I do not own the universe of Devil May Cry, as much as I find their essential badassery and hottitude inspiring. This is a story set in that universe. Call it AU if you will, though I use the canon on occasion. This takes place after DMC 1, ignoring DMC 4 and DMC 2 for the moment.
There are also angels, as well as demons, and we'll have to see how THAT particular thing turns out. -Evil grin-
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I hate cultists.
That is to say, I'm not exactly giant smiles and lollipops with the rest of the workaday masses of humanity but cultists in particular.
They remind me of teenagers huddled in their parents basement, their own private kingdom crafted from a dumptruck of paper and empty soda cans. Their reality defined by some pictures and deep, meaningful words found in a series of ever increasingly important texts that must be treated with the proper gravity.
Stupid.
You also unfortunately can't take a twelve gauge to them. Lots of splatter, lots of mess. Demons? No cleanup time. Blood sealed in neat little packages. The occasional welcome blue or green orb from their last meal. Demons are crackerjack boxes, prize inside. Cultists are.. gooey, and easily fall into monologuing. Oh, how I should despair.. cleanse the wicked, the end of times, lifted up into paradise... if I had a nickel..
Spyder goes through an equipment check a last time before she reaches the warehouse, looking down from the edge of a nearby building. That lookout seems so bored, standing out there in the open near a light source. Now where's your buddy? Don't tell me your.. ah yes, over there. Next obvious place. Spyder sighs, maneuvering over the rooftop then across.
A small twist of one hand summons a sleek little gun as she watches the white clothed lookout turn, peer myopically into the darkness for awhile and drop like a stone, a small black dart embedded in his neck. The other doesn't't see it coming either. A little poison, a little paralysis.
It's a good thing.
Alot of hunters I know do two things. Guns blazing or thoughtless stealth, more easily labeled cunning's stupider cousin. Spyder checks the ropes, long sticky black strands pulled out like thick taffy from a small orb at her belt. The gooey black setting into something like springy concrete as she lashes them sitting up against the warehouse wall, a slash of black keeping them from sounding any alarms. The poison should keep them knocked out for the duration, but she hadn't lived so long trusting her life to words like should.
It'll be easier inside. Faster. This was the harder part.. being careful, working as far into the compound as possible without being detected THEN crashing the party. The longer she could hold this up, the easier it'd be to fight her way out through the cultists and whatever they would have managed to summon by the time she got down there. Spyder took a steadying breath, vaulting herself up onto a spill of boxes that lead back onto the warehouse roof and a shattered window whistling faintly in the steady breeze.
Silence from inside the warehouse, followed by the sharp clinking of broken glass as the rest of the frame follows the rest. More silence broken by a quiet thump and rustle of clothes against eachother. Choking noises, and Spyder drags the third sentry across the floor to lean against some boxes draped over by a tarp. This one was robed. Apparently, street clothes fell out of fashion some time.. ah shit. Spyder lifted the sleeve inspecting the crest. The Sacred. This just got a sudden boost up into serious.
She ruffles through the voluminous pockets, stripping robe of it's contents. Aha. Ward key. Wards took time, took energy. If she'd thought it was the Sacred down here, she would have brought better guns. "Oh well." Spyder ties this one to the boxes as well, with the tarp over them. Maybe it wouldn't't even hold them long. They'd been known to pull all kinds of magical shit in the past. Still.. on the clock here. Backing out means not getting paid, and that meant a cascade of Really Bad Things. Spyder twists her hands, summoning a pair of matte black guns into her hands as she stalks down the corridor towards the stairs leading downward, smaller pistol evaporating back into it's pocket dimension. Okay. Well, she could play serious too.
It was when she hit hostages that things really started to go downhill. There were lots of them, mostly zonked out on whatever they'd been given to keep them quiet. No trace of the one she'd been contracted to find. She'd been tracking them halfway across the city and only NOW did she figure out it was them? Shit. Sloppy.. so sloppy. She'd wanted it to be simple. Emo kids. College punks. Not sorcerers... anything but sorcerers. Sorcerers bridged that neat little dividing line between demons and cultists, meaning more work and STILL no prize..
Mandibles were supposed to do two things. Tangle up those who were too fast to put medium sized holes into, and the aforementioned medium sized holes in things. By the time she got through the fifth cultist, and their webbed body slumped to the bare concrete she realized that Mandibles STILL made a hell of a lot of noise in these small labyrinths of small concrete rooms and voluminous loading docks.. and that the spells sewn into her armor were going to fail if they stood up to anything but the weak fire and acid spells these thugs were slinging. "Hey.. Hey.. Damnit." she nudged one of the bound hostages whose eyes stared at nothing at all. Breathing dead weight. She'd have to come back for them. The cultists wouldn't kill them. Couldn't kill them. Blood was a sacrilege to the things they worshiped. The runes were getting thicker, which meant she was going to need that ward key real soon.
