"Some forty meters in that direction," Giles whispered to Buffy, pointing towards a grove of maple trees. As their group moved nearer, clanking slightly with every movement under the sheer amount of weaponry each carried, the pale light of the waning moon flickered through the branches of the trees. The flickering light highlighted their faces, making them appear much like the ghouls of childhood, created from the forms of friends by the wavering light of a campfire.

If the grove hadn't housed a slimy, hydra-headed demon that was sinking its metaphorical claws into the man she loved, Buffy might have thought it was beautiful. As it was, she looked past any outside appearance, concentrating only on the desire to pay the demon back for every ounce of pain it was causing her love. She was going to be his angel, for a change - his avenging angel.

They slipped along the gassy ground, being as stealthy as possible. The moon seemed to rise higher in the sky as they crept closer and closer to the grove. Finally, they were within ten meters of the demon. Buffy crouched, below the level of the bushes that surrounded the trees, and the rest of her group followed suit.

Each took turns peeking up above the top of the bushes. They saw the multi-headed, dripping demon in the center of the grove, his repulsive form illuminated by the clear, dim light of the moon. A few of its heads were twitching and twisting, much the same way Angel had been, though he was otherwise motionless. Frozen, possibly, by the need to concentrate and devour Angel before sunrise.

"He's distracted. Let's go," Buffy instructed the others, softly. The Slayer didn't wait for a reply - she didn't even look behind her to see if they were following. She crept along the edge of the bushes, knees bent, back flat, and eyes alert. There was a break in the hedge-line perhaps ten feet from where she had started her search. She stopped when she reached it.

Buffy locked her crossbow, securing the sharpened bolt. Without a sound, she launched herself through the break in the bushes, landing in a roll across the fallen leaves covering grove floor. When she came out of the roll, she aimed her crossbow at the most prominent of the monster's heads and fired.

There was a wet crunch as the tip of the bolt penetrated one of the Gi'tar's yellow eyes.

Four heads swung towards her immediately, each pinning her with a dark scowl. The demon reached a clawed limb up to its injured socket, which had begun to ooze a blue-green slime that Buffy assumed was its blood. Two eyes swiveled to inspect the sticky talons, and, discovering their bloodied state, swirled back to glare at her once again.

"I think we got his attention," Buffy smirked, slightly.

The demon opened three of its many mouths, revealing green shark teeth - far too many of them, given the relatively small size of the mouths. It hissed at her, and somehow managed to form the hate filled sound into a word.

"Sssssslayer," the Gi'tar demon said.

"Dddddddead demon." Buffy threw back at him. She dropped her crossbow and pulled a slim, katana-like sword from a sheath closely tied to her left leg. "Would you like to meet my favorite pointy, non-wooden friend?"

At least three of its heads were still in deep concentration, fighting for Angel's essence. The other four, which were already staring at her, seemed to want to charge her, but couldn't. It couldn't move until it had finished its food.

"Aren't we just the good boy at the dinner table?" She muttered darkly.

Then she ran at him, her sword held high over her head. Buffy gave her first strike to the demon's stubby body, driving at the joining "shoulder" between two heads.

Giles ran after her, matching daggers the length of his forearms in each hand. Xander, Willow, and Oz came after the Watcher, each brandishing their own chosen stabbing utensils. Cordelia remained by the line of bushes, pelting the demon with crossbow bolts whenever a vulnerable-looking place appeared.

Willow was the first to cut off a head. She had busily been chopping at the impossibly thick neck with her hefty hatchet, and the head had simply popped away from the rest of the body. The hacker jumped, startled, but smiled, though a bit sickly. Then the severed head tried to gnaw off her ankle and she had to beat it several times in the mouth with the butt of her hatchet before it stilled.

By the end of the evening, they each had at least one popped-off head or limb to their name. But the demon was nothing if not persistent.

The Slayer threw herself wholeheartedly into the battle, finding a strange feeling of release in giving the demon a thorough whipping. She suspected that it was rather like getting one's emotions out by punching a bag or pillow - the battle was more than a little one sided, as the demon's defense capabilities were extremely limited while it fed. Buffy enjoyed the conflict so much that she was almost sorry when she felt the prickly sensation at the base of her neck that signaled dawn was nearby.

She paused in her mutilation, watching as Xander and Willow together grappled with one of the larger heads. The gaping mouth opened, emitting another of its evil hisses, and spit a stream of black goo at Xander's chest. He yelped and stepped back, waving air over the spot of impact as it began to smoke.

"Xander!" Cordy called, abandoning her station at the edge of the grove to run to him.

"Step away from it!" Buffy yelled to Oz and Giles, who had both been on the other side of the main bulk of the Gi'tar demon's body, and hadn't seen the encounter.

The two males did as Buffy asked and backed away from the creature. Willow and Cordelia helped Xander limp out of the demon's range, beating any part of the Gi'tar with their weapons if it tried to get close to him.

The prickling at the Slayer's neck went up a notch in intensity. The rise of the sun was eminent, as the lightening sky suggested.

The Gi'tar demon noticed the coming dawn at exactly that moment. It hissed yet again, this time with all of its remaining heads facing the brightly painted horizon.

Then, the orange disk of the sun peeked over the edge of the world.

The demon's hiss turned into a howl. A howl of death and power lost, a screech from every cell of its burning being. Every toothy mouth was open to its fullest, seven full sets of demonic vocal cords humming and breaking as they turned to ash.

The humans clapped their hands over their ears, an unimaginable pain washing over them as the sound entered their delicate eardrums.

Buffy, the closest to the dying demon, screamed into the onrush of sound. Her voice was lost in the bedlam of a thousand other voices, of essences tapped and killed by the Gi'tar. The screech rose and fell across the scale of human hearing, sounding at times almost musical. But it wasn't not any mortal music - a discordant collection of blasted sound that made them all physically nauseous.

The Slayer fell to her knees, shaking and writhing, trying anything she could to halt the sound. She crawled away from the demon on hands and knees, eyes tearing with the pain. For one moment, she feared she would go mad.

With what she felt was her last sane thought, she hoped Angel had managed to survive the demon's attack. Buffy hoped he knew how much she loved him.

Without warning, it stopped.

There was a slight popping sound, an anti-climax after the amazing cacophony, and then nothing.

Utter silence took over the grove. At first, Buffy was terrified that she had just lost her hearing. She feared to remove her hands from her ears, only to discover that the world had gone silent to her, forever.

After long moments of caution, she finally found the courage to open her eyes. She sat up slowly and scanned the area, noting her friends were rising as well. When she found no sign of the screaming demon, she very slowly pried her hands away from her ears.

Cordelia, who, after all the confusion, wound up the closest other person to the Slayer, did the same. She mouthed something several times, then cleared her throat and whispered, "Buffy? Did... we kill it?"

Breathing a sigh of relief that her hearing had been not lost, Buffy nodded. She only now noticed the singed spot on the ground, where the demon had been. All the vegetation which had been under the creature's giant, dripping form had been burned away. But the demon itself was gone.

"Yeah," Buffy whispered back, "we got it."

More Soon.

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