Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.
The city-scape had been changed. The sky overhead swirled with static clouds around a single black point where the moon used to be. The entire block Nny and his demonic apparition of the past fought on was covered and painted gorgeously with blood. Aside from Nny's own sickly-pale-yellow skin the only colors that existed anymore were black and white. He stood amongst the infinite carnage, arms cross with knives held in fists, and glared through his wide, white eyes at his demonic enemy. The thing was still reeling in pain, whimpering with its huge hands on its torn face, cursing the heavens in some strange tongue.
"You done yet?" Johnny asked. He sighed and shifted his feet, letting his arms lightly swing. "This routine is getting kinda stupid." The demon grunted loudly and blinked open its eyes. The former bizarre patterns of black on white were just the lids of the thing's eyes. Its true eyes were pools of incalculable depth and blackness ending in the dimmest nebula of tiny white specs. Eyes reflecting infinite space, the cruelest darkness of the cosmos which Nny and his demon now fought in. Its hands slammed its face back together and its terrible grin had become a snarling frown of even more wickedly jagged teeth.
"Oh?" Nny grunted. "You are done..." With a stomp of its legs the beast leaned deeply forward, its wriggling chest just above the bloody road and its arms thrown far out to the sides. Its mouth stretched all the way down to its coiling waist and it roared.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!
The rotted wind of its breath blew Nny's hair and forced his eyes to close, but he smiled and when the voice died down he started to titter.
"Was that it?" Nny asked. The beast blinked and rose back up, its tentacle body resetting itself. Now it stood five stories tall, its crown staying exactly the same as a straight-standing demented chef's hat. The mask-like bone of its face melted down and twisted around its eyes and mouth to form a constantly shifting Rorschach pattern of black and white gnarled veins. The tentacles that made up its body coiled around each other and formed a mirror-image of a human muscular anatomy in broad stripes of black and white. Its humungous arms, complete with stripped nails of particularly hard tentacle flesh on its five fingers and toes. Nny looked straight up and barely saw the glow of its monstrous eyes and teeth beyond the constantly shifting pool of black and white that was its face.
"Is that it?" Nny asked. The monster raised up its leg and stomped down at Nny. Nny jumped far back, to the end of the street, and landed in a position that looked like he was going to sprint. If he weren't so damn skinny he would have looked serious.
"That seems to be it" the cockroach girl said off to the side. Nny looked back and saw her, the same as before and rooted through the rippling puddle of deep-red blood, billowing out a cloud of red smoke from her red-tipped cigarette. "Aren't you going to kill it?"
"Give me a sec" Nny said, waving her off. The monster punched into a nearby high-rise and opened its palm, sweeping out all the furniture and debris from the fifth story down into the street. Nny wasn't moved by the gesture and flipped a long-range bird to his enemy. It lowed loudly, far above the clatter of its attack, and began walking at a surprisingly brisk pace. Nny dashed into a nearby building, feeling the eyes of his enemy following him. His conscience blew one last drag from her stick and vanished in a puff of black smoke. The Doughboy creature punted the building apart, blowing debris everywhere, including towards it. Nny sat lazily on a couch that flew through the air towards his enemy's face, waiting for the universe to deliver him to his proper place. The Doughboy slapped the couch and Nny away, far down to the opposite end of the street.
"Ow!" Nny exclaimed. He was standing, rather than painfully rolling like the couch he was just on, right in the middle of the street. "Okay, that didn't work."
"Was that it?" she asked, once again leaning against a building and smoking.
"Knock that off" Nny apathetically said. He twirled his knives around his fingers and began walking down the street. "A monster is a monster, and the definition of a monster is completely subjective. There is no golden standard for what defines a chaotic mess of organic evolution, there simply is and are things beyond worldly evolutionary explanation, and those are all monsters."
"So in a sense" she said, "are you not a monster?"
"Of course I'm a monster" Nny admitted, stopping after walking the length of just one building. The blood had finally reached him, pouring out and reaching across the flat of the road for Nny's boots. Once the blood reached him it seemed to speed up and the lazy swirl of the black and white sky reflected down to the ground. "Ever since I could remember, I've been nothing less than a monster!" With his jagged, ear-to-ear smile Nny turned back and let the light fade from his face. He was two eyes and a terrible, V-shaped smile with a tangled mess of disgusting hair. He stood with feet shoulder-length apart and began slowly raising his arms up, keeping them straight and letting his wrists give in to the weight of the knives he held.
"You're nothing but a fool, Johnny" the monster said. Nny's knives finally drifted up and his arms were straight up. With one whip of his wrists his blades clashed in a blinding flash of white. The blades crossed over his head with the serrated teeth near the tips of the knives forming the outline of a perfectly equilateral triangle. Nny raised his head incrementally to look up at his wildly huge opponent as it stomped forward again. "You've always been nothing but foolish!!!" Johnny brought his knives back down, crossing his arms at his chest with the knives pointed down...and vanished. "What!?" the demon exclaimed. It looked around in a panic, not seeing Johnny's still active, smoking conscience at the nearby street corner. "Where? Where did he go!?!?!?"
