Aliss was practically bouncing in excitement, her armor jiggling a bit as she jogged in place on her bent heels, knees folded at the joint as she waited. Glancing at the solider, she asked with a massive grin, "So when do we start? I want to get going!" Eld and the second head (who the soldier had eventually decided to name Isabelle) was crouched behind them, tail wagging fiercely, and giving a low growl of agreement.
The soldier raised one fist, signaling her to stay quiet, and swept his vision over the stadium. They'd made their way into one of the small areas designed for the battling creatures, and were far enough back that they could see everything without being seen.
The demons were holding a gigantic meeting of some kind, and the stands were packed full. Nervous monsters muttered to each other inaudibly, a low buzz of conversation sweeping around the arena. Most of them were the medium-grade demons, the red-skinned ones with curving horns and lean physiques, but there were a few of the tiny ones. The small ones had little nubs on the tops of their heads and a perpetually dazed expression, as though someone had bashed them in the forehead with a piece of metal or something.
Needless to say, the soldier was extremely ready for this, if not perhaps a little too ready. He had spent most of the past hour summoning a very specific type of sticky brick and placing them around the stadium at strategic points, and had put over two hundred of them on the supporting beams of the arena. One tap from a trigger, and well...
He was looking forward to it. A lot.
But for the moment, he was waiting as more of the demons showed up, filtering in either through the open-air ceiling of the arena, the half-mile crimson stalactites that made up the ceiling barely visible in the distance, or from the gaping entrances. At one point he'd thought about bombing the stalactites and destroying the whole city in one go, but he wasn't sure if that would count as him killing them, and more specifically if it would allow Genocide to do its thing. If he had, it would have put them on high alert - well, higher alert - and he didn't want to garner the attention of anything too powerful just yet.
A twenty-five-foot tall creature walked into the center of the arena, bipedal and painfully thin. With extraordinarily pale skin and severely depressed features, the thing wore a too-small pinstriped suit on its ridiculously lanky body and a tilted bowler hat. Its fingers, laced behind its back, were disproportionately long and featured stiff claw tips instead of fingernails. The soldier squinted at it curiously. Hadn't he seen that thing before?
Aliss sucked in a sharp breath, and the soldier turned his attention towards her. She was staring hard at the tall creature, an intense expression on her face. "Pardon the language, but darn. That's Torin - he's almost on the level of one of the Sins. We're going to have to pull back for now, figure out a new - what are you doing!?"
She hissed the last part as he crept forward, keeping his eye on the creature. Torin, or whatever its name was - he didn't really care.
Looking shockingly tired and possibly a little bored, Torin spoke in a slow voice. "Hello, esteemed demons of Brimstone. I welcome you all to this meeting regarding the creature known as the Doom Guy."
The soldier was a little surprised. They were having a meeting all about him? And how did they know that the only thing he could say was 'doom'?
A low rumble of anxious conversation swept the stadium, interrupting Torin, and his forehead creased as he leaned forward, a strange aura emanating from him that made Aliss break into a visible sweat and made Eld whimper. The soldier was, for whatever reason, completely unaffected. "I am speaking, demons. Know your places."
They shut up.
Relaxing somewhat, Torin straightened again, then slumped back to his perpetually hunch-backed stance. "As I was saying, we are here to talk about the Doom Guy, and most specifically how we might get rid of him. Geller'rekt, please state your business."
A bespectacled demon stood, a clipboard tucked under its arm, and coughed loudly in the silence that followed. "Ah, yes. Ahem; the aptly nicknamed Doom Guy is incredibly tough, fast, and strong. He seems to have no sense of mercy whatsoever, and appears to genuinely enjoy killing us by the hundreds. Despite having arrived an exact total of six days, thirty-three hours and forty-seven minutes ago, his presumably low level has skyrocketed. Using long-range Scan and Appraisal abilities, we have estimated his current level to be somewhere in the seventies."
A different kind of silence fell on the crowd, one that had left them shocked into silence. The soldier was interested in spite of himself, but he had a job to do and he was hardly going to be polite under the circumstances.
Bracing himself, he gave Aliss a thumbs-up, and she glanced at him in terror. "What? No, we can't go ahead! That's Torin! The Massacre at Edisburg? The killings of Khasval? We don't stand a chance!"
The soldier repeated the gesture, this time a little aggravated, and her eyes widened. Sputtering quietly for a moment, her shoulders slumped as she gave in. "Fine.
A shining yellow dome appeared around them, glittering and transparent. According to Aliss, it was a special feature of her shield, one that essentially would block all incoming damage.
Before Geller'rekt could continue speaking, Torin's gray eyes narrowed as his head turned to look in their direction. "Wait..."
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The soldier, as was previously stated, was not nearly polite enough to let him finish whatever it was he had been about to say. He just clicked the small red button on the detonator.
Approximately two hundred and thirty packs of concentrated explosives, all of which had been summoned via
The stands, and every demon currently seated on them, were basically liquified as a gout of fire and boiling hot air erupted in a nearly perfect circle, taking the entirety of the stadium with it in a colossal detonation of pure boom. The shockwave blasted up and outward, leveling what was left of the outside auditorium and knocking the walls out, chunks of rubble crashing into the now-permanently vacant houses and shops below.
