And now LBHE is back on its feet wielding sporks of doom. Enjoy enraged Dante side story goodness. :D
Dante
It had been an easy enough job, the same old, same old. Only it wasn't just the same old, same old. It never really was, was it? Everything had its own lead, its own clue and hedge way into something deeper and darker and well…evil. He'd seen every color on the spectrum, saw how the gray blurred the white into black. Hell, he was one of the fuzzy gray parts. Half human, half demon, neither and both. It was the fine edge of the blade he walked and damn, he balanced that act well. Then again, being one of a kind, it wasn't that hard to make this kind of job look damn good. Rebellion twisted in his hand, circling in his palm as he gritted his teeth. He was Dante fucking Sparda. He saved the little terrified weak masses from the darkness his miserable bastard of a father had been born from. But whatever, right? This was his goddamn job and he was good at. With a vengeance, he was good at it, for more than just one reason.
But this...this was not walking the fine edge of the blade…this…this was something all together different…
Rebellion shone red, blade tip arcing so far backwards that it was in danger of digging into the back of his leg. The blade came crashing down, gouging a crater into the ground and bashing his opponent into a nondescript smear. All too red blood and very human looking body parts splattered like a broken water balloon. Several more lay dead, but that was part of the problem. They had been dead to begin with. Could this be considered killing humans? Where they ever human to begin with? Had a demonic parasite eaten its way through them? Was something like that possible on a wide spread level like this? Justifying his job like this…given enough time would he walk the same path as Vergil…or was he worse? …Yeah…right….whatever…
His arms screamed wariness, but he ignored it. Couldn't afford to slack off now. He had always wondered what would happen if it came to this… if he would have ended up like Vergil some where along the way. The fuck…this had to be Vergil showing his hand…had to be that joke of a brother…that bastard…
Dante wasn't smiling. He wasn't laid back and he wasn't fucking kidding around anymore. It was one thing to keep the feud between the two of them. To take their mother's amulet and their father's sword, a little sibling rivalry never included anyone outside of the family directly. Was Vergil doing this in earnest? Was he seriously taunting Dante, watching him somewhere in hell and laughing as Rebellion cut down wave after wave of them?
It had never been like this before. He had never wanted something like this. Demons disguised as humans, wearing the flesh of corpses, he could deal with that. These weren't demons though. They didn't smell like demons…there was nothing even vaguely demonic about them. They couldn't even be said to have been possessed, because they weren't! There was simply no demonic auras present. Anywhere.
The thing that had been human screamed in a horse whispery hiss and lunged towards him. Ebony's nuzzle spouted an endless stream of very well placed bullets, blowing holes through the back of its head. The woman hit the ground, faceless, brainless, twitching but she didn't get back up again. She was in the minority however. He turned, right hand switching up Rebellion for Ivory. Swords weren't getting him anywhere. Melee was useful but cutting off limbs wasn't doing him any good. Not right now in any case, they just got up again, oozing black stuff where their limbs had been. The twin guns went to town, doing their best imitation of a disco strobe light.
This wasn't 'demon exorcism' as the job description had led him to believe. No this was genocide. Dante didn't kill humans. They could damn themselves to hell for all he cared, there were way too many of them and he damn well wasn't a prophet, but this wasn't death, wasn't damnation, wasn't anything he had really fought against before…
The shadows blurred together on the walls of the room he occupied. He was Dante Sparda. He didn't hurt humans, at least not the ones that didn't deserve it. What was Vergil trying to prove? That he could drag his twin down to his level? That Dante could kill things as easily as he did, that he didn't have to possess that damnable pity and respect for life that Sparda had? If it was a straight forward answer…well that just wasn't the way Vergil did things. There was always a deeper meaning with his twin. Always.
"Tch." There were more…and more….and more… and fuck! Dante's hand clamped down on the man's head. There was blood before he even did anything, his grip enough to dig finger tips into and past the hard layer of the skull, cracking it like an egg shell. Easily, he tore the man from his arm, throwing him across the room. The ex-human's body hit the wall, splattering black across cracked plaster and molding, ornate woodwork. The bastard had taken a chunk out of him, even through the leather. Dante growled, annoyed, feeling blood run down his sleeve as the wound healed.
It had been an easy job, investigate a house some uptown smucks were looking to purchase. The only reason he'd taken the job was because they knew the password. How the fuck had they missed the hannibal-cannibals in the land deed? What was that? Some Sunday detail?
Still they kept coming. He was getting annoyed now, jumping all over the goddamn place like a grasshopper. The fuckers were biting him, crazed with hunger, the black ooze of whatever it was leaking from their mouths and eyes. They were humans though, dammit! Not possessed humans, just humans with some kind of fucked up sickness… He couldn't smell a trace of demonic influences in them. They were sick. Fucking wacked out sick people and he was lopping them up like sushi rolls.
The real annoying part was that this wasn't his first run-in with these brain washed things. There had been at least one other before this…and he'd taken out the main baddie. The surprise came when the brainwashed humans had just dropped dead…rather than reverting to what they had once been. It wasn't the happy ever after ending usually delivered. He ignored a second bite, this one digging into his right shoulder from behind. It was the fourth, fifth, and seventh that got to him.
Not even the half demonic part was shaking these things….there were too many of them… he was Dante fucking Sparda. He'd raided hell for the fun of it more than once. And he was being taken down by these fucks?
He roared, going down on one knee. Seven clung to his left arm, tearing away fabric and flesh as if they were the same thing. They were swarming, hundreds of them. It was supposed to be an easy job. Another set of teeth bit down hard on the back of his neck. It wasn't that his strength was lacking, it was that there was too many of them. For every one he cut down, another ten rose in their place. Roaring, Dante reeled, getting to his feet.
It hurt, letting the demon out so fast, as it always did. He'd be damned if he was giving in that easily though….