"Ah, I see" Johnny said. "A Sea of Sartre." Johnny sat in the reflection, taking a seat on the highest branch of a myriad gnarled roots which all came from beneath his subconscious partner's dress. It formed a giant tree that stretched far above the cityscape and into the sky, or rather down to the sky as Nny's gravity had yet to wrong itself in this infinitely twisted realm of implausibility.
"This place" Nny began "was created by the universe at my own whim to win this fight. I can exist easily in it, as I don't follow the normal rules of existence anyway. I'm a defiant son of a bitch who takes no more shit, metaphorical or Satanical. This is an entire region of space which is an anti-thesis of the rules of reality, a place that I call home. I can do anything I wish, but right now all I want to do is kill." Nny felt the pull of gravity drift him back up to the street of blood. He landed and made the entire scene ripple as reality corrected itself around Nny's wrongs and set the new sky as his ground. He now stood at the feet of his reflected enemy and raised up his knife to stab into his unguarded, tightly-coiled tentacle mass.
"GRAH!!!" It shouted in pain. Something has stabbed its foot, something inhuman. It lifted up its foot and let the blood fall down like rain, but then its other foot suffered the same pain. "GAH! JOHNNY, YOU PRICK!"
"Who's a what now?" Johnny asked. The monster looked down to find his voice but saw nothing, save for the still flowing puddle of blood. In the Sartre Sea the ground had rippled up and immaterial blackness filled the air where the monster's foot was lifted. Whatever movement was made in the real world this strange world reflected it in chaotic and strange ways. Nny himself had shrunk as he scaled the behemoth's leg from behind. He raised up his knife and stabbed into its leg, sliding down into the Sea again where he floated as if the blood-red world was water.
"WHERE ARE YOUUUUUU!!!!!"
"Poor blind bastard" she said, finishing her cigarette. "You'll never find him if you don't really look." The monster made a jump and landed on the bloody surface of the road, impacting on the surface of the blood rather than driving through it and the road at once. Finally some sort of realization occurred. Because Johnny used both the ground of the real world and the sky of the Sartre Sea as a solid surface at some point, the combined tension of both through the portal made the blood that pooled the streets into the new ground.
"Still don't get it?" Johnny asked as his form slowly rose up from the blood. He as but a reflection of the self that existed just outside of existence, inside the thin pond of red. This Johnny was coated and dripping with blood and his two knives took on a much more sinister appearance. Instead of smiley faced circles holding the blade to the handle, twisted, grinning demonic faces with horns coming up from either end to end in tips on the flat ends of the blades. Everything of his now was red while the black demon stood upside down in the world below.
"Honestly no" the demon said, shaking its head. The red Johnny, faceless and constantly flowing with blood from its head, lowered its head while the real Johnny smiled wide.
"Good" Johnny said. Suddenly all the blood came pooling in, revealing the terribly broken ground that the demon had stomped on just before and the bodies that gave so much blood create the splendid scene. Suddenly a giant of rippling, smooth blood appeared with two huge knives in its balled fists and an eternally dripping trench coat of red. Johnny was reflected in its dead center with the skyline of a seemingly endless city spiraling behind him. He glared through wide eyes and extended his left arm out to stab. The motion carried through just how he did it, regardless to the size that it happened in, and the demon received a nastily sharp blade right through its shoulder and an equally horrific slash straight down through its waist.
There was no time for pain. Only retaliation as the demon fell deep into its darkest state of insanity. It eliminated pain from its twisted mind and retaliated with a stern punch. The giant blood-Johnny's head exploded in a sloshing liquid rain that spread all the way up to the clouds upon contact, but the giant did not falter. It didn't flinch or move. It simply let its blood form ripple into mist that clouded the still static sky. Johnny's conscience was below, on the street, with her eyes averted as if in shame.
The bloody giant reformed itself, becoming slightly shorter to compensate for losing most of its better weight. Johnny still floated in the middle, this time with the pose of a rugged martyr, arms straight out and knives held as extended from his arm instead of his hand. His head was hanging low with a grin full of menace and eyes that oozed a thick, black loathing. The giant was reformed and made its own attack, chopping off its offender's right arm. The demon raised its partially severed left arm up and swiped at the bloody Goliath, swinging directly at Nny. He didn't move. In his twisted world he watched the sky ripple around as the black and white hand of his foe passed just between worlds and then faded out to reality.
