, you’d have the whole Dr. Strange deal nailed solid.”

Ethan muttered something that sounded like ‘bloody ponce’. Giles could understand the sentiment without quite sharing it — though Nathan’s contribution was unquestionably invaluable, he did keep himself clear of direct danger while making it — but Xander just shrugged and said amiably, “Hey, if anybody would know, it’d be you.”

Already more than a bit precarious, the group dynamic had inevitably shifted with the addition of a fourth member, and Giles found himself struck by a perverse, surprising impulse to defend Ethan. He quelled it with callous firmness; not only would such a thing be offensive in its very nature, they had more important things demanding their attention just now. For one: “I never thought to ask before,” he said to Nathan, “but is there any possibility of a … well, a game clock for this reality? a set period within which our task must be completed, before time runs out?”

Nathan frowned, thought for a moment, and then said, “Not feeling anything like a countdown, but it’s something to keep in mind. You weren’t exactly dragging your feet before you picked me up —” (Ah, yes, he’d know that from Ethan’s memories.) “— and we’ve moved along right smartly since then. If there’s a tempo here, I’d say we’re matching it and pushing past.”

“We’ve got one countdown you haven’t thought about,” Xander threw in. “I’m thirsty. Haven’t seen anything to drink in here — and I wouldn’t be crazy enough to touch it if there were anything — but we’re gonna be dealing with dehydration before a lot longer. Wish we’d brought canteens.”

“Yes, quite right,” Giles replied, acknowledging and dismissing the point in the same moment. Xander had been exerting himself far more strenuously than the rest of them, but water would indeed be welcome now (in fact, he wished Xander hadn’t even mentioned it, because suddenly his own thirst was acute), but who would have ever suspected they’d be occupied long enough for such a thing to become a factor? All odds had been that they would succeed quickly or die quickly … and, since there was nothing they could do about it, there was no use in dwelling on it. “Another reason to move as quickly as we can. Ethan, Nathan: if we’ve held more or less to direction, we should be considerably closer than we were. Is there any way to do a seeking spell for something more like ourselves than like this environment?”

Both men frowned this time, but then there was another wave of attack, and everyone was too busy for talk. Nathan rose up to just below the ceiling and cast a tanglefoot, then began tossing fireballs; Giles fired the crossbow, cocked it and fired again, cocked and fired, cocked and fired, choosing his targets and moving more swiftly and fluidly than he ever could have done with an unenchanted weapon; Ethan formed the kattari around his hand and waded in, slashing and stabbing and using the spell-shield to parry and divert and sometimes even strike edge-on; and Xander whirled his sword in a continuous unending flow of deadly motion, hewing through the creatures ahead of and around him, seemingly every blow a killing-stroke. They had done this before, again and again, and the progressive increase in the number of foes coming at them had given them time to get very good at it, always moving forward as they fought so that opposition might slow their progress but not halt it.

Despite the honed lethality they could bring to bear, the sheer press of bodies meant it was minutes before they could slow down, kill the last few, and regroup. “Seeking spell,” Ethan gasped, sweat running down his face as his chest heaved. “Don’t know, Ripper; it’d be one thing if we were out in the real world with the proper materials, but in here —”

“Too right,” Nathan agreed. “I mean, ‘in here’ isn’t a problem for me, but you don’t just cast something like that ex nihilo. It needs something for focus, something of hers, and unless you’ve been carrying around a lock of her hair you haven’t told us about, we’ve got sweet Fanny Adams to work with.”

Giles put his foot on the neck of one of the flyers, still squirming on the concrete floor, and used the axe to sever it from the body. “You’re two versions of the same person,” he told the Raynes. “One from outside, one from here. Can’t you use the similarities between you to isolate the difference, and then the difference to tune in on Jenny’s location?”

Ethan raised an eyebrow, looking Nathan over dubiously. “You know, we might be able to do something like that. Only …”

“Only we’d have to work together,” Nathan finished. “Because we’re both big on that kind of thing.”

Ethan’s smile was hard-edged. “Couldn’t be at all because you’re not up to the challenge, could it?”

Nathan smiled back just as nastily. “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine. Just see if you can keep up.”

“Uh-huh,” Xander said. “Or maybe we could go check out that door over there.”

They broke off to look at him, as did Giles. “Why?” Giles asked him. “Is there something particular about it?”

“Well, I’m pretty sure I can see a red light on it,” Xander said, gesturing toward the distant door at the end of the long hallway. “That’s new, and new is worth giving a look-see.”

