Jiang Xuande didn’t have much time to prepare for the attack that Astaroth had in mind for him, but he did have fair warning that she was coming. She had made an unsuccessful attempt to recall Makeri to her service, and Makeri writhed from the excruciating efforts, issuing a profound number of curses upon the magician’s head.
The magician hadn’t had much time to play with the Orrery and perfect the magics in it, but he got the gist of how to summon his own army. Makeri’s human host went gray with the amount of blood that was necessary to summon forty-nine Nekus, and Jiang Xuande ordered them all to possess the forty-nine generals in command of Duke Xiao’s royal guard. The generals were then ordered to defend Jiang Xuande against the attack from Astaroth’s army.
Astaroth had had a different plan in mind at first, but when she understood what Jiang Xuande was up to, she had to shift things around. She took the shape of Duke Xiao (and left the real Duke incapacitated within his bedroom to flirt with insanity at the sight of his double running about) and commanded his forces to destroy the mutinous attack launched by Jiang Xuande and his own royal guard. She also summoned more than eight thousand Nekus to possess the army, and they were all of them ordered to annihilate everything in sight.
The armies assembled on the battlefield. Each side waited impatiently for the order to attack. In the anticipation, the concentration of dark metaphysical energies within the state of Qin brought that part of the Earth into serious distress. Sunlight bent and scattered, spring turned to bitter winter and life itself began to wither under the oppressive evil.
Michael had made a sweep of the area. He was loathe to destroy the vast number of humans assembled there, but he had to do something to destroy the demons. He determined that both sides were armed with human weapons (it requires an entirely different type of weapon to do harm to an angel), and understanding the risk, he ordered Jophiel, Sidriel, Sabrathon and Kochabiel to the battlefield to dispatch as many demons as possible while he worked on a solution to fix the accumulating metaphysical damage with a few other angels in Heaven. The four angels set out inside the hordes of demons, approaching each Neku with great stealth to destroy them inside their hosts. All of them did their best to leave the humans alive without causing them serious harm.
Astaroth didn’t care to tarry, and she ordered her army to advance against Jiang Xuande’s forces. They charged across the field with a murderous speed, and when she was sure that Jiang Xuande was preoccupied with being outnumbered more than 160 to 1, she went after him to recover the Orrery.
It was in use, just as she had suspected. Jiang Xuande had it engaged to locate Azrael, for he was certain that the Angel of Death was present on the battlefield.
It didn’t take Astaroth much effort to recover the Orrery. Ninalla had been a proud Neku, and she’d neglected to tell Jiang Xuande about the stark differences between Nekus and Apokomistai. Had Astaroth not been so adamant to recover her property, she probably would have made Jiang Xuande’s death a far more painful event, but she ended his life quickly. She had begun the process of claiming the dead magician’s soul for her own before it returned to Earth’s well of souls, but Azrael materialized in the nick of time and took his soul instead.
Astaroth wasn’t about to surrender such a corrupt soul to Azrael. Unlike the thousands of Nekus on the battlefield, Astaroth did have a weapon that could harm an angel. She drew her sword, ready to steal back the soul that she felt was rightfully hers. She struck out at him, but Michael had appeared to intervene. She fell off balance and quickly sheathed her weapon. She knew that she was no match for an Archangel, and so she seized the Orrery and disappeared in tact.
The four angels on the battlefield had destroyed over a thousand Nekus—Jophiel and Sidriel had taken out more than four hundred each. Michael surveyed the situation. He knew that if he left Jophiel and Sidriel in the battle long enough, the rest of the Nekus would either leave the battle or fall, but there were still over six thousand demons in the area. The concentration of six thousand demons in one location was rapidly contaminating the metaphysical fabric of the Earth.
Michael called the four warriors on the battlefield to him, and with the help of a few angels from the Order of Virtues—Virtues are celestial architects and engineers—they brought a great storm to the sky over the battlefield. It rained a heavy, thick liquid upon the Nekus below, and it slowly transformed the human hosts of the Nekus into clay over the course of half of an hour. The hosts with the Nekus sank into the mud of the battlefield. After the hour had passed, the storm diminished, and every surviving Neku had been trapped inside a dying host, anchored to the Earth.
Azrael collected the essences of the Nekus and spirited them away to a dark corner of the Universe. The balance of the Earth had returned.
Most of the clay soldiers sunk deep into the ground and were forgotten, but a few of them had perished on rock. Over the years, the people of Qin had spun tales about how these soldiers had come to be. A century later, the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang had heard tales of how these clay soldiers had once been spirit warriors, until a great dragon had turned them into clay. He felt that spirit warriors would be exactly what he needed after he had passed on, and he built an army of them—an army of more than eight thousand—in terracotta to guard his tomb, vigilant until the end of the Earth.
This concludes our tale. A happy and safe Halloween to you! Dominus vobiscum.
