Banter!
She could feel the evil that had been on the blade, too. Luckily it had shriveled up and died from the blasts of energy coming from the Bells, leaving behind an ugly weal of cauterized flesh that promised to make for one hell of a scar on her leg, assuming she got out of this alive. Which she might not, because the cultist with the sword was now getting up. And retrieving her blade, dammit.
Talking never hurts, Janet thought. “You know, you look pretty bad, right now,” she said. It wasn’t a lie. Even to mundane eyes the cultist seemed almost grey-skinned, and to Janet’s increasingly esoteric senses the woman was carrying around an agitated, and hopefully collapsing, collection of tubes of malevolent energies. “How about you give yourself up? Maybe we can fix you.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” said the cultist as she advanced. “You’re the messed-up ones. We’re fine.”
“Really?” said Janet as she tried to scrabble back. Every little bit helped. “Because I can hear a bell without puking up evil. How about you?”
The cultist was moving slow, but the sword was only wavering a little, dammit. “Yeah? Well, I can go outside your walls without getting ripped apart. How about you?”
Hmmm. Tries to change the discussion from “good vs evil” to “adaptation vs resistance”. Nice touch.
I mean, it’s kind of undercut by the fact that the cultist side keeps sending their people off to die on suicide missions and also contains a demon who picks bird hosts preferentially because it enjoys savoring the way they suffer as they strain and break under the weight of its influence, but it’s nice to have the opposition have at least *some* coherence to their position.