Author's Notes: Apologies for the lateness of this chapter, I got caught up in this and that, and wouldn't have been able to do it without rushing, which is usually bad for the quality of the writing. It's here now though, and I hope it was worth the wait :D. A little in-joke for those who own DMC3, go to level 8, and look in the background at the beginning, you'll know what I mean ;)...
----
Deep in the bowels of the demon tower, a ritual most sinister and twisted was being carried out in darkness.
"That's it boys, you like to fight don't you? Like to cause each other pain, like it rough!" a female voice bellowed with sadistically enthralled command from the shadows. Reluctantly, bodies and spirits bent to this unwilling task, her captives complied, grunting in pain as they thrust at one another with their weapons.
Having led the imagination to the precipice of madness, we look no further, lest the rating of this story fall into the abyss. Harbouring this glimpse at the heart of damnation, we turn to those bent on thwarting it…
----
High above the buried tomb of stone and earth where desecrating acts torment imprisoned souls, a plane sours through skies tainted dark, even so far away. Within it rests perhaps the last hope for the world itself.
"Ahah, I've got it!" one of the three saviours suddenly declares, his two companions looking up at him in surprise. With elated enthusiasm the inspired one collects several items and lays them according to his plan.
"… And, Y, there, jellybean!" Zone declares with satisfaction, rubbing his paws together gleefully. Before him lay a Scrabble board, to which he had added the letters J, E, L, another L, and a Y, the rodent having to carry the pieces in his paws and set them down in place one at a time. His contribution prefixed the word BEAN Arson had laid down earlier, and the J had managed to work its way onto one of the coveted triple word score spaces. "Haha, beat that" Zone said confidently as Reiko calculated and wrote down his score.
"That's, 192 points" Reiko said after figuring it out, looking at the celebrating Zone, then turning to Arson. "I think he's beating us" the vampire stated, the rodent's score having just about doubled in a single move.
"No fair, he stole my bean" the hybrid complained, glaring at his pieces like they were a four letter word, reproachful of their betrayal. The way they played Scrabble all bonuses were cumulative, so since bean had covered the triple word score along one side, and jelly got the corner, Zone had scored a 9 times multiplier.
"It's your go now, Arson" Reiko reminded, allowing the hamster his celebrations, since he respected the highly effective tactical move he'd pulled off. The vampire had been leading the game with several good words such as morose, dichotomy (prefixing a "my" already in play), and bubblegum (suffixing "bubble").
"My turn my turn!" Arson cheered, misery instantly forgotten as he set down his sandwich and scrutinised the board and his letters with shrewd analysis. As he did this, Reiko gazed out of the window in reflection.
They were back in the DMC3 fandom by now, the vampire was fairly certain, and he mused over how much had changed, silently praying they weren't too late. The flight had been unsettlingly quiet to begin with, with few other passengers onboard, and there had been occasional discussion of what lay ahead, but there was little to talk about. The premise was simple; it was the execution that would prove challenging.
Eventually, Zone had grown annoyed at the atmosphere and had hot-headedly promoted them to business class. Reiko had complained, but the rodent wouldn't bow to reason and they had ended up wandering into the midsection of the plane. It turned out to be even emptier than the back, and no one had minded them taking one of the tables, and they had. They came to the half-spoken conclusion that there was no point in lingering on the imminent, and decided it was best to stay relaxed and enjoy themselves while they could. Thus they had ended up playing one of their habitual pastimes, Scrabble, which the plane conveniently had.
Reiko was broken out of his reverie by the sound of Arson and Zone arguing. "Sheeps is not a word, sheep is the plural of sheep!" the rodent yelled, glaring at the hybrid, who was leaning over to return the gesture.
"Aha, that's where you're wrong! I did biology in school and sheep are not asexual, you need a mommy and daddy sheep to make baby sheep!" Arson rebuked, grinning smugly as if he'd just played a trump card.
Reiko rolled his eyes and turned away from the window to break them up, before the inevitable fight began. Despite the latter's physical puniness, Arson and Zone never really hurt each other badly, but the collateral could be quite severe. Just as he was about to speak however, the plane shuddered, and the PA came to life.
"Sorry about that disturbance ladies and gentlemen, just some minor turbulence, nothing to-oh shit!" the pilot's voice abruptly cut off. At the same time as the announcement ended, a shadow passed over the trio.
"Huh?" Reiko muttered, perplexed, and he turned to look out the window from which the light had ceased to come. But whatever had blocked out the sun was gone, nothing visible but it, the sky and the right wing.
"This is creepy" Arson whimpered, reaching for his sandwich lying on the table, for moral support. It was a sandwich that he was destined never to finish.
With an ear-splitting screech the entire craft shook and jarred to the side, Reiko and Arson gripping their seats and Zone being flung into the ruined Scrabble game. Rubbing his head he sat up, and saw some letters in front of him that had been knocked to loosely form the word "CRAP", ironically echoing his thoughts.
"No, my BLT!" Arson cried in despair, reaching out for his Bacon, Like, Totally sandwich, which had slid towards the window. His fingertips brushed against it, but then with the scream of tortured metal, the hull around it and them buckled and began to rip away, Reiko grabbing him and Zone, and diving into the aisle.
Turning around, they were treated to a rare spectacle as a chunk of the plane was ripped off, and watched as it disappeared down the giant gullet of what looked like a monstrous whale, flying along beside the aircraft.
"Leviathan…" Reiko whispered awed in horror, recognising the demonic weapon buried with the Temen-Ni-Gru. He and Zone were clutching onto the seats in the middle of the aisle, but slowly Arson stood up.
A fiery rage smouldered in the eyes of the hybrid, and a primal growl resonated up from his chest into his throat. There was a fierce burning in his heart, a burning that screamed in fury, a burning that cried out for revenge, for retribution. "That, was, my… SANDWICH!" the hybrid shouted as he was surrounded by a blazing inferno. With a deