With a great strength Na'lsa ripped himself from Sin's body. Limbs and teeth met skin and scale and forced their separation from each other in a vile mockery of birth. The gape was split further, tearing along the seams of muscle until it would go no further. Meat hung in tatters and then forced itself around his form as he issued out. Gore and fluid gushed from the wound, ushering the twisted child back in to the world. Back in to the hell tainted plane. Back to the hell hounds. Back to the suffering mortals. Back to it all.

Na'lsa fell upon the ground, screaming feral defiance. Blood poured in to his eyes. His hair and skin were matted with fluid. Clothes hung sopping with crimson. He was bathed in it. Baptized in it.

He laughed maniacally. His head rolled back, and the blood covering his body was absorbed in to him. Became part of him. Entered unto his body and was consumed. Reprocessed. Repurposed.

And no sooner had he exited one body, he set forth to enter another.

The crazed...thing brought himself to stand, grinning towards the hell hounds. With a voice much too loud for his form, he issued challenge.

"TAKE ME."

He laughed. He laughed as one of the hell hounds charged him. He laughed as it opened its sizzling gaping mouth. He laughed as it lunged. He laughed still as its mighty jaws closed in around him.

His flesh melted between in the cavernous mouth. Bones were split apart by mountainous teeth. Na'lsa puddled in to a blood-laden mess of kibble as he slid down the unholy throat of the beast.

And he laughed.

Emerging from the nightmare has brought a consummation of chaos. As soon as the order is given, Diogenes' men fall into formation and begin to open fire with their grenade launchers. The filters on their helmets prevent exposure to the hellish gas the things breathe out. Yet fire is the Hounds' blood and bile, and the concussion of explosives does does only minimal damage. Focusing fire on a single beast, they manage to wound and perhaps cripple it, though writhing against its mother's coils, it is far from dead.

When the firestorm erupts, they cease fire and retreat to form a defensive cordon around Diogenes. Encased in a ton and more of nanite-braced ceramic-titanium, they are unscathed by the holocaust, unlike their commander who is hurled violently away and and burns helplessly. The whipping gales and walls of psionic force that sweep across the room prevent them from going immediately to his aid. When they finally break through, the assassin is near to death, only his adamantine will and the defensive tattoo covering his organs allow him to cling to life.

While the other four form a defensive perimeter, conserving their dwindling supplies of grenades unless truly needed, the fifth wastes no time extinguishing the flames consuming Diogenes and beginning to administer aid to the faltering psychic. Parsing apart the charred tissue of his neck with the needle's tip, he finds Diogenes' carotid artery and injects an entire syringe of Eden water into his system.

While the immediate flesh begins to mend, the serum does not travel to where it is most needed. His heart has stopped. Once more bringing out the emergency defibrillator, he performs the same procedure on Diogenes that he did to Thomas earlier, slitting open his ribs with the monomolecular edge of his combat knife and clamping the electrodes to Diogenes' heart.

A single shock is all that is required, pumping the serum to the brain and reigniting the psychic's mind. In a matter of seconds, the healing burgeons throughout his entire body, sealing the incision, regenerating burned muscle, mending snapped bones and melted ligaments.

He draws a breath. Another. Leaping to his feet in the trailing tatters of robes and ruined armor, he moves at once to attack. Both pistols snap out and fire in rapid succession, dozens of rounds unerring, shrieking with electrum fire as the blessings inscribed on them by Zaccheus are fulfilled.

Each bullet strikes like the hammers of God against the skulls of two of the Hounds, blasting white-smoking craters into their brains, decapitating them with explosive force. Both bodies sprawl inert and dead.

The final beast, the one wounded, leaps from its mother's side in fury, bounding toward him, spanning the chamber in a single vaulting leap, its acrid jaws stretched wide for murder.

Meeting it mid-flight, Diogenes springs forward with a psychic push, twisting and wrangling himself onto the creature's back as it crashes through the line of his men. Before it can recover from the shock to its wounded haunches, he raises his fist high, once more throbbing with terrible momentum, and plunges it into the base of the Hound's head, shattering the infernal bones and plunging his hand deep within.

Grasping, he finds the encephalon stem and snaps it off, and drives forward, through the cortex, through the cerebellum, and out through its right eye in a burst of vitreous gore. Flexing his arm, Diogenes splits the skull in half.

That task complete, he rolls to feet, brushing gobbets of brain-matter from his sleeve.

The quivering pile of blood and bone that had been Na'lsa worked its way in to the stomach of the hound. It twisted and melded, growing and rearranging itself within the pit of acid that it found itself. Splintered bone shot outward, piercing the cavern-like wall of the stomach. The mass of gore exploited the opening, tearing its way through in to the rest of the body. It began to reform as it gained mass, pressing against the organs of the hound like some sort of hellish tumor. It grew and grew, until the body could no longer contain it. Acid squeezed itself from the stomach in to the body. Blood and bile filled the empty spaces left. Still the flesh swirled, and sinewy tendrils not unlike tentacles lashed out and pierced tissue. They crept along the spinal column of the hound, rearranging nerve endings and replacing them with their own.

