The soldier glared at the demons following him for what had to be the third time. They sensed the fury and rapidly backed to a safe distance, while still ensuring that they were in eyeshot.
After he was finished with whatever it was that happened to the demons, he'd headed off in the direction of the helpfully marked tunnel towards the next demon city, which was evidently called Despair. He didn't really care about what it was called so long as he could raze it to the ground. But now his brand-new demons were sticking as close to him as they could without him killing them. And considering that they wouldn't die forever if he killed them, it was rapidly becoming a more and more attractive prospect.
Even Daisy, whose idea this had been in the first place, was beginning to get a little irritated. "Yo! We didn't kill you! Can you go away already!?" Isabeld growled as if in agreement, lightly bouncing on her paws.
The one in the lead paused uncertainly. "But... we swore fealty." He sounded rather confused about the situation at hand and took a hesitant step forward.
The soldier slowed as he worked out the ramifications of that particular piece of information and figured it out rather quickly. Summoning his shotgun and turning, he blasted the head off of the demon one-handed. Everyone froze, staring wide-eyed at his corpse as it slowly fell over, blood spurting from the severed neck.
Daisy the first to speak, exploding, "What the heck!? I thought we weren't going to..."
She paused as a portion of the crimson wall bulged, bubbling as though it were liquid, and then erupting in a shower of blood. The same demon that the soldier had just effectively decapitated fell out of it, stumbling forward. He wore identical armor to the corpse on the floor. Staring at his hands in confusion, he looked up and asked, "Did I just die?"
The other demons walked forward, patting him down as if they weren't sure he was actually real. "The Doom Guy just killed you!" "He used one of his weapons to remove your head." "It was pretty cool!"
The rest of the demons snapped around to look at the one who had made that final statement, a particularly bulky one with magnificent curving horns. He noticed their expressions and shrugged indifferently. "You decided to follow him because you wanted to live. I'm following him because he rips everything he fights to bits, whether that be with his special weapons, his bare hands, or even the parts of his enemies. It's admirable on a number of levels."
Watching the speaker with an appraising view, the soldier wondered if perhaps these demons - or at least, this one - enjoyed slaying half as much as he did.
Probably not, he decided.
Daisy directed Isabeld over to him, squinting skeptically. "What's your name?"
The demon folded his arms, cheerfully grumbling, "Tagral! And you're the Doom Guy's pet, right?"
She waved it away. "I prefer to think of myself as a personal companion. I'm Daisy, just so you know. Anyway - you said you liked to, y'know, kill and everything?"
Tagral nodded happily, and she asked with a devious smirk, "And you'd be okay with killing other demons?"
It took him by surprise, and he sat back on his heels for a moment, thinking. A few seconds later, he said thoughtfully, "I believe I would, yes. After all, the Doom Guy will be slaying quite a lot of demons wherever we're going, and I don't think it'd be very helpful of us if we didn't help."
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The other demons looked incredibly uncomfortable as they realized the implications of that, and the one who had originally spoken said doubtfully, "I mean, I kinda thought we could convince the Doom Guy to stop killing demons after a while."
Daisy snorted loudly. "Is that a joke? Everything I've heard about him and everyone I've talked to about him says that he's not gonna be satisfied until all of Hell is dead. Barring present company, of course."
Tagral was the only demon who looked interested as opposed to horrified. "All of Hell? That's going to be quite the task... The other nine Sins aren't going to be happy at all that you killed Envy, and I'm willing to bet they already know. Do you really think you can kill a group that's reigned for over a thousand years?" He directed the final part at the soldier, whose temper was building to a boil the more he listened to these demons.
Without the slightest hesitation, the soldier gave Tagral a thumbs-up, hoping that it would serve as a threat and perhaps goad the demon into attacking him. That way, he'd be able to murder him permanently.
One of the demons threw his hands in the air. "There's no way! You're going to die! And all of Hell!? Really? That's never going to work - there are way too many demons! We have armies of slaves! We could-"
The soldier had been waiting for an opportunity.
<
And this was nothing if not an opportunity.
Launching himself forward, the soldier ripped Voz'gohuk's entire arm off, and then promptly used the jagged edge of the broken humerus to impale the demon in the gut. Before the unfortunate demon could even begin to react, the soldier shoved a grenade down his throat and punched through the front of his neck to yank the pin out. Blood spraying from the already mostly dead opponent, the soldier straight-kicked him away from the group. Skipping across the ground, the demon gargled, "WAI-" and then exploded.
A mess of blood and guts blew over everyone present, and the soldier grinned. To his surprise, he noticed a similar expression on both Daisy and Tagral's faces. As for the remaining demons, they turned to the soldier with murderous expressions. "You accepted his fealty and then killed him!?" one of them growled, and the others muttered their agreement. Tagral melted to the back of the group and gave the soldier a thumbs-up.
The soldier wasn't entirely sure how to feel about that, so he settled for angry.
! You kill them now, they stay dead!>
The soldier's heart sang at the news. He raised one hand, and a device appeared in his palm. With a bulky back end and a narrow piece of metal extending out from it, tiny jagged blades wrapped around the strip and feeding into the bigger section, the weapon looked rather ominous in its own brutal way.
And that was before the soldier pulled the ripcord on the chainsaw.
With a moaning shriek and the growl of a murderous engine, the chainsaw's blades whipped into motion, a blur of shredding death hurtling at horrific speeds near the soldier's hands.
Hurling himself into the suddenly regretful demons, the soldier brought the chainsaw down on one's head, and nearly cut him in half. It was neither clean nor rapid, and the soldier couldn't have been happier. One of them tried to claw his side and yowled in pain as his claws dulled. The soldier rewarded the demon's attempt by grabbing him by a horn and bisecting him across the chest.
They began to stumble backward, trying to retreat. Blocking them from moving any further, Tagral bodily lifted a demon and ripped him in half with a grunt of effort. In the time it took for the savagely happy demon to do so, the soldier had gone through another three in short succession, sawing their legs off and diagonally removing one side of their bodies from the other. With only four to go, the soldier switched to his bare fists and performed a messy bariatric surgery on the one directly to his right. Shoving yet another grenade in the space where the demon's gut should be, he picked the bleeding demon up and tossed him at the remaining three. Tagral dove out of the way as the explosion rocked the tunnel, and Daisy nearly fell off of Isabeld.
The whole process had taken perhaps three seconds.
The soldier decided that having eleven demons in tow was too many, and that one was tolerable.
Barely tolerable.
Barely.