Deathstalker 08 - Deathstalker Coda

Bois couldn’t either. And when he finally fell, still flailing about him with his sword, his last thought was: Ah, Lewis, I always knew you’d be the death of me.
    The whole city was a battleground now. The thrall invasion had been halted by the starcruisers’ actions outside the city, but the armies of thralls already inside the city were still surging through the streets of the Parade of the Endless. The tides of battle swept this way and that, and apart from one small area around the Imperial Palace, no one could tell for sure which way the war was going.

    Inside the court, the five assembled uber-espers launched the full force of their considerable will against the waiting Douglas Campbell and Finn Durandal, and once again they failed. They simply could not reach the two men standing steadily before them. The uber-espers looked at each other, baffled. No esp-blocker ever made could have stood up to such an attack. And then cold, harsh laughter rang out on the air from nowhere. The uber-espers’ heads snapped round. Screaming Silence shook violently, rattling her chains, and Blue Hellfire let out a low moaning. Gray Train actually lost control of his dusty shape for a moment. All the uber-espers knew that laugh. And as they looked wildly about them, Diana Vertue stepped casually out from behind Finn’s throne, to fix them all with her savage glare.
    “I’ve been here all along,” she said flatly. “Hidden behind the strongest shields I ever created. I walked in here with Douglas and Tel, and nobody saw or heard me. Even they couldn’t be sure I was with them. They just had to take it on trust. You see, Douglas and Finn were the bait, but I am the trap. I knew you’d never face me willingly, even if you did manage to kill me once, so Douglas and I came up with a plan to bring all of you to me. And guess what—I brought a few friends along.”
    She rose up into the air, hovering above the throne on unseen wings, and suddenly she was shining brightly as the sun. Her presence joined with the presence of many other minds to beat on the air of the court. Even Douglas and Finn flinched away from her. The uber-espers howled and shrieked in inhuman voices as Diana Vertue became a conduit for all the power of the mass-mind of the oversoul, and Diana laughed again.
    “The oversoul has come back! The city of New Hope traveled here with the Fleet from Mistworld, unseen and unsuspected. Only I knew. A secret weapon, to be preserved and kept ready for just this moment. You uber-espers are all that’s left of a particularly shameful episode of our past, and we will finally be rid of you!”
    The uber-espers tried to flee, teleporting out of the court, but Diana Vertue held them where they were. And the oversoul struck at the uber-espers through Diana, who was still sometimes Jenny Psycho. The terrible destructive force beat upon the monstrous minds of the uber-espers, driving them together to support their mental shield. Douglas and Finn were forced back, unable to bear even the side effects of the psychic assault taking place before them. They huddled together, hands clapped uselessly to their heads, the only human souls left on an inhuman battlefield. The oversoul kept up the pressure, beating at the uber-espers’ shield with brutal strength, determined to wipe out the menace of the mad minds, once and for all. Diana Vertue grinned like a death’s head as the attack focused through her enlarged mind. This was what she had come back for. An old vengeance for an old crime.
    The uber-espers huddled together as their mental shield shuddered and cracked, failing under the onslaught of the oversoul and Diana Vertue, and then . . . something utterly unexpected happened. The dusty gray figure of the Gray Train collapsed, losing its human shape to become a gray cloud that swept over Blue Hellfire, surrounded and sank into her, darkening the color of her corpse-pale skin. Icy flames leapt up around her. The Shatter Freak lurched forward, almost against his will, his body parts appearing and disappearing at dizzying speed, until he too fell into Blue Hellfire like a rock into a pool, absorbed and swallowed up in a moment. Screaming Silence lunged forward, grunting like a hog at the trough, and her great fleshy body wrapped itself around Blue Hellfire. The flames blazed brightly, radiating an impossible cold as the two figures melted together to become one. A dark silhouette of a human figure, like a hole in the world.