The hound stumbled as its nervous system began to betray itself. In mere moments a large knot began to form along the back of the creature. It grew to immense proportions, swelling upwards until it burst in a rain of blood and tissue. With the bursting Na'lsa emerged, skinless body still rebuilding itself. Sickening limbs of muscles twisted and grew to fine but strong tendrils that disappeared in to the spine of the hound, ripping apart motor control on the nerve level. It buckled as it attempted to fight against the fate that quickly approached. Na'lsa's tendrils wove even deeper in to the flesh, further up the spine and in to the skull of the hound. In to the brain, in to everything. And as he began to literally unplug the hound's brain from its own body, he laughed.

"I AM THAT WHICH WAS. THAT WHICH HAS BEEN. THAT WHICH WILL BE. I AM THE PURVEYOR OF LIFE. I AM THE FLESH WEAVER, AND YOU! HOUND OF HELL! YOU NO LONGER EXIST!"

And with a great heave, the spinal column was unseated from the hound's brain. It collapsed in to a paralyzed, useless heap of broken body. Ooze poured from the wound that Na'lsa had made. He made no rush of climbing from the gaping hole, skin and flesh retracting back in to his body to reform as a human being. Blood and fluids covering his skin coalesced and were absorbed by his pores. In every physical sense, he once again appeared...human.

Tarja stared up at the wall of the building that she had just fallen from, which help from one of the hounds. The beast was now dead and slumped half in the APC that slumped forward in its broken front suspension.

Tarja didn't know the state of the soldiers that remained in the APC. Instead she continued to glare up at the hole in the wall she and the hound had created with their exit, and through her pain, focused only on the flashes of movement that she saw in the open space. There was darkness, flashes of fire, splatter of blood.

She focused on the darkness.

Ignoring the sensations of her body, Tarja reached out with her telekinetic ability and latched onto the solid darkness she found there. Gritting her teeth, she yanked hard.

Perhaps I should have practiced running more.

The thought flashed through his tired mind as Dante dodged yet another ball of flame, then narrowly avoided the trampling paws of a hellhound. Sin herself seemed to be too...preoccupied, fortunately enough, but he still kept watch as he wove quickly under the bellies of the beasts.

And then all too soon, he stood in front of the Abbot. That ivory Crown was just a mere meter away.

Do I...just take it?

The question of consequences was halfway formed in his mind when something flung him bodily through the air, sending him crashing into furniture, drapes and shrouds tangled around him. Cringing through the pain, and berating himself for what the moment of hesitation had cost him, Dante regained his bearing just in time to roll past snapping jaws. He extricated himself from the curtains and splintered wood, and shot at what he could only hope was where the hound's eye lay, then tumbled forward.

The monstrosity reeled sideways and paused for just a bit, and this time it was the mercenary who had the upper hand. But the Crown was several arm's lengths out of reach, and he would never make it...

Grasping it with all the telekinetic force he could muster, he twisted around and flung it through the gaping hole in the wall.

Na'lsa did not have to be told. In the presence of such power, something that could turn back Sin herself could easily obliterate him. Slinking away in to the shadows, he made himself unseen as he ungraciously climbed down the side of the tower, eager to be out of the observing eye of such a being. Yes, Zaccheus would have made a meal beyond his dreams. But for now, fear overrode his ever present hunger. For now, he would bide his time. For now, he would be the unseen prey.

This was not an act of faith. Sheer mechanical expedience saw his message delivered, and the Celestrine has answered, as Diogenes knew he would. He must admit, it is a glorious sight to behold; too rarely does the Iron Scepter fulfill the divine purpose of its forging.

But there is no time to appreciate the descent of the holy patriarch's fury. The assassin has his orders.

Even as the others reel at the celestial display, Diogenes acts, channel his psykhe and propelling himself across the room in a blur, under the harrowing storm and onto the priest's bed, pausing only to hoist the shocked abbot of Smyrna in his arm before leaping away once more.

He pauses only briefly at the blasted opening in the wall before stepping over the edge, feet cycling with inhuman agility, pounding chunks of ancient mortar of the wall as he runs down it before leaping to safety on the ground below.

Glancing above with his psychic sight, he sees the rest of his men rappelling down on grapnels, obeying their Celestrine with all the devout adherence he would expect.

As much as it can be called such, the mission is a success.

With few options but to stare straight up, Tarja took in the glory of the presence of the Celestrine, or what she could make of it. Her vision was blurring, the holy corona coming from the tower appearing less distinct with each passing second as she focused her mind on keeping her body together, blood seeping from crushing wounds and punctures.

Her arm was numb, but she at retained enough awareness of herself to make a fair assumption that it was still attached. She refused to close her eyes.

A dark blur was making its way down the wall, then more in increasing numbers. She remained where she was, attempting to stem her own bleeding, and thought briefly whether it had been wise to enter Zacchaeus' payroll.