Chapter 65 - Knee-Deep In Dead Demons


"... let me get this straight." Jaune groaned in exasperation, rubbing his temples as the cyborg and the AI finished their discussion about the Dust-damned Helix Stone, and the Slayer looked at him with a mixture of sympathy and amusement (having had millennia to get used to the unreasonableness of the multiverse, and generally not caring as long as she could kill more demons anyway).

"After Hayden asked the pair of us to fight our way across the facility, just so that we could meet him in "person"... ignoring the fact we'd just gotten out of hell... he then used the element of surprise to install a prototype inter-dimensional tether into our suits, knowing that we wouldn't voluntarily allow its installation, right?"

Grunt. Nod.

"And now he wants us to rupture another Argent Accumulator, i.e. the source of that fucking tear in the fabric in reality over there, and create another portal, so that we can go back to Hell, and shut down the portals from their end?"

"..." The Slayer grunted again, throwing in a shrug to go with her nod this time.

Jaune's eye twitched as he glared at the giant floating stone in front of him, and kicked the console it was hovering over in frustration, before snapping: "What in Oum's name is wrong with this Dust-damned place?!"

The Slayer snorted in agreement, privately wondering what the hell the Seraphim was doing.

-HOLDING PEN 6, LAZARUS LABS, MARS, ONE LEVEL LATER-

"That, is Grimmshit!" Jaune bitterly complained in outrage, as the slowly-opening heavy-set doors were smashed apart by a massive hand, and he got his first look at Specimen CD-587.

"Big" did not do the cyborg-demon justice.

Neither did "massive".

Nor did "huge".

The thing peeking through the massive doors was probably taller than a Super Mutant behemoth.

Nope, definitely taller; Jaune noted with muted panic that he barely came up to its knee, as it slowly came into view.

Oum, he could really use a Fat Man right about now!

Or Liberty Prime; he'd happily throw Liberty Prime at whatever the hell this thing was!

His Aura screamed at him to put as much distance between him and that thing as he possibly could, and the small voice at the back of his head, who told him this was all far more than he'd ever bargained for, got all the more louder.

Instead, however, as it picked the Slayer up, power armor and all, and flung her across its pen like she was a ragdoll, Jaune rushed in, trying to remember the plan they'd agreed upon before the Slayer had unlocked the doors.

The Slayer, meanwhile, gritted her teeth and planted her feet, leaving skid marks on the floor as she forcibly killed her momentum.

The cybernetically-augmented and resurrected Baalgar demon took a second to study the foolish prey that had opened its cell, before recognition dawned in its eyes.

The air trembled and shook as the Cyberdemon bellowed at its killer, fury and rage beyond mortal comprehension filling its consciousness, as energy from the Argent Accumulator in its chest coursed through its body at the manipulations of the Aranea Imperatrix.

The Doom Slayer simply looked on, the being of transcendental fury and rage utterly unimpressed by the pathetic display of force.

Even if fear hadn't been long since burned out of her soul, even if she hadn't slain titans in single combat... the "Cyberdemon" in front of her was a far cry from the original ones she'd fought, in the First Age, in that First Battle.

The creature she'd slain at the Tower of Babel, and its kin that had unleashed Armageddon on her original home, had been much larger, and far more dangerous.

And the beast in front of her was just a juiced-up demon she'd already killed once before.

The demon levelled its arm cannon at her, determined to avenge itself.

The Slayer raised her shotgun in return, barrels spinning up, determined to kill it again, simply because it was a demon, a soulless husk, and thus enraged her by daring to exist.

Rockets began firing out of the cannon's barrel, one after the other with barely any pause.

The Slayer began charging forward, shotgun still aimed steadily at the massive demon as she dodged the barrage, before shell after shell began flying at it.

A continuous hail of buckshot peppered the creature's tough hide, failing to draw blood as Argent energy danced around it, absorbing the impacts.

The Slayer grunted in irritation, holstering the shotgun.

Clearly, she'd need some bigger guns.

As she pulled out the Chaingun, however, Specimen CD-587 roared once more, and multiple missiles suddenly flew upwards from its back, before turning around and slamming back into the ground around it.

She immediately tossed the heavy and cumbersome weapon aside, before leaping away as explosions rocked the floor around her.

The Cyberdemon didn't miss it's chance, and swiped at her with its biological right arm, a wave of Hell energy flying out from the talon over its hand at her.

Before it even came close to her, however, Jaune leapt out of his hiding spot and intercepted it, cutting through it with his dragonbone sword, his Aura coating the frost-covered blade and protecting it as the Argent energy washed over it.

The Slayer grunted at him, having spotted him in the corner of the massive room behind the Cyberdemon.

The Cyberdemon roared in frustration, refusing to be denied, and tried to skewer the new obstacle with the blade covering its right hand.

Jaune was forced back a few steps, as the

It swung its arm cannon at him, and he suddenly stopped resisting, instead ducking under the attack and rolling under its feet, much to its confusion.

An ominous green glow caught its attention, and it looked up to see the Slayer pointing a big fucking gun at its head,

She pulled the trigger.

A green orb of Argent energy flew towards the Cyberdemon.

As it neared its target, streams of energy began streaking out of the orb, attracted to the massive cache of Argent energy that was the ancient Baalgar demon.

The first three energy streams washed over the Argent protecting its body.

The fourth overloaded it.

The next sixty two released all of their stored energy in a fraction of a second, delivering an electrical shock that boiled the blood and fatty tissues and melted the metals within its body.

Then the orb slammed into its body, and detonated.

The Cyberdemon flew into the walls, creating a large dent in them.

Amazingly, though, despite all the abuse it had taken, the mangled creature was still alive, and it struggled to get up.

