A gay story: Sex God Saga Ch. 25 ### Sex God Saga 25
### Where Sleeping Gods Are Dreaming
MONDAY:
The morning fog refused to dissipate under the overcast sky. Fields lay in hazy white, interspersed with small forests where all but the evergreens were shedding their browned foliage.
Theo drew his jacket closed and shivered.
The assembly of about twenty Knowing was loosely grouped around the various cars they’d arrived in.
When Mako had looked for weird animal behavior to find Theo, he’d stumbled over a lot of reports from this area. Foxes falling asleep under car hoods, a drowsy hog walking into a house, some anecdotal cases of lethargy in humans. Dream wisps, most likely. It was a big area to cover.
Juniper, the team Delta ‘liaison’, clapped his hands. “In order to cover as much ground as possible, we’ll split up. Maintain contact with other groups. Maintain sightlines with your team mates. Maintain seals.”
Theo found his group, led by Keith in a white jacket with reflector strips and a beany. Fulin and Coralline were his team mates.
Paris, who had brought Cain, was in a group with Mo.
Mira walked by and gave them nods as greeting. She shot her teammate Ace a compliment on his lilac hair, then made off with him, Jun and Ray.
More senior shamans walked toward the forests, while Keith showed his teammates the fields they were supposed to zigzag through.
“Fog shouldn’t really interfere,” Keith said. “Summoning works through anything less dense than cardboard. Just keep your eyes peeled.”
Coralline looked at her phone. She was the one keeping contacts going. “Alessandra is detecting Watcher activity.”
“Then we know it’s big,” Keith said. “Unless it’s just going to gawk at Theo again.”
“Sorry for being a lightning rod,” Theo said. He stepped on an eye-shaped clump of mud. The Watcher was kind of annoying.
The field offered no Outsider activity, and neither did the next.
“Heads up,” Coralline said. “Hostile Redeemers have been spotted. Including the old geezer, ‘grandmaster’ Adam.”
“Direction?”
“Spreading out but mostly focused on buildings. The fog is really on our side here.”
Keith hummed. “Might just be looking for possessed people, but maybe they know something we don’t. Hard to say how their superpowers work. What do *our* Redeemers think?”
“Uh, should I ask?”
“Godrick is a slayer,” Keith said, “but Dawn’s a ranger-trapper hybrid so she might have inklings or visions or whatever similar to the hostiles.”
Theo checked the noosphere. It threw uncertainty and anxiousness at him, in the sights and memories he was familiar with. That wasn’t exactly helping him feel less spooked.
Fulin growled. No, the sound was coming from the muse in his torso – Weidong.
“Down,” Fulin hissed. He pulled Theo into a crouch even though the blond Mirrorgnost had already been obeying.
Two silhouettes moved past in the distance with leaps longer than any athlete could have made.
“A girl and a woman,” Fulin whispered.
“Liturgy,” Keith said, “trapper. And either her mom or aunt. So, ranger or slayer-trapper hybrid. Guessing second since we weren’t spotted.”
“Retreat?” Coralline asked. “We’ve not seen so much as a Vestige. If anything the area is suspiciously cleaned out.”
Fulin gestured. “More coming from there. Moving at a right angle to the females. They’re covering a grid pattern.”
The team leading Duskwright squinted. “There’s a church the other way. The women probably came from there, so they’d have checked it off the list. We hide out until they’ve passed.”
Crouch-sneaking, the four slipped toward the wood building. It had been a church once, but with the small farming community turning industrial it had been converted into a storage barn. The dim interior smelled of sawdust, barred windows behind covered machine parts blocking the outside.
Phones lit the area as they advanced on the mix of old and new floorboards.
“Vestiges,” Fulin said. He was looking down where his sneakers — inhabited by Xiang — left a few snowflakes along the planks. “Outsiders walked here. Or floated, whatever. Not really jackpot but…”
“Reporting it,” Coralline said. “Makes me wonder if the Redeemers know and plan on coming back.”
Keith took a deep breath and kept going. “Let’s check it off *our* list then.”
There was only one door and it was locked with a padlock. Keith magicked it open with a jiggle from Biscuit’s key vessel.
The former churches’ backroom had become an office, slightly messy but not abandoned. Nothing out of the ordinary except for the Vestiges practically littering the walls as faint smears under mediumship.
“Did they *store* wisps in here?” Fulin wondered. “Or run experiments? Assuming this is the dream wisp factory we’ve been looking for, there should have been a muse that bound them all. This could have been a sanctuary.”
Keith nodded. “If the muse had a roaming vessel it could have just moved the wisp factory elsewhere. We shou-” He froze. “Guys? This place is bigger on the inside. I’m not misjudging, right?”
“Yeah, it’s too wide,” Theo said and checked the anti-dream seal on his lapel.
“Maybe-”
Fulin slapped his hand over Keith’s mouth, his head twitching.
Two pairs of footsteps entered the barn and headed straight for the office. Too late to hide.
An old, haggard, blue eyed, white haired man with an angry glare. Adam. With him was Gideon — thinning black hair, sharp cheekbones, gun out.
Keith waved his hands and a wall of darkness rose at the office entrance. The enemy was cut off but there was no other exit.
Muffled, slurred speech – Adam. “Our lord Jesus, help me in this time of need. Let my son do your noble work to eradicate the demons.”
The darkness dissipated. Fucking Redeemer superpowers.
Gideon aimed with one hand, talking into a phone he held in the other.
“Dash!” Keith yelled and the office’s heavy, main desk slammed itself into the doorframe. Adam on the other side fell with a surprised shout.
Fulin rammed his body into a wooden back wall and tore a hole to the outside, cast in diffuse daylight. He ripped planks with bare hands, Weidong’s spectral paws seeping through his skin.
Team delta-2 hurried to exit the deathtrap through the wall hole. They stumbled through a field but were encircled by three figures. Genesis, Liturgy, Sacred. Mother, daughter, adoptive cousin.
“Oh Lord,” Liturgy intoned, “let your will be done and-”
Fulin kicked the air and ice crystals flew from his sneakers as if they’d been on the ground for him to kick up. The girl screeched and fell back with a shout of “Aarh, exclamations!”
Genesis shot her gun. Fulin caught the bullet from the air, the wisp in his yang-tattoo getting expended. He went on the offensive but the woman faded into the mist, able to turn near invisible under the right conditions.
Sacred closed in with his ranger-speed and shoved Theo to the ground. The Chinese man with a fauxhauk and a bulky leather jacket easily pinned than the shaman.
Theo called Glowy to aid.
A red rash ripped along Sacred’s arms, up the neck. Something like magic sunburn. The Redeemer grunted and pushed himself away.
Fulin and Coralline held Liturgy’s arms behind the girl’s back.