Giles peered ahead, and sure enough he could barely make out a tiny red light on the door Xander had indicated. “All stay alert,” he cautioned, almost certainly unnecessarily, and together they advanced to the door in question. No new enemies appeared in their path, which was quite the opposite of reassuring, but …

The door, when they reached it, was unlike any they had thus far encountered. Those had been either generic metal with ordinary handles, or had been sealed with symbols that had to be unlocked. This one, first, had an industrial magnetic keypad (the source of the red light they’d seen), and second, had a small window of the type that embedded wire mesh into the glass. Giles tried to look through the glass while the others took up guard positions; the room beyond was unlit, however, and there wasn’t enough illumination from the hallway to reach in very far. “Ethan,” he said. “If you would?”

“Right, right,” Ethan said, moving up next to him. He formed a glowball, steering it up to the window, but the light merely reflected from the glass. “Bugger,” Ethan muttered. “All right, hold on, how about …?” A moment’s concentration, and the next glowball formed inside the room, drifting forward as Ethan tried to mentally steer it. It didn’t work, the ball moved a few yards and then settled to the floor, glowing for a few more seconds before fading out.

Still, that had given a bit of help. “I think,” Giles said huskily, then stopped to swallow. “I think there might be someone huddled in that leftmost corner. I think … protruding from a clump of shadow there … I think it may have been a foot. Perhaps even a woman’s foot.”

“Company!” Xander called, breaking in on the sudden surge of treacherous hope. “If this is the jackpot, here come the characters who don’t want us to collect. Battle stations, people!”

It required no huge effort of will for Giles to pull himself from the window, but he still didn’t like doing it. “Nathan, check the door for traps,” he ordered, turning. “Ethan, watch him.”

Nathan’s laugh came even as Giles felled one of the advancing wave with a crossbow shot. “After all we’ve been through, you still don’t trust me?”

“More than I should, perhaps,” Giles replied crisply, already sighting in on his next target. “But you’ll not get carte blanche from me any time soon.”

He had the impression Nathan had attempted some needling retort, but couldn’t spare the attention to notice. The wall of creatures coming at them … there were no greater numbers crowded into the front ranks than they’d faced before, but the depth of the oncoming press seemed all but endless. He fell into a rhythm, picking off those a bit farther back and letting Xander deal with the nearer ones and the flyers. He was currently the only one of them wielding a distance weapon, and only Ethan’s enhancement of the crossbow — easy draw, fast reload, self-replenishing ammunition — allowed him any hope of keeping up. With an awareness sharpened by the experience of the last several hours, he saw that the balance was about to break. “Nathan,” he called, still sighting and firing. “Give the door over to Ethan, we need support!”

The man was with him in seconds, calling up magic before even bothering to speak: a searing line of flame for those almost within reach of them, followed by the ever-useful tanglefoot field to slow the advance, then fireballs and paralysis bolts. “Bloody hell,” Nathan observed when the most acute danger had been suppressed. “They are getting close!”

“Final phase,” Xander panted, sword at rest for just a moment; toward the last, he hadn’t even been fighting to kill, just to hold back the attack till more potent force could be brought to bear. “This is the last level; we either get through, or they just keep piling on till we’re plowed under.”

“It very much appears so,” Giles agreed, and shot down one of the flyers; he’d been leaving those for Xander — too quick to make promising targets, whereas deft sword-work could bring them down handily enough — but he’d gone with instinct and his aim was on, the creature dropped screeching and convulsing. “How goes it with the door?”

“It’s tricky,” Nathan answered. He, too, was interspersing words with murderous action, reinforcing the tanglefoot and laying down another line of flame. “I was making real progress —”

“No, you weren’t!” Ethan snapped from behind them.

“— but that one has the been loaded with the works. Shields and traps layered into the door, walls, ceiling, floors … we could work our way through, but it’d take time —” A barrage of fireballs, nearly a dozen in quick sequence. “— that we’re clearly not going to bloody have, so I’ve been feeling my way through the little fripperies in the keypad.” Nathan wasn’t wasting effort on flight now, all his attention was taken up with direct action against the enemies pressing in on them, but he spoke while casting. “No traps there, far as I can tell, but it just won’t work without the correct code, and we haven’t the faintest of what that might be. Who expects sodding vampires to use key-codes? Against the natural order, if you ask me …”

“Seven-digit code,” Ethan called back to them. “Got that much, but I haven’t been able to finesse anything else. Any suggestions? because I’m totally sodding blank up here.”

“Suggestions, you say?” Nathan produced something new, a neon-bright pinwheel that he sent caroming through the assault wave, bouncing from one to another and inflicting multiple wounds at every contact. “It could be anything, there’s no sense to see or work out, that’s the whole point of a key-code. We’ll go under here long before we’ve tried every buggering irrelevancy we can think of, it’s just utterly bleeding random.”

“But it’s still a game,” Xander insisted without looking around. Even with Giles and Nathan working together, enough were getting close that he was having to carry a solid share of the fighting. “We have to think of it as a game, with rules, ’cause if there are no rules we’re screwed regardless.” He chopped down one of the blue-skinned beast-demons, taking three blows to finish the thing. “What seven-letter code would have any kind of meaning to a magic-mojo game designer?”