Acid splattered against the bare concrete in half a dozen places, bubbling and hissing and making the ground treacherous now that there were giant scaffolds stretched across the long room half filled with innumerable nameless boxes and chunks of unused machinery. Forklifts. Part of a catwalk sagged, making an awful racket as it clattered against the shelves as it fell. The boxes were useful though, blocked the shots. At least they weren't stupid enough to use fire here. Grazed her fingers there, ow ow.. ahh.. hot! Spyder shook out her hand, the constant steady thumping of an active blue orb keeping her fingers from being eaten away as the glove leather smoked. Four left. Duck behind that shelf, vaulting up higher towards the catwalks. Three left, acid eating away at the supports. She gave it a swift kick, snapping it then climbing up into the upper portions.. riding the giant shelf to where it smashed against the catwalk. Trenchcoat sizzles again from a near miss, grey ash filtering down to ground level as the acid was burnt away by the protection wards.
There's still too many, and the resumption of gunfire along with spellfire wasn't helping any. Spyder threw herself across the catwalk, into a low roll taking her off the edge.. one of the black guns evaporated, leaving her hand free to snag the edge of the catwalk, other hand already tracking.. aiming.. two left. One left, toppling off the edge of the shelving into the boxes. Spyder dropped down into a crouch, rolling away from the gunfire pinning her to this stand of boxes. The sound of movement, trying to get a bead on her position around the boxes. A round drills itself through her shoulder, piercing her cover as she made her way around the other side. Shit! Snap up, both Mandibles in hand as she made the gesture. One, two three.. still didn't go down. Spyder threw herself to the ground as they lined up another ensorceled shot. No cover. Nowhere to hide. Got to move. Spyder hissed between grit teeth, throwing herself away from the boxes as they suddenly exploded, wooden shrapnel peppering her trenchcoat producing more ash but slower now, the spell wearing itself out. Good. I've pissed them off.
What follows is an extended game of cat and mouse. It takes too long, seemingly forever to take this last one down.. probably a lieutenant. Still got the big bad to go and already drained her active orb dry. In the silence of the wrecked storage room she quickly swaps them out, still flinching from the pain in her shoulder as the blue orb healed the wound. They took a risk. They took a risk with the guns spilling her blood over the floor, which meant she was too far from the summoning grounds or it didn't matter anymore. Bad mojo. Spyder slung herself up to the catwalk again, making her way across the twisted construct to the heavily warded door. Touching the ward key to the correct place in the design unlocked it, allowed her entrance inside.. and immediate she heard screams.. horrible screams.
Oh yes. Bad.. bad mojo.
More hostages here, the freshest of the crop. They weren't drugged for storage and so the sight of a woman in black and purple approaching them with the same inclination to swerve as an oncoming freight train caused them to start screaming, especially as she put a mid sized hole in their captor's head, aiming high as to not hit the captives. Blood splatters. Good.. they wouldn't eat stained food. Why hadn't they put up a fight? She wouldn't thought surprise had gone right out the window already. Some of the hostages were still whimpering and screaming. "Shut up!" Spyder knelt down, and it's a wonder when the light turns on in their eyes.. and immediately you go in the space of a instant from gun toting madwoman to blessed savior. The bonds weren't very tight, most of them weren't even bound.. just held by the threat of the single robed man.
That's not professional.. it's just.. sloppy. That didn't make sense. "What are you looking at?! Get out of here!" shoving and needling them like dogs that had been kicked too much or not enough. Why did they always pull those grateful faces? Those fake, damsel in distress faces especially the woman with the brown hair standing there staring at her stumbling over her words. Pointing into the darkness of the corridor, to the furthest depths. They'd already taken some of the others, including a little boy. "Yes. yes, that's very nice. I'll see what I can do. Thank you.. now follow the others." A little nod, reassured. Stupid. The others were probably already dead by now. Wait.. she went back through her memories. That's the mark. There was a razor edge tingling feeling, a cold shudder running up and down her spine of powerful magic. Very powerful.
It's game over. She should just cut her losses, make sure the nice little rich girl got somewhere safe and take the money. She glanced down the corridor. No.. NO. Focus, think of the job. You've done the job. That's it. Let some other guy clean up this mess. Someone better armed. Someone willing to deal with the Host. She moved towards the doors with the screams continuing, scraping like claws down the back of her jacket..
Don't be a hero, Spyder. Focus. Past the warded room now, into the abandoned storeroom where the others were helping eachother across the battlefield. She barked at them occasionally, distractedly, when they were about to do something too stupid. The rich girl staying close to her when she caught up again, glancing nervously at her every once in awhile with such anguish on her face to hear the screams.
She'd been her once. Spyder rubbed her face as they made their way back to the drugged hostages. In a nice cozy family full of meaningless things. Wealth means nothing to a zealot. Life means nothing to a zealot. Don't look back.. "Why aren't you doing anything?" the woman pleaded. Spyder restrained the urge to slap her. Knock some reality into her shallow, empty mind. Knock some sense into that small squealing little voice pleading for her to hurry the hell up before something really nasty showed up. Cursing her self preservation instinct for being too weak.
