That was genuinely rough.
Jude let out a breath he'd been holding for what felt like several days. The system notification glowed at the edge of his vision like a green light finally turning over. He deployed the skill — "I Have Taken No Life," quiet and precise, directed into the churning insect cloud still occupying what remained of the man's torso.
The swarm stilled. Then, with the reluctant withdrawal of something interrupted mid-meal, it pulled free of the man's body in a single dark mass, burst from his mouth and collar, and spiralled up into the street air before banking hard toward a narrow alley off the main block.
The man collapsed against the display case — skin pulled tight over bone, eyes unfocused, barely breathing. But breathing.
Barely counts, Jude thought. But barely counts.
"This one's done." Constantine was already moving, not looking at the man on the ground. His voice had shifted — something sharp underneath the casual delivery. "You know, I figured something out years ago: if you like eating meat, just eat meat. Vegetarianism is a preference, same as any other. Neither one's a moral achievement." He pushed past a frozen cluster of onlookers. "Clearly some people never got that memo."
He didn't wait for a response. The swarm had left a trail — a faint, nauseating thread of movement cutting into the alley — and Constantine was already following it, Emma drifting alongside him, both of them gone before Jude could ask a single question.
"Go ahead," Jude called after them. "I'll catch up."
He turned back to the scene.
The crowd had thickened — twenty, thirty people now, phones up, a woman kneeling on the floor cradling the man's head and crying. Sirens somewhere in the middle distance, still too far away to matter. Jude pulled his hood up, letting the wide brim drop low over his face, and palmed a fruit candy from his pocket.
He moved forward, knelt beside the woman, and kept his voice level. "His colour doesn't look right. Let me check his pupils and breathing."
"Are you a doctor?"
He was already bending over the man, using his body to block the sightline of the nearest phone camera. The candy went into the man's mouth with a motion that looked, to anyone watching, like checking for an airway obstruction.
"No," Jude said, straightening up. "I just got curious. The ambulance hadn't arrived yet and I wanted to check if he was still alive."
The woman stared at him. Her lips moved. Whatever she was about to say had clearly taken a moment to gather momentum.
Jude decided not to be present when it arrived. He slipped into the alley at a pace that was not quite running.
The alley opened onto a back street, and the back street opened onto a church.
It was a small one — the kind that exists in every city neighbourhood as a quiet fixture, its presence so established it becomes invisible. Constantine and Emma were already at the door. The wood was thick with insects, clustered in the gaps between planks, crawling over the iron handle in slow, purposeful loops. Constantine regarded this without any particular expression and pushed the door open.
"Following flies works just as well as following bees," he said. "Good to know."
Inside, the church was almost dark. Neon from the street outside bled through the stained glass in fractured blues and reds, throwing the Virgin Mary and the Holy Trinity across the floor in distorted patches of light. The altar candles provided the only real illumination — small, steady flames that did almost nothing for the shadows gathering above.
Behind the altar, a priest stood clutching a crucifix, staring upward. His face was the face of a man who had run entirely out of frameworks for what he was looking at. His lips moved: Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ — not prayer, exactly. More like the mind cycling back to the last familiar word it trusted.
Constantine followed his gaze to the dome.
Mnemoth had taken his true form.
What had been a cloud of insects was now a shape — vast, chitinous, and deliberate, assembled from a million individual bodies into something that wore the suggestion of limbs, a torso, a face. Compound eyes the colour of decay fixed on the figures below. Hairy, barbed legs tapered to three-fingered claws. Its mouth — if it could be called that — opened and closed with slow, rhythmic patience, a cavity that looked less like an orifice and more like a void that had learned to be hungry. A long green tongue slid out and tasted the air.
The swarm returning from the street fed itself back into that opening, carrying the last traces of the man from the supermarket. A million wings exhaled something that might have been satisfaction.
So that's where you live, Constantine thought.
He felt the demon's attention settle on him and the priest like a weight. Two sources of fear. Two potential meals. An either/or decision.
Constantine made the decision for it.
"Oi." He stepped forward, jaw set, every personal catastrophe of the last week compressed into a single sharp point of fury behind his sternum. "You rotting sack of maggots. Come on, then. Come and eat me."
"John, you idiot!" Emma's voice cracked. "You're not strong enough — don't go head-to-head with it!"
Constantine didn't hear her. Not really. The insect-whisper had gotten into his ears again, layered and relentless, and it was doing something peculiar to his sense of proportion — making the anger feel righteous, the confrontation feel winnable, the enormous demon descending slowly from the apex of the church feel like a problem he could personally grab by the throat.
The man in the supermarket. Lester's face. Emma, standing on this side of the living. All of it feeding the same flame.
Mnemoth drifted lower. It had made its choice.
The pressure arrived before the demon did — a physical compression, as if the air itself was thickening around Constantine's limbs, locking his joints, cementing his feet to the floor. His body understood what was happening and responded accordingly: bile rising in his throat, hands shaking, every survival instinct firing at once.
His brain was still composing the follow-up insult.
"Constantine, get back!"
Emma's voice, but muffled — like shouting through a wall of glass.
Mnemoth leaned in close. Its face — the approximation of one — arranged itself into something resembling a smile. Patient. Unhurried. It extended its tongue toward Constantine's face with the languid confidence of something that had never needed to rush.
It was eating his rage. Jude had been right — whatever the food, Mnemoth didn't discriminate. Fear, hunger, anger, grief: all of it nourishment. Constantine's fury, so carefully stoked and pointed, was simply a different flavour of the same meal.
As the last of it drained away, the fog lifted.
Constantine blinked. Looked at the tongue hovering inches from his face. Looked at the vast insect-body it was attached to.
"…Oh. What am I doing."
The tongue crept closer.
"Bloody hell," Constantine said. "This thing is trying to kiss me."
Emma's scream finally punched through whatever dampening field the demon's proximity created and hit him like a slap to the back of the head.