AN: Well, just a few more chapters left for this installment! I want to thank all the wonderful nutcases who have stuck with me thus far- you are all wonderfully amazing people. After Eight-Card deck gets finished, I think I will be taking a short break to get caught up on things- like, say, homework. Fear not, my freaky darlings, it'll probably only be two weeks or so, and I'll leave you a nice trailer for Seven of Spades.
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Things Go All To Hell
I promise, we are almost done in M's Fortress…
A jet of curling flame rolled down the hall toward him, and Tom Sawyer dove headlong into the parchment room to avoid it. He sprawled on the floor among rolled parchments and documents that Sanderson Reed had knocked form the shelves. But hundreds of ancient- and flammable- documents remained stored in the chamber.
The towering flamethrower man clanked to the doorway, raising a reinforced metal arm. With a whoosh, he unleashed another flood of fire, blasting the whole room while Sawyer scrambled for cover. A wall of parchments ignited instantly.
Like a cornered river rat, Sawyer cast around for an escape route, but flames cut him off in every direction. The ironclad colossus closed in on him, raising the flame-throwing arm again.
From inside the armored walker suit, the voice of the Fantom's man sounded oddly thin and small. "You left your luck on the doorstep, boy."
Sawyer found himself trapped in a corner with nowhere left to go. The flamethrower man loomed through the thick smoke and took aim with his jet arm. Just as he shot another burst of flames, something knocked the reinforced arm aside, causing the fiery blast to go wide.
The walking ironclad roared in confusion, and his fire jet petered out after incinerating a wall of empty shelves. Sawyer opened his eyes and saw the armored titan struggling with an invisible assailant. A long knife protruded from between two of the iron plates, shoved deep into the man's vulnerable body within. Rising smoke outlined the form of the intruder.
"Skinner!" Sawyer cried gleefully. "The real one this time, I hope."
"I thought you Yanks were supposed to be the cavalry," Skinner replied, a grin barely visible on his smoke-stained face.
The wounded flamethrower man spun around and knocked Skinner aside with an iron-clad arm. He turned the jet on in the direction of his unexpected opponent and blasted at the invisible man, who skittered away.
Skinner didn't move quickly enough, and the leading edge of the fire scorched him. Large areas of his transparent skin were now burned into visibility, mostly across his back. He yowled and cursed in a drawn-out, incomprehensible wail.
Sawyer acted without thinking. He grabbed a piece of shattered shelving and charged the flamethrower man from behind, rammed into him, and knocked him spinning, He whacked against the tank on the ironclad's back until he pierced the fuel reservoir. Sparks flying from the inferno in the room caught the flammable liquid, causing it to spew fire like a Catherine wheel.
Sawyer rushed to where Skinner lay on the floor, burned and suffering. "Are you hurt bad?"
"Oh, no, it's really quite pleasant," the invisible man said sarcastically. "Can't wait to do it again. God, that's the last time I play with matches…" His voice trailed off as he pointed weakly at something past Sawyer's shoulder.
Sawyer froze as another knife blade was suddenly pressed against his throat, drawing him up. He lifted his chin and gulped.
It was Reed, still semi-visible from the smeared ink powders. "You know what they say, Yank," he growled. "Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer."
OSCOSCOSCOSCOSCOSC
While in his powerfully muscled, bestial form, Edward Hyde had never before felt intimidated. Now, however, he staggered back from the huge and monstrous thing that Dante had become. The lieutenant's metamorphosis had left him in a horrific form that would have made even your average tyrannosaur tremble.
His face still rippling and writhing from the agonies of the change, the Dante-beast loomed up, and up- then he struck. The blow he landed knocked his opponent backward across the mezzanine. Hyde slammed into a wall, smashing whole stone blocks into gravel, and fell to the floor, stunned and dazed.
The Dante-beast lumbered forward to pummel him again.
OSCOSCOSCOSCOSCOSC
After Captain Nemo had sent the freed scientists fleeing with their hostage family members, he rushed back to the pillared mezzanine to help his fellow League member.