The soldier had a gigantic grin on his face, notifications streaming in faster than he could read them, as Aliss pulled her dome down, the yellow glow flickering unsteadily as it dissipated back into her. The moment the dome was down, she nearly collapsed, using her shield to support herself and the golden eye embossed in the silver surface of the shield dimming. Eld shoved her head underneath her spare arm, Isabelle nuzzling her in the back. The soldier patted her shoulder, standing slowly.
He doubted anything would have survived that, but the way Aliss had been talking about the skinny demon, he had a feeling that - yep, there it was.
Utterly uninjured and obviously displeased, Torin was standing in the exact same place that he had been, arms gently folded across his chest. "The Doom Guy. Do you have the slightest idea of how much of an inconvenience you have been to me? The size of the thorn you represent? It's going to take quite a while for all those demons to come back, and even longer to rebuild the Arena of Joy. Watching those beasts murder each other was one of my favorite hobbies, do you know that?"
The soldier pulled a double-barreled shotgun from nowhere, pacing forward and giving Torin a thumbs down. Torin's forehead creased. "What exactly do you mean by - ah. You have discovered a method of permanently slaying us demons. Why am I not surprised?"
There was no visible moment when Torin moved. One moment he was standing a good three hundred feet away and the next second he was standing right next to the soldier. Bending down, the demon curled its claws into a fist and punched the soldier.
The impact shattered the ground underneath both of them, and the soldier sailed over Brimstone, his view spinning as he careened through empty space. He was pretty sure he'd broken a rib, but he had taken far worse hits.
Managing to right himself, he bent his knees and crashed into the distant wall near the ceiling, making a crater big enough to comfortably fit several houses in. Shaking his head, the soldier glanced down at his side.
The mend had been instant. Whatever streak he was on - the counter was blasting upward faster than he could see it - it was making him pretty much unkillable, at least for however long it lasted. He thought quickly - if he was currently level... no, that was climbing too rapidly as well as experience points for the slain demons flooded in. He'd passed a hundred and thirty at least, so he assumed that that was close enough.
In other words, a little over two minutes. He had a little over two minutes to take that thing down if he wanted to hold the advantage.
Tensing, he jumped out of the crater in the wall and fired his grappling hook at a stalactite. Clenching the muscles in his arms and back, he twisted and pulled in one motion, and he shot off like a bullet from a gun.
It was hard to track how fast he was moving, but he was headed straight for the decimated arena again, and he clenched a fist. Narrowing his eyes, he carefully spread his arms and legs out, angling himself and changing his trajectory slightly to gain more accuracy.
A split second. He had a split-second view of Torin two feet away from him before his punch landed, and he felt his arm shatter. Like before, it fixed itself instantly, and he rolled to a stop, getting to his feet and summoning the chaingun.
Torin's head had been imploded from the force and was pulling back into the correct shape like putty. This time, his teeth were jutting out of his jaw like needles, and his eyes were growing larger as he bent his lanky body into a hunched shape, claws curled viciously.
The soldier opened fire with the chaingun and felt his bones rattle from the force. Torin's body began bending unnaturally as he dodged the bullets, swerving back and forth and at times seeming to vanish from existence as he avoided the screaming chunks of magic lead.
A vibrating hiss emanated from the demon. "Yyoouu aannnnooyy mmee, ccoorrppssee."
Turning his entire body into a single half-moon and spiraling around the soldier's cone of fire, the demon crawled with lightning speed across the ground and raised its razor-sharp claws in an upward stab, puncturing the soldier's armor and lifting him into the air with a victorious grin.
Except, the soldier had an equally smug grin on his face, and even as red blood ran down the exterior of the armor, he raised a double-barreled shotgun to Torin's face.
He blasted the demon in the face, and Torin retreated with a rising shriek of pain, dropping the soldier and pulling his claws back with a dull shhcck. Stumbling backward, the demon scrabbled at his own face with a moan of agony.
Rising to his feet, the soldier strode forward, the stab wound healing, and jumped onto Torin's torso. The demon lashed out blindly, his gouged eyes useless under the circumstances, and the soldier bent back, avoiding them easily. Leaning forward, the soldier extended the Doomblade and stabbed Torin in the face.
The scream went even higher as the soldier's arm pistoned into the demon's head, reducing it to a bloody pulp in less than a minute. Torin's claws struck upwards, but due to their inaccuracy failed to cut through the soldier's armor again. His scream gradually died as the soldier continued with all the inexorable fatality of death itself, and ended as a slight whimper.
Standing back, chest heaving, the soldier smiled. The demon's head had been utterly destroyed, a soggy red crater of wet flesh making up his face as his body twitched uncontrollably.
"...Doom."
Surprised, the soldier advanced, and Torin's decimated head turned to him. "...Why? What... what is your objective?"
Aliss approached, somber at the realization that the demon was well and truly on his way to his final death. No matter how much she might have hated or feared the demon, it was pitiful to see something so powerful reduced to a shivering wreck. "Torin... he can only say one-"
"Rip."
They both turned to the soldier, Aliss' eyes widening in shock. "Did you just-"
The soldier leaned down until his visor was right in front of where Torin's face should be. "Rip and tear, until it is done."
Raising the shotgun, he aimed it at Torin's head, and the faintest impression of a smile crossed the demon's mouth. "You... are a terrifying opponent. A worthy opponent."
The soldier fired, and everything was quiet.