It wasn’t the simplest thing, to puzzle at such a question while simultaneously devoting full commitment to immediate combat, but Giles made the attempt, physical resistance was just delaying the inevitable and only intellect (or luck, but who would trust to luck in these circumstances?) would save them. “Angelus: ANGELUS is seven letters long —”

“Yeah, so is ASSHOLE,” Xander gasped. “Which fits just as well … oh, hell, what’s that?”

‘That’ was something they hadn’t seen before, looming up above the horde ahead of it: an ogre, but larger than the others by twenty per cent, and a bright orange-red in hue. The stupendous muscles were banded in patches of glowing light, as of pools of magma shifting under the skin, and small gouts of flame flickered off it now and then. Giles took careful aim and fired directly into its left eye … and the creature bellowed and clamped a washtub-sized hand to its face, but the magical force-bolt rebounded, somehow solidifying into an actual quarrel, sizzled, and then vanished in a puff of flame and smoke.

“A fire ogre?” Nathan blurted. “They’re inventing new things to throw at us now!”

Giles steadied and fired again, trying for the other eye, while Nathan shot forth one paralysis blast after another, apparently feeling (as did Giles) that fireballs would probably serve only to strengthen this fresh enemy. Xander was everywhere, leaping and laying about himself with the sword, trying by speed and desperation and sheer total savagery to compensate for the attention the others couldn’t spare for their more mundane foes. And Ethan was saying something, Giles caught a fragment: “— only numbers, it’s not alphanumeric, there’s only numbers to choose from. What kind of bloody seven-digit number would an insane psychic vampire slag choose to plug into a scenario like this?”

“Cover me!” Xander shrieked, turning and pushing through them back to the door. “I’ve got this, cover me, DO IT NOW!” Ethan stumbled out, startled and bewildered, but in the next instant he had summoned up the light-kattari and was slashing at the front ranks of the advancing wall, face white and set.

Giles was too busy to feel more than the faintest flicker of wonder and incomprehension, but behind him he could hear the keypad chime as Xander began punching in numbers. This wasn’t the generic quasi-robotic sound of standard tone-codes, it was actually almost melodic, like the fragment of a tune, he knew that tune, but what —? and Ethan shot flames from both hands to ignite creatures close enough to reach out and seize them, and there was a loud beep and then the mechanical clack! of a lock disengaging, and “Inside, inside, got it, inside!” Xander shouted, and Giles fired a last time at the fire-ogre (now, finally, beginning to stagger under the sustained fusillade it had been taking, now when it didn’t matter anymore) and lunged through the opened door, Ethan and Nathan instantly behind him, and Xander slammed the door again before any of their foes could move to follow.

In the last, desperate few minutes Giles had been so intent on the present necessity that he’d lost sight of the farther goal. Now, inside and shielded from their besiegers and granted a moment’s quiet, it came back to him. He looked around for the shadowed form he’d seen before, starting toward it —

He could never have said why he turned back, but that warning instinct was too slow and too late. Nathan was coming at him, face twisted into a snarl of triumph, a kattari appearing in his own hand and drawn back to strike. Astonishingly, Ethan was throwing himself between the two of them, one hand out to push Giles back and the spell-shield flickering up around the other, but it was still unformed and the angle was wrong, he’d be split open in the next half-second and then Giles the following moment, and the point of Xander’s sword burst out of Nathan’s chest, Xander had struck from behind, extending himself so far in the thrust that he fell full-length on the gritty floor. Nathan let out an awful gasping wail, blood surging from his mouth; he toppled half-sideways, the kattari gouging a furrow in the concrete, scrabbled for a hold, for control, for anything, and then his eyes went empty and his face slack, blood still running from the open mouth.

Giles was mute, stunned, staring. Xander was scrambling back up, not trusting that the danger was over. Ethan had caught his balance, and he looked down now at his dead double, his face fixed in a sneer far more intent than his usual confident smirk. “Well, now,” he drawled. “I suppose this would be a good time for me to say Scream thy last scream … but you already did that, didn’t you?” He leaned forward, spat on the corpse, and added, “Wanker.”

“I …” Giles blinked, shook himself. “Th–… thank you. Both of you.”

The answering smile was thin and sardonic, typical Ethan. “Come on, Ripper, I couldn’t let anyone else double-cross you, could I? You know I’ve never been one to share my toys.” He nodded past Giles. “I believe you had some business over there, before you were so … predictably interrupted?”

Giles swung back toward that dark corner, his mind already whirling with apprehension at war with hope. Was there yet another trap awaiting them? was it Jenny? was she alive? “Light,” he commanded, and as Ethan obligingly called up a glowball, he steeled himself and stepped forward.
 

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