"Moron" Johnny said, standing at the black spot in the sky which the static clouds spun around. It was a moving floor, the clouds painted poorly in shades of white and gray, and the blackness Johnny stood on a perfect circle of artistic dimensions. He looked up and saw the surface of his world shrink just slightly from the attack as some of the blood in his giant had been displaced. "Eye for an eye..." Johnny growled. His giant responded by resetting itself, crouching down, and then jumping high up, casting a dreadful, red shadow across the sky only to come back down and reap the tentacle meat of its enemy from shoulder down to toe. The demon roared and let its blood darken the buildings everywhere. Johnny was still reflected dead-center in creation of de-creation and smiling quite happily.
"You're so confused" Johnny said mockingly. His giant grew the feint features of a face with round budges for eyes and a concave, angular stretch that oozed with the thick, salty blood as a smile. It reeled its arms back and began stabbing and stabbing and stabbing with the inhuman swiftness that could only come from a man who had lived his life to poke things with sharp instruments. Blood and tentacle bits came shredding out of the demon's body, oozing into a black sickness as they hit the street, darkening the already dismal city colors. "You have no idea what's going on, do you?"
"I don't need to know" the demon growled. It shrank in and instant, grabbed the racing bloody arms and squeezed them right off. The blood hit the ground, right in Johnny's vision as he leaned back lazily in the limb of a demonically gnarled tree floating in an infinite, starry space. "All I need to do is kill you!" Johnny yawned and hopped off the tree, right into an abyss that led nowhere but down. The giant of blood dissolved, but not in any traditional sense. It simply vanished, along with all the evidence of the struggle, all the signs of battle, all the damage in the ground and the buildings. Everything was gone, including the sky, and the Doughboy Demon found itself startled and confused in its previous form of a nastily dressed school kid.
Soon, as the scenery swirled, everything returned. Even the people, who just moments before were a mush of blood, guts and mangled flesh. They seemed to know this as well, as a wide circle formed around Nny and his current helpless victim. Nny, of course, stood in the one spot where the light of the streetlamps couldn't reach, his arms held up and his fingers extended, total darkness eclipsing his face save for the shining grin he wore.
"That's really it?" Nny asked. He laughed in a deep, low, bowel-crunching laugh that shook the humans around him with fear. Doughboy fell to his knees and dropped his hat, revealing the authentic hair on his head. "All you need to know is to kill me? But what if I can't die?" Doughboy became terrified and his eyes spiraled and shook out of control, nearly becoming static. "That's right! As if dying once wasn't enough to shake the universe, losing my humanity threw the poor bitch straight into madness! How else can you explain all the shit that's been happening?"
"You mean" Doughboy began shakily "you knew? All along?"
"I had a hunch" Nny admitted. He began walking around the limits of the crowd, who were petrified at his approach, and just looked at them. "I keep having strange visions of a hilltop and a throne, with up to six cloaked characters standing and staring me down. Right now, according to my latest vision, that number is down to four. At one point I was positive a certain chef-hatted creature was standing with them, but now I see that you were just a smudge of runaway paint that got removed in the second draft. You're nothing to my future anymore."
"So you do know" Doughboy exclaimed. He struggled to his feet and tried to retreat. Nny turned his head away with a gentle smile under the menacing darkness and weakly threw a knife that split through the air and went through Doughboy's head. While not dead or injured the demon was shaken and fell to the ground anyway.
"What's important" Nny began "isn't what I did or did not know, but the fact that I was willing to acknowledge this information as important." Nny began making his way over to the puppet to retrieve his knife. He knelt down and held the handle like a brush. "I wouldn't bother to care otherwise." He removed the knife and held it up to his face, the light now shining solely on him. He held his knife up, stepping on the paralyzed body of Doughboy, and looked at the inky blackness of his new paint as it coated his brush.
"That's disappointing" Johnny said. The people all leaned in as the lights flashed back to normal and the light was spread evenly. "Honestly...I'm getting tired of BLACK!!!" Something in Johnny snapped and a demon was awakened. He teleported from person to person, lunging his knives deep into their brains and twisting as he pulled away. The people all died rapidly, some trying to run and getting a swift slice to the throat. Others tried desperately to fight back with their own knives or guns but they were instantly sliced apart and reduced to headless torsos that exploded with blood. The street soon ran red with blood, and with no gutters to dirty up an otherwise perfectly clean and douchy neighborhood the blood simply pooled into the street and formed a shallow puddle which, in the end, the King stood triumphant in with his knives down and his eyes wide and glowing.
Still unable to move, Psycho Doughboy laid face-down in the blood and passed out, dying from the extreme existential exhaustion brought about by Johnny's relentless assault from an alternate reality. The cockroach girl was finally happy and stepped out into the street with dead-blue legs in grave-black heels. She had her cigarette-stick in her mouth and a smile on her face.
The King of Killers strikes!!!