In his Nautilus, Nemo had seen awesome sights that few men alive had witnessed: sunken cities, undersea mountains and volcanoes, horrific giant squid. But when he saw what Dante had become, he stared in disbelief.
The Fantom's lieutenant was now more than twelve feet tall, tremendously deformed, engorged with muscle and sinew. His spine had twisted, as if unable to support so much power and fury. His face, no longer even remotely human, was swollen with popped blood vessels and spiny facial hair that grew like a forest of bristles.
Hyde struggled to his feet just in time to meet Dante's next charge. The larger beast-man stormed at him, and the force of his punch sent the League member careening into a support pillar. The stone column cracked, teetered, and collapsed, bringing down a precarious arch. Hyde fell amid a shower of stones and rubble that blocked the exit passage.
A thick arm knocked the heavy blocks away, and Hyde hauled himself out of the rock pile. The Dante-beast immediately waded toward him and began his merciless assault once again.
Though he was becoming immensely battered, Hyde broke the attack and swung a powerful uppercut. "Come on, then," he growled. "If you fancy a ruckus."
Eep, Jekyll squeaked. There really was nothing else he could say.
Hyde, ignoring him, continued to advance and slammed the Dante-beast into a structural column, toppling it and collapsing another portion of the ceiling. Nemo joined him, a wicked scimitar held in his right hand, his left raised and ready to assist with the fight. Despite his martial arts training and the curved blade, the captain looked absurdly small in comparison with the two behemoths.
Hyde stopped him with a hand as large as Nemo's head. "No, no. Leave this to me." He cracked his knuckles. "This will be my pleasure."
Jekyll squeaked again.
Reeling to his feet, the Dante-beast charged at Hyde, who obligingly ran back at him. They looked like two rampaging rhinos.
On one voyage to Japan, Nemo had seen a match of enormously fat Sumo wrestlers. Although this struggle brought back the memory, that contest had been a mere child's game in comparison.
Hyde and Dante collided like a pair of locomotives, giving Nemo a ringside seat at their gargantuan battle.
OSCOSCOSCOSCOSCOSC
Standing over his bed, Dorian Gray turned from Mina's body. She lay sprawled, impaled on the thin sword. Gray sighed wistfully. "You were so lovely."
"Why, thank you." Mina stood and pulled the sword from her chest.
Gray spun, gaping in disbelief.
"You stole my heart once a long time ago, Dorian. This time you missed."
She somersaulted from the bed and skewered Gray with his own rapier. The force of the impact drove him backward, and they hit the wall together. Mina added extra force, shoving the point of the sword into that wall with all of her vampiric strength.
Then she backed away and dusted her hands, as if trying to wipe away the contamination of his touch. Gray tried to move, squirming left and right, but found that he was firmly affixed to the wall, like a beetle on a card.
Mina ran to the other side of the room and snatched up his wrapped painting, which still leaned against the wall. She turned it toward him.
"Mina…" Gray said warily, then grew more frantic. He tugged at his cane-sword to free himself, but it was buried too deep in the wall behind him.
With razor-sharp nails, Mina tore at the burlap covering. "You spoke once of wanting to atone, Dorian. You wanted to face your demon."
Gray's panic grew with each shred of cloth that she peeled away from the painting.
"Well, here he is!" She had exposed the entire portrait of Dorian Gray.
In the painting, Gray's face,- barely recognizable as a corrupted version of his youthful, handsome features- was wizened with age, leprous, oozing, and rotted from the accumulation of decades of evil debauchery. It was a symphony of horrors wrapped in an approximation of human form, carrying the weight of far more age and poison and decrepitude than any one person could endure.
Gray was transfixed by the true appearance of his soul- the last thing he would see. As he hung pinned to the wall by his cane-sword, his perfect, youthful face began to crease and peel. He gasped, writhed, screamed while his body aged and rotted, until he took on the precise appearance of the painting- its degeneration, the cracked and peeling texture.
Mina looked away, her face resolute, yet her eyes brimmed with regretful tears. Dorian Gray withered and shriveled and finally died as nothing more than a twisted mummy.
At the same time, the image on his portrait became younger, restored to the likeness that Mina remembered- and had loved.