Foreword
Hey there, so this is an alternate universe series. Prequel to DMC 1, set after DMC 3, timeline where Vergil never met Arkham and the resultant timeline therein. Dante's personality will be as it was in the first game for the most part, focused and all that, as per my usual approach to his character as a balanced mix of his different variations. Expect deviations and world-building.
Enjoy.
Mission 01: Old Tail and New Guns
Clawed nails scratched aged concrete; the feet they grew from galloped a furious pace.
Furry, blackened skin ran through the inky night. The malicious presence leapt over steel piping and old brick like it was a playground. This was a mockery of nature. It moved past gargoyle brethren, flexing its diseased tendons. Desperation filled most movements, it was like an abandoned animal. The arm of a small boy fell from its mouth. A grim trophy. But it was not this hideous creature chasing prey, rather, something else seemed to prowl after the beast instead. The scurrying steps were loud, clanging upon the metallic-stone sheets of the city's plentiful rooftops. An evil grace it so displayed as it swung between gothic towers.
Shadows appeared and fell, a barrage of savage ways only the darkness could filter through did unto him a bad manner.
Sowing threads of chaos into the universe was just a natural conclusion to this hidden beast. Time was like a fuse, burning fast.
Not enough to stop the thing.
Two shapes bounded 'cross the course of these old grunge-laden structures.
Taking no effort, both entities shot from one building to another, never ceasing nor breaking pursuit. Not once did they falter; inhumanly fluid.
The silhouettes were the only signs of life, scraping high above the less fortunate districts.
The overall cityscape presented modern day horrors alive, slowly passing along their timeless fears to those that would inherit its oblivion. It was almost mournful, the gray skyline and the magic man chasing the satyr. Not even the sands of eden could spawn elegies to distract them. Misery to this beast, of the earth's twisted-norse throne, its own number burned brightly for all to sin. But now was not the time for doom.
The chase was on.
So it went that they devoured one another in time, psychologically.
A raspy shriek cut through nightfall. A devilish cry screeched from the chase's forerunner.
Its long arms flailed savagely, unmitigated by human growth. Try as it might, the creature gained no distance over its assailant. Those scarlet eyes narrowed in on its back. A taller building lay before them. Rushing towards the edifice's edge, it flung itself suicidal, far across the chasm between the two structures and far from the world of you and I.
It recalled the shaking of the ground; the construct was exceptionally large, larger than expected from the view. Nevertheless, cryptids must try. The thing felt a drag on its billy horns, fighting back the air itself. Sad to say, it simply wasn't built for this. The forest was its natural home, and the hunter knew that too well. He didn't care, so long as the beast was his. The man drove it from the woodlands, no remorse. That alone would not satiate his appetite, nor his job description.
Desperation had caused the beast to misjudge the gap, and it landed fierce against the building's wall. Time to tear it down.
Those icy fingers grasped deadly at the concrete, legs lacerated by shattered glass, until its hands found purchase at the very ledge.
Those worn, barren feet tried to gain traction on the stone wall, hoping to hoist itself up. The roof was its safety, close but ever so out of reach. Steadily, it neared . . .
A loud bang accompanied an abrupt puncture through its chest.
One bullet tore these aspirations asunder.
The monster shrieked recklessly, wearing its anger like a badge. So, it fell a few stories.
Wind rustled by its shaggy hair till the beast came crashing upon solid, serious earth.
An alleyway; crime's birthing grounds.
Rats scampered away from the repulsive figure. It wasn't still but a moment. Springing to life in an instant, it took no time to recover from its plummet, the creature standing upon its grizzly clawed hooves in mere seconds. Convulsing, it spat black blood upon its own goaty beard. Pond scum surrounded it, mephitic trash from humanity's minds discarded back in this rusty nook. Those bright, reflective orbs, the truly consuming eyes, searched the dark for any signs of . . . him. It couldn't wait for the chance to deliver retribution. The enemy's spirit would pay.
Those spindly digits twitched eagerly, lusting after his blood.
The sharp claws scraped against one another every so often.
But the alleyway was silent, eerily lacking all sound.
It could feel so much as a pin drop, and yet . . .
Nothing.
A sound came from somewhere off to the left. Like a whip, it cracked its gaze off to that direction.
Like before, the air was still.
It delayed a little while longer, awaiting when its predator would emerge . . . but he simply wasn't there.
The monster hissed, vehemently longing for the flesh of a Cambion, if fleeing could not be its solution. Greedily, it prepared itself to charge into the dark and strike down the red one.
Yet another sound jangled into its warped ears.
A tremendous whip lashed the air, crunching metal.
Something large skid through the air.
Before any chance of action, a projectile pierced its torso; hammered it like a semi-truck, tore its braying hooves off the ground— ornately grotesque blade splitting flesh— and carried off careening it went, slamming into the brick wall of a downtown business building. It had been trying to jump this new prison only a few moments ago. Cries of inhuman anguish ripped through the air, a squalid Goat Man squirming for release, agonized.
