Origin - Twelve - Rending Nightmare

“Come and fight me, if you dare.”

The message Alice sent to demonkind all across the Second Circle was simple. A dare, a warning, and her location.

She didn’t bother making it impressive, or making it fancy. No, that would just give some demons the wrong impression, or maybe the right one? What she wanted was for a decent number of them to take the threat seriously enough that they’d show up, but not so many that she’d be overwhelmed. Keeping the message simple also--hopefully--discouraged the stronger demons.

Alice didn’t know if she could take on a prince yet. Marcia was confident, but Alice wasn’t as certain of her own abilities.

It took an hour, but the first of the demons appeared at the threshold of the arena.

Marcia and Alice had unceremoniously ripped apart the entrance of the arena, tearing down walls and floors and shredding one side’s row of seats to leave a large tunnel from the exterior of the arena to the main floor.

Alice stood on the far end of the oval, still in her cloak, shadows swarming around her.

The first demon to step into the arena was a large specimen. He was very obviously male and proud of it, judging by his pantsless state. Alice swallowed back some revulsion as she watched the beastly demon stomp into the arena and pointed across at her. “Are you the meat of the hour?” he roared.

“That’s a Baelite,” Marcia whispered to Alice. “Strong as a bull and half as smart. Some of them can turn invisible. Terrible in bed. What they lack in technique they fail to make up for with their equipment, if you know what I mean.”

Alice groaned. “Don’t make this all about sex, please.”

“Sorry, it’s in my nature, and being home is bringing it all back,” Marcia said unapologetically.

Alice cleared her throat, then she pointed across the arena. The demon wasn’t alone. There were several others with him, but they were lingering behind. “Hell has insulted me by invading my home. I’m here as a reprisal.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” the Baelite asked, his voice a roar that carried perfectly well across the space between them.

“It means that I’m here to kill every demon that has a problem with me,” Alice said. “Until there’s either none of you left, or Hell learns not to mess with me and those I’m protecting?”

“And who’s that?” he asked.

Alice paused for a moment, considering. “Humanity. All of it.”

The demon laughed, and a few others joined in. “I’ll take you up on that. And once I’m done beating you up, I’m gonna--”

Alice tuned him out. All he had to say from there on were pointless threats. Most of them graphic and sexual in nature. “Is he from this circle?” she asked Marcia.

“Hmm? Oh, no, but plenty of folk come and visit. Maybe you should just injure him? He’s from Pride, which means that tossing him out will really piss him off, maybe get more to come and visit.”

Alice considered it. There were only a hundred or so demons by the arena’s entrance, and of those, only a dozen were filing into the arena itself. She had actually hoped to gather a bigger crowd.

Then again, if she made any sort of big announcement back home, how many people would actually show up? People, even the people of Hell, had jobs and things that they had to do. They wouldn’t all come out to meet some random challenger that most of them had probably never heard about, even if she’d delivered a vague message in their dreams.

So she needed a few survivors to spread the tale.

The Baelite ran up to her and swung.

The shadows beneath her feet ripped upwards, jutting spikes of darkness ramming into and through the demon and flinging his bloody corpse back where it flopped to the ground and ragdolled away.

She’d pick others to be the survivors though. Maybe some of the more polite demons.

Another demon screamed and charged at her, the one a strange wolf-like creature with the head of the snake. Alice decided that it could live, so she grabbed it by the neck, spun, then flung it out of the far end of the arena.

“Think that’ll get more of them to show up?” Alice asked.

Marcia shrugged, then sat back down next to Alice.

They were both in one of the VIP booths, far above the ground floor of the arena. Below, another Alice... or at least, a hastily crafted illusion of Alice with her cloak tossed on, fought the demons back.

Alice was focused mostly on summoning shields against the ranged attacks of some of the more cowardly or cautious demons while beating back any that came too close. She decided to focus more on using her shadows to rip and tear them in the middle ground. That made it harder for any demon to come close enough to reveal the deception.

“Fanta?” Marcia asked as she held a can out towards Alice.

“Oh, thanks,” Alice said as she took it. It was cool to the touch, and she frowned. “Where did you get this?”

“The... vending machine,” Marcia said. She pointed over her shoulder to the corner of the VIP room where, indeed, there was a vending machine.

Alice turned the can around and squinted at the label. “This says feito no Brasil.”

“Well, yeah, you think we bottle soft drinks in Hell? I mean... there might be like knock-offs, but they taste worse. So all the fancy folk just import them.”

“Huh,” Alice said as she popped the tab and took a sip. It tasted how she expected it to. “Weird. Does Hell import a lot of stuff?”

“Sure, I guess. I’m not someone who has spent a lot of time studying Hell’s economy though, so I’m mostly just guessing here, but I think most of the really high-quality stuff used in Hell for the last... eh, fifty-to-one hundred years has been made on Earth. Before that it was more or less the same though.”

