The pain was enormous, but pain was the currency of Hell and she’d earned much payment over the eons. She choked up on the haft of her SHUKUR, twisting it and slashing the blade into the grizzly’s side. The monster bear roared in its own pain and fell back enough for her to stand. Sensing movement behind her, she spun and backfisted the black bear, knocking it flying against the crushed Toyota RAV. Then she turned, lifted her weapon, and slammed it butt first into the ground.

A shock wave of force rippled out, throwing the bears, the werewolf, the witch, and the guards all up, back, and then down to the ground while lifting every car, both whole and smashed, in a fifty-foot circle, into the air, a full yard off the ground.

“Enough!” she roared out. “Playtime is over!” She swung her unholy spear blade down at the thick-furred neck of the closest enemy, the black bear, ready to start ending these foes. A foot from the exposed black fur, a glowing-edged weapon of silver fire appeared between the bear and her SHUKUR, stopping her unstoppable blade with the unmovable mass of a boulder.

The figure holding the blade glowed with the Holy silver light of Heaven, his body covered with translucent plates of gleaming armor.

“Yes, by all means. Let’s stop playing, shall we, Lilith?” Chris Gordon said, simultaneously lifting his blade and throwing her back ten feet like she weighed nothing.

Chapter 33

Without waiting for a response, God’s Hammer on Earth spun his blade into a horizontal cut at Lilith’s side as he slid forward, smooth and fast. She blocked with her spear shaft, spinning the butt at his head, but he blocked with the armored vambrace on his left arm, stabbing at her with his sword-wielding right hand. He was fast. Shockingly so, she thought as she arched her stomach back, the point of his Angelic sword missing her flat, hard-scaled muscles by a hair’s width.

She cleared space, a fifteen-foot backward jump, giving her time to look over this new, unwelcome enemy.

He wasn’t especially big for a human, maybe just over the average height for males in this age, but his powerful build made him appear larger. She towered over him in her true form, yet still she hesitated.

His glowing armor was different from that which she remembered of the Angelic Host. It appeared more… mechanical, reminding her of the machines of this age rather than the flowing, ornate forms of Hell’s ancient enemy.

His sword, too, was more streamlined than the weapons she recalled from ages past. Not that she’d ever faced an Archangel of the Lord in combat. Those demons who chose the path of single combat had invariably been destroyed. No, it generally took superior numbers to take out a single Archangel.