The sound of bored footsteps approached.
"They reserve the darkest places in Avernus for devils like us," he said, face coming into the moonlight. "I suppose you're goin' there first."
It glared down at its enemy with scorching hate. What greeted sight was the chill of winter's yearn. His shadow loomed.
The shape of him became an outline of a man as he moved murkily through the darkness, a man carved from legacy and hate.
His powerful jaw and ideal nose spoke of his borderline sadistic, rugged elegance. Every so often, the light would catch his frigid sapphire eyes, held beneath a canopy of snow white bangs.
Long cheeks filled out his robust face. Good for taking punches.
He dressed himself in a black-red long coat that came to rest slightly below his knees. The crimson coloring on his flared lapels also extended onto his shoulders and formed a thick stripe that ran down the outside of both arms. At the end of the sleeves was an inch-and-a-half-long cuff of identical pigment that met and conjoined with the beam design. Down his back, vermillion ran to just above his waistline. Silver buttons and pins signaled a jagged gothic calling, and he seemed to embrace that notion with the screaming skulls on the hilt of his thrown sword. All other portions of the coat were a stark stygian shade, beneath which he wore a dark green dress shirt fastened only halfway. Below this, there was a blue-tinted black long-sleeve shirt, while his pants were a pair of drab gunmetal gray cargos.
Fingerless black gloves adorned his chaotic hands, and dark biker boots ran up to his shins. A pure menace to high society. The devil inside was a stylish savage, and on these desolate streets, you had to dress to kill, or the grease would rend you trampled under foot, out of sight, out of mind, out of this world. Of this crumbling kingdom, he was the master of death, or at least, at one time he was.
A ruthless darkness frostbit his soul, and this frozen history scarred him so.
He leisurely strolled toward the demon, now that his target looked confined. The ebony tails of his bi-chromatic coat swayed in similar fashion with his movements. Swagger was king. Endlessly, the beast swiped at nothing, unbound, and fidgeted with the sword still plunged through its chest. Step by step, the devil drew nearer. It became more frantic and despaired, the lost one here to reap that which it had so mistakenly sown. Scrambling harsh enough, against its own form, against the tide of death, it managed to pull both itself and the sword free from the brick wall's flat embrace.
Now that this prison was through with the beast, it hobbled for a moment's disgrace.
The hunter smiled.
"What's your rush? I thought we were gonna get to know each other better."
Almost like it knew it was being mocked, a roar erupted from that animal-mug, a twisted howl meant to curdle the blood of children. Innocent children.
"Aw, I'm hurt. Well, since ya don't wanna be friends, guess I'll have to finish things up early."
Out from the depths of his trench coat came the muzzles of two guns, one of black metal and the other glistening silver, but both custom designed. On the sides of the barrel were special engravings and insignias that imparted these weapons with a sentimental value as well. They were mementoes. Just as he took aim, the man noticed something 'different' about his target.
The limbs elongated and became gangly, trying to grow larger at the expense of its own mass.
Its head grew disparate, enlarging and bubbling out. The hair fell out to reveal cracked and blistered flesh.
By the sheerly mangled shape of its head, the skin that stretched tore away.
Its eyes grew colorless and big as saucers, the lids totally receding as the creeping orbs popped forward. Tentacles mutated from it's sores, covered in strange, pus-like mucus.
Those fingers began to deform like tree branches, and its screams grew harsher.
A set of spider pincers burst from the entity's neck, which soon too grew longer and ridged. From its hips, a flurry of fried limbs stabbed out of its own flesh. These charred members wiggled around with no master. Slowly, it came away from reality, revealed for the true thing that it was. Thousands of feelers erupted from its mouth plentiful, the jaw becoming square as it almost tore away.
The head-heavy nature made it squat on all fours, permanently bipedal. An unholy grin creased across its leathery 'face;' if you could call it that.
Its legs changed too, becoming thick like trees, and retaining their woolen nature. The hair thickened, becoming like a sea otter's, resisting any toxins that might seek to poison. Despite its size, the depraved organism slithered forward with a gleeful abandonment of physics v. anatomy. Had to know that shit if he was gonna be effective. If the man let his guard down, it could wriggle through his innards like a tapeworm.
No.
Not this time.
Quickly, the silver hunter unleashed a maelstrom of gunfire; pulling the triggers on both his handguns in rapid succession.
The attack was haphazard, aiming more for crowd-control than deliberate precision. Some bullets hit the creature in its stomach, others tore through the rotten flesh of its many limbs. Those forgotten simply passed by and embedded themselves into brick. Despite the metallic lead-shower, it didn't seem to hinder the inevitable act of the creature's malformation. By now, everything had contorted so wildly out of proportion that the devil couldn't exactly tell which parts he hit.