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Alice blinked. “That’s... interesting. I wonder if all of this will have an impact on the economy,” she said with a gesture to the arena. More demons were starting to show up. Alice had some of her shadows ‘eat’ the corpses piling up across the arena floor, to prevent them from building up too much.

“You mean, besides the fact that a lot of dead people means fewer workers?” Marcia asked.

“Ah, yeah, besides that. Does Hell get a lot of things from Earth?”

“Not that much, I don’t think. At least, not that much in the grand scheme of things. Hell’s big, but it’s only the top echelon that really care to live in what you’d consider luxury. If Hell had a class system, then it would only have three classes. The rulers, those kissing the ruler’s asses, and then all the rest.”

“I don’t think it’s all that different from back home, then,” Alice muttered. She flicked her hand to the side, sending the illusion of herself below flying to the side as a rather quick-moving demon tried to crush her with a large hammer. She had the illusion fling its arm to the side and a brace of dark darts stabbed into the demons and started to eat away at its flesh.

More demons were showing up, fortunately, so her show was gaining an audience.

“Do you think proving that I’m the strongest will be enough?” she asked.

Marcia snorted. “Here, no. The strongest princes of Hell still have to put down upstarts every so often. There’s a hierarchy here, of who’s the strongest and toughest, but it doesn’t make the strongest immune to others trying to take what they have.”

“So this is all kind of pointless, isn’t it?” Alice asked with a gesture to the arena floor. One demon in particular was howling, staring at the stump where their arm had been. That hadn’t even been her fault. It was friendly fire... or unfriendly, she supposed.

“No, because even if strength doesn’t shield you, it still brings about respect. Being the baddest bitch doesn’t mean no one’s going to try for your head, but when they do try, they’ll put some real effort into it because they’ll know that half-assing it won’t work. And besides, the smarter demons will just decide that there are other fish to fry.” Marcia shrugged. “Not like you’re planning to get a house down here in any case, is it?”

“I think I’d rather stay, ah, home. The air down here is a little dry,” Alice said.

Marcia giggled. “It can be, yeah. I think your next move should be a little more direct. This is about sending several messages, right?”

“I suppose?” Alice said.

“Right, so by sending a message to everyone’s dreams, you’re warning all of this circle that it’s within your range, even if that’s just to send a message. That’s a lot of power still. Then by beating up all of this chaff, you’re proving that you don’t just have the power to use weird magics, but you have the strength to beat up anyone that you disagree with too. That’s a strong warning.”

“But it’s not enough, is it?”

“Not quite,” Marcia said. “Which is why your next step should be to find that one douche that got away and stomp him flat.”

Alice thought back to the mall, and the demon who’d fled once she’d turned the tides of their fight. “Him? He... well, he felt strong, a little, at the time, but I think I could take him on now without breaking a sweat.”

She was currently taking on literally dozens of demons at that very moment while sipping from a soda in a VIP box. She wasn’t even paying as much attention as she felt she should. The illusion was starting to fray at the edges until she squinted down at it and restored the image.

“Yeah, sure, but he came to your place and messed it up. So by going after him, you’ll let anyone that has a few brain cells to rub together know that pissing you off has consequences. And if you make it particularly brutal, they might decide that it’s not worth it.”

“I thought that people down here would fight anyone stronger, regardless of how dumb an idea it is?”

“Ah, some will, because they’re just that stupid, but they’re not the ones you need to worry about. Most clever demons will gladly take out someone a rank or two higher than they are, but only if they think they can get away with it. For your purposes, I think making a big statement is more important than worrying about some small fry’s retaliation.”

Alice sighed, sipped the last of her can, then crumpled the can and flung it across the room into a garbage pail next to the exit. She leaned forwards, elbows on knees and rubbed at her face. “Being a magical girl is... significantly more complicated than I thought it would be.”

“There there,” Marcia said as she rubbed Alice’s back.

“There’s this whole invasion of Hell, insane magic stuff, and then there’s school and I need to keep up my social life, and I don’t want just anyone finding out that I have this kind of power. It’s a lot.”

“... There there,” Marcia continued. “I’m sure being gifted phenomenal cosmic powers over the concept of nightmares is awful.”

“Yes, Marcia, it is,” Alice said. She sighed and stood up. Then glanced down at the arena floor. A few bigger demons had shown up and were cornering her illusion, and she noted that the quality of the demons in the area had risen overall. There were still imps and a few scattered demons that looked weaker, but as a whole, they nearly all looked pretty strong.

She swiped her hand from left to right, a massive slicing blade of darkness sweeping across the arena faster than most could blink. When it passed, all that lived were a few imps short enough that the blade had missed their heads.

“Let’s get going,” she said as she dismissed the illusion. “I think I’ve made my point here.”

***