Then the Slayer put three rockets into its chest for good measure, and the Argent Accumulator within it finally cracked.

The creature clutched the crater in its chest in pain, as the flow of Argent energy that had been powering its body was suddenly cut off, and futilely tried to point its cannon at the Slayer one last time, before it finally toppled over lifelessly.

Jaune made his way to the Slayer's side, staring cautiously at the corpse as the Argent Accumulator in its chest began to glow red.

The Slayer, unable to help herself, clapped him in the back, acknowledging his contribution, before snorting in amusement as he gave her his most put-upon expression.

She knew that a love tap like that wouldn't be nearly enough to hurt him, after all.

Then the Argent Accumulator within its chest exploded, engulfing the room in a silvery-white light.

As the Slayer blinked, the familiar sickly yellow-brown shades of Hell greeted her, along with a groaning Jaune and the Baalgar's corpse.

"Oum, I hate dimensional travel..." Jaune muttered, fighting the urge to throw up. fighting down a growing migraine, wondering why this afterlife was just so unreasonable.

As the Slayer helped him to his feet. Hell screwed them over, to their complete and utter lack of surprise.

Lightning suddenly struck the Cyberdemon's corpse, where the Argent Accumulator had once been, while a pentagram burned into existence beneath it.

His Aura, completely freaking out about everything in the realm, once again didn't see fit to warn him as the smell of ozone and brimstone filled the area, noticeable even through his sealed helmet.

As the Cyberdemon resurrected itself once again, its mangled flesh knitting together and regenerating before their eyes while it shuddered and rose to its feet, Jaune had only one thing to say: "Oh, you have got to be kidding me!"

-TITAN'S REALM, HELL, ONE BOSS BATTLE LATER-

"..."

"..."

"... are you absolutely sure there's really no other way?" Jaune tried again, staring at the direction the Slayer was pointing at.

The Slayer grunted and nodded, before empathetically pointing in the same direction once again.

Jaune looked at the gaping maw she was pointing at, and tried again: "Can't we go around or something?"

The Slayer shook her head, before fixing a stare at him, and snorting, not seeing the problem.

Besides a non-negligible amount of demons who'd made a temple in its former body, she was sure the Titan's corpse was pretty safe (by Hellish-standards)!

After all, she'd been the one to kill the building-sized demon.

Honestly, the kid was just being such a baby...

Jaune gulped, and inched towards the giant skull jutting out of the ground, looking down into what had (presumably) been its mouth.

The darkness within seemed to stretch on forever.

It wasn't the fall that worried him, it was whatever might have survived in its guts.

Why was he about to jump down into the mouth of a demon who'd been the size of Liberty Prime again?

Oh, right, he got screwed over with his current afterlife.

Maybe we should just give up-

Before his subconscious could finish that thought, he suddenly felt something gripped his hand, and saw the Slayer linking her hand with his.

Jaune gulped as she fixed a look at him, his bad feeling only growing stronger.

He could almost see the grin under her reflective visor, as she turned back to the mouth, and her legs tensed.

Fortunately, his fall was broken by a Cacodemon that had the misfortune of floating under him, much to the Slayer's quiet amusement.

-NECROPOLIS, HELL, TWO LEVELS LATER-

The parasitic worm controlling the great biomechanical suit of bone and chitin writhed and screeched as it was cooked alive by the energies from its own staff, even as Jaune took a moment to catch his breath, and shake the blood off of his sword.

Something felt off.

This was supposed to be the Guardian of some ancient hellish artifact of unimaginable power, right?

The Slayer, for her part, finally released her hold on the Hell Guard's staff as it stopped jerking, and the demon toppled over with a satisfying thump to the ground while she turned to the kid.

He shared a long-suffering look with her, to which she responded with a snort and a shrug.

None of them even bothered to think it out loud.

Instead, they spent a moment looking around.

Then Jaune pointed to where he thought the next demon would rise from, and the Slayer pointed to her best guess.

And with that, Jaune finally jinxed it: "That was way too easy."

Immediately, a rumbling sound could be heard, and a fresh Hell Guard rose from each of the two different spots they were pointing to.

Jaune just rolled his eyes as he raised his sword and shield, and the Slayer just cracked her knuckles, eager to finally get it over and done with.


Author's Note: And here we go, with another short and relatively light-hearted chapter (well, as light-hearted as we can be in Hell, I suppose), as we near the end of the DOOM arc. And, once again, I reiterate that, as much as I love DOOM... my style of writing probably (really) isn't the best for translating it into a character-driven story. Sure, I can write a few action scenes, but if I transcribed all the action between scenes as well... well, it would get boring.

Also this is my explanation for why the demons in Doom and Doom 2 have such different backstories from the demons in DOOM. I shall not retcon either of them! Instead, both will be canon!

Basically, Revenants used to be demons who were killed and had their bodies shoved back into combat suits, and Cyberdemons used to be far more common (along with being much larger, and with rocket launchers for arms). However, seeing as how that was during the First Age, in the First Battle, when the Shadows First Lengthened... well, the Slayer's probably destroyed the facilities that mass-produced such cybernetic monstrosities, either by accident or on purpose, in the countless millennia of fighting that took place since then.

Also yeah... by this point in the story, Jaune is just rolling with the absurdity. It's only been a few hours, but he's just so utterly done with his current afterlife. It doesn't help that, according to Hayden in DOOM (2016), the Doom Slayer is the only flesh and blood to walk between dimensions. Hayden doesn't count because he has a cybernetic body, demons don't count because demons, and the UAC soldiers that went on the manned expeditions don't count because they didn't return. Long story short, travelling out of Hell seems to be very unpleasant... so Jaune's definitely not having a good time.