"Shut up. Just.. go. Get the others out of here, for sparda's sake use a cellphone! Call the police." "But.. but.." Spyder growled at her, intimidation winning over the woman's need to be heard. The hunter digs out her own phone, passing it over as she turns away from them. "I knew I should have brought a spellcracker." Nice little weapon.. paid almost a fortune in red orbs to have it. Sliced through magical protections and wards like soggy pancakes. She wasn't much for melee... but it was a very nice little toy. Now I'm going to have to get another cellphone. Beats getting another motorcycle like the LAST job..
The crackling, tingling feeling grew stronger and she saw the first of the robed corpses upon returning to the dark corridor, white dust poking out from underneath the folds, shards of bone glittering in the sand. When she discovers others she figures they were trying to escape with the hostages, the reason she hadn't been immediately overwhelmed in the firefight. They'd already lost control of the situation. Please let it be lower caste.. a godlion, or a divine slave.. Spyder felt that creepy little voice again, the one that piped up when there was the unknown ahead.
The little voice that whispered it'd be damn near common sense to ditch this job. Why did she look back when she knew NEVER to look back? Why.. she sighed. "Why not.." whispered to herself as she approached the door, fingers lightly pressed to the surface guns at the ready. The door swung inward, a pale bluish white illuminating the relatively small room completely covered in runic chalk. The chalk was on fire near the center of the room, where a perfect portal of bluish white fire gave her the first glimpse of what she was dealing with.
Shit. Not lower caste.
Spyder had roughly about five seconds before the inquisitor noticed her presence and acted accordingly. In that time she saw the robes near the center, presumably the summoning crew.. the runic robe of the leader, also an empty husk. Her mind couldn't wrap around it at the time, but it almost looked like a demon was menacing a small boy in the corner covered in a black spill of fabric. The other hostages were dead, dust like the cultists. What was a Pride demon doing here? Then there wasn't any more time, and the inquisitor was on her before she could even get off more than two shots which it shrugged off effortlessly.
Don't look at it! Don't look at it, don't let it touch you. Spyder threw herself backwards through the doorway again, firing the whole time the bullets thumping hollowly against the inquisitors white armor, some of it getting through.. mostly not. It walked unhurriedly towards her. Spyder sucked her breath in with a gasp as she stared through her perpetual vision, white feathers fluttering to the ground. She rolled back onto feet with every impulse screaming for her to run.
She lined up one more shot, three bullets slamming in succession into a pristine white mask. It staggered momentarily, enough for her to turn.. start to run. It was already ahead of her, and she barreled straight into it. She went limp, it's hands the only things keeping her upright, glassy eyes staring into nothing. "Shhh.. it'll be alright." went it's liars voice as it pulled her back to her feet.
Hand held and dragging her feet slightly like a petulant child, the hunter followed the inquisitor back towards the other room. "You do know that dress looks brilliant on you, right Sarah?" Spyder rolls her glassy eyes, staring off into the distance. "Well, I thought.. camo pants and a grungy sweater would be inappropriate." "A little, but you'd draw jealous stares if you wore an orange sack." "I think I have one of those if you'd like, Daniel."
The Inquisitor snapped it's fingers upon entering the room, but it's servant did not answer the call. The Pride was in fact in the opposite corner clawing madly at it's face and shoulders with stick thin talons while the boy sat in the corner huddling underneath the black sheets, large broken shards of the demon's sword embedded in the fabric. Another snap, and the pride tore itself away from it's single minded task but did not approach rocking back and forth, body twitching and jerking like a marionette on broken strings. It was a momentary lapse of attention, in which Spyder saw flashing across her eyes the flash of a gun going off in a dark room, the gun shots reverberating about in her head as Daniel.. or what had been Daniel, fell dead to the floor.
In her hand was the shaking gun.
When the inquisitor returned it's attentions to her, the Pride kneeling at it's feet she jerked slightly turning her face away and down as if she was still trapped in the throes of their control. Before her mind slipped away again she bit hard into the side of her cheek, feeling the soothing touch of it's fingers drawing her face back upwards again. Staring into the featureless mask cracked slightly she spat hot blood into the face she was desperately clawing at her sanity not to worship.
The spell snapped. Spyder dropped to her knees in a sudden wash of weakness, grinning viciously to herself as the creature screamed.. a high, musical note heavy with rage as she palmed a knife from her boot and with the high, nasty laugh of the spiteful victor stabbed herself through the stomach with it, ripping raggedly across and slumping to the ground in a pool of blood. "Sorry.." Spyder gasps, thinking with her last threads of consciousness two things. One.. that gold orb.. she'd have to thank Marcus for that.. and two... oh.. she was going to be sore when she woke up. "to be such a bother to your..evil...plots...bastard.." The runes breaking apart as her vision dimmed, the bluish white flare consuming her sight as the creature screamed in horrible frustration. The seal ruined, it snapped out of this existence with the fury of a captive star.
And then the lights went out.