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Info
Embracing the Angels
Author:stormbreath
Part of the War on All Fronts Canon.
Part of Team Mikasa's Doomsday Contest 2018 entries, along with:
- SCP-3534 by DrCaroll
- Project Sensuikan by stallmantic
- The Kaiju Sea by DrChandra
- A Storm More Foul, A Land Less Fair by stormbreath
by stormbreath
THE COLOSSI THAT WALK OUR WORLD ARE NOT DEMONS, BUT ANGELS SENT FROM BELOW. KNOW THAT THEY ARE DIVINE BY THEIR FIVE ARMS AND FIVE TENTACLES, THE EMANATION OF THE LORD HIMSELF.
The Southern Baptist Fifthist Church of Pensacola rarely - in all honesty - actually had full attendance. Most of the attendees were of those "January 5th and 5×5 Day only goers" types, that said they were Fifthists but really only went for the big holidays (but of course, all the while looking down on everyone else who did the same.)
But it just so happens that the literal end of the world could get even those types off their couches and into pews. Who knew! A scoop of armageddon, handful of eschaton and a little something of what those Foundation eggheads called an “MH-Class 'Large-Scale Aggressor Overrun' Scenario” works wonders for bringing out the faith in us all.
When the first of these so-called "angels'' had crashed down on the shore of Hy-Brasil, only a few had actually believed it was anything of the sort. Sure, it had five arms, five tentacles, and five eyes, and a lot of people tended to hear its voice whisper things to them after it had died, but the Global Occult Coalition had killed it. Angels weren't supposed to die!
But then the other angels came, and boy howdy were there a lot of those. The argument that these were the beasts causing the apocalypse became a lot more convincing when there were 555 of them, crawling all over the world, mindlessly killing everything they could see and doing their level best to wipe out human civilization as we know it.
At the very least, the members of the Southern Baptist Fifthist Church of Pensacola were convinced that the world was ending, and they might just want to get on the good side of THE LORD before the end. Was it an automatic pass into heaven if you died in church? Maybe? Hopefully? Probably not. The optics looked good, at least.
The congregation had all filed in — with a couple of new converts, who had heard about these people who claimed the kaiju eating the world were their own angels and at the very least thought it'd be interesting to give that a listen — and crowded the pews.
The pastor — a man who had previously spent most of his time preaching that the great 5tarfish above would help those who helped themselves, and faith in Him would be rewarded with riches fivefold — stepped forward to preach to the choir. A part of him, in truth, was indeed connected with the entity that poked through reality and had coiled around the concept of a Southern Baptist Church, but that part of him was the religious part and was subservient to his greed.
But at the end of the world, greed tends to fall quiet and faith tends to start screaming.
THE COLOSSI THAT WALK OUR WORLD ARE NOT DEMONS, BUT ANGELS SENT FROM BELOW.1 KNOW THAT THEY ARE DIVINE BY THEIR FIVE ARMS AND FIVE TENTACLES, THE EMANATION OF THE LORD HIMSELF.
OUR WORLD WAS RIFE WITH SINNERS, CITIES LIKE UNTO SODOM AND GOMORRAH.2 BUT THE GREATEST OF THEIR SINS WAS THE HUBRIS TO ENTER HEAVEN AND WALK AMONG THE STARS BEFORE THEIR DEATH, AND SO THEY DREW THE FURY OF OUR GOD.
THIS SIN WAS HUBRIS EQUAL TO THAT OF EVE IN THE GARDEN3, AND LIKE BEFORE SO AGAIN DOES IT DAMN THE WHOLE OF MAN. THE LORD HAS PASSED HIS JUDGEMENT AND HAS DENIED FORGIVENESS TO THE WORLD.
FIGHT NOT AGAINST THE ANGELS, FOR YOU SHALL FAIL. IT IS OUR DUTY AS THE CHILDREN OF GOD TO ACCEPT HIS HOLY WISDOM AND WILL,4 AND SO WE LAY OUR LIVES DOWN BEFORE THE ANGELS AND THE FLOOD.
MAY THE ANGELS PURGE THIS WORLD WITH THEIR HOLY FIRE AND MAY THEY CLEANSE IT WITH THEIR FLOOD5, FOR WE ARE SINNERS IN THE TENTACLES OF AN ANGRY GOD.
The problem with most Southern Baptist Fifthists was that any of the truly devout had their minds addled by their devotion to 55555, which had the nasty habit of completely replacing the intellect of anyone who followed it. And anybody who wasn't truly devout most certainly wasn't going to listen to a sermon like that.
But as the pastor rambled on concerning the wrath of God and how Man had managed to draw it, there was a roar outside. It started alone and was then was joined by a choir. The choir inside the church shut up and looked outside.
A swarm of so-called angels had descended upon Pensacola, hundreds of the little angels, not one taller than thirty feet tall. These were some of the smaller of the harbingers of the apocalypse - the big ones towered into the clouds, after all. Together, their cries drowned out all other noise in the world and to the ears of the Southern Baptist Fifthist Church of Pensacola, it was nothing less than beautiful.
Ideally, the churchgoers would lay their lives down before the swarm of angels that had come to deliver divine reckoning to them. But, unfortunately, as we have established, most members of the congregation were only tangentially Fifthist and reacted as any normal person would to a horde of five armed, five tentacled crocodile-squid-dinosaur-monsters.
Which is to say, not very well.
The beach around them had already erupted into chaos, with civilians and tourists trying to escape. Some souls had heard that the apocalypse was coming and had elected to continue on with their vacation plan? Was that stupid or prudent? I know that I, for one, would rather die on vacation than in Gary, Indiana.
The pastor was the only member of the congregation to embrace the angels. Without fear, he walked forward, a puppet dancing on the fifty strings of a greater being from out of time and out of space. Devout men and women stepped forward, walking behind their leader.
He stepped forward and his mind fell apart. His connection to FIVE had always been present, but seeing something that was so closely tied with FIVE brought it forward and ripped every other bit of his mind out, leaving it on the cutting room floor.
His fingers graced an angel for just a second before his head was in the stomach of the beast, and in that second he knew divinity.