It wheezed its stretched lungs and screeched at the stars.
It tried to maintain this transformation, this dark eyesore.
The sound? It was like nothing else in this world.
The revolting croaks felt like a cascading river of roaches and needles grinding through his ears, begging to crawl under his skin.
Ebony and Ivory trained themselves on a single point—his blasphemous sword, the rebellion.
Riotous waves of slugs struck the handle of his weapon, one after the other, perfectly stacking themselves, and forced the entity back against the cinder block barrier. Following up with more shells, his next salvo targeted the demon's wrist. In almost an instant, they had riddled its festered forearm with enough holes that the entire hand crudely severed away. Falling to the floor, the blood sizzled into the pavement, stinging and stiffening to stone.
The thing wailed from simulated-agony, feeling genuine anguish, before seeing a flash.
In a blur, the hybrid moved to the monster's oversized face and put one last shot into its skull.
Smoke blistered up into the trashy air.
But the monster would not die. Not yet.
Crawling, the gurgling sound it made as he ruthlessly put bullet after bullet into its twisted brain, could stay with anyone for a lifetime. He had plenty of those kinds of memories already.
One more would keep them company.
There was a lot of gray matter to get through, but he pulverized it all, one cartridge at a time. This twisted man wasn't afraid. Not anymore; not for a long time. Fear did no one any good, not one touched by the sad wings of destiny. The splatters on the wall made such a soul-crushing splash. It prayed for cavitation; he delivered unto the beast this ghastly desire. To think he'd timed himself at only five minutes.
After the destruction of the nervous system, its mind finally broke away into shards of cosmic glass, then putrefied.
Rapidly, the entirety of its structure dusted away, becoming nothing but ash in the wind. He took care to preserve what he needed.
The hand.
He walked to it, preparing what he would need to do.
Crouching down, he held out his hand, and a rune of some sort appeared in front of his fingers. He mumbled aloud some old verses of Romanian text he'd memorized; evocations of the dark powers flowed through his veins. A golden light engulfed the severed thing, flashing a strange luster that froze it within earthen time. Now, through this ancient power, the hand became bound by the laws of human decomposition.
The only other thing its slain keeper left behind was an echoing, horrid howl, imprisoned within a vermillion memory inside him fashioned from its own blood; its last trace on the mortal coil.
'Twas how demoniac biology worked. The destruction of the body brought about consumption in a crystalline method. It held nothing of worth for earthly bonds. Their physiology was simply incapable of accepting the gift. Ingesting such fluid bore great consequence to them with time, but not so for the Cambion. Made from both demon and human flesh, hybrids could consume this 'leftover,' retrieving the power held within the creature's blood, as could any other demonic creature. Lord knows the other remains were worthless, decomposing instantly.
Alone now, the man sighed.
The quiet, and for all others, peaceful night, enveloped him. Silence was good sometimes. It gave him the tranquility he needed to stamp out the usual visuals.
"Another day, another child murderer . . ."
Natives getting restless now.
He ran his right hand back through his snow white hair, retrieving his blade from the wall. Dante placed the weapon on his back, and it clung to it without a holster; magnetic attraction, as though it needed him to survive.
"At least I got what I came here for."
With that, he snatched the wretched extremity from the ground and wrapped it within a dirty cloth he'd used many times before for the same purpose.
He briefly glanced up at the crescent moon that hung in the sky. Such beauty in the cosmic things, the world beyond their reach. Dante often dreamt of flying there, out beyond the void to the stars, hoping at the very least if'n he so ever became capable, and the dreary nature of the world could be left behind, perhaps. Wasn't a bad thing of him letting the old ways go, the old tail. The new guns themselves weren't cut out for such lofty ideals. And as soon as he came back to his earthbound mind, the task ahead was set as he gazed upon the light. Then, there came a small wave of clouds that rolled past the glowing satellite, darkening the world once more.
For now . . .
Author's Note:
Oh it feels so good to update this again. So I started taking a look at this after awhile of creative stagnation and I realized it was a bit of a disservice to keep the series in lengthy 10000 word-long shorts, even tho I really liked the episodic style. The plots I was making for each short ended up getting more complex and better suited to Novella-type length, so I started breaking them up and polishing/rewriting some of them to make them shorter and more consumable, like a serial rather than an anthology. Goes against the original plan, but I'm glad to improve audience enjoyment however I can.
So! anyway, the plot will remain the same, the universe is still connected to Sanitarium and Minus Human, and it's still going to be a Horror series, but now more focused towards traditional Occult Detective formulas. I also hope to update more frequently in the future, but it's unlikely to happen given life goals and such.
Barring all that, this was a short introductory chapter to the style and aesthetic of the series as a whole, almost a prologue, except it flows into the next chapter. Kinda was supposed to from the very start anyway lol the style in this one is mostly going for atmosphere and I hope I can produce more going forward.
Hope y'all enjoyed, thanks for reading