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.
Cold silence has a tendency
to atrophy any sense of compassion
between supposed lovers.
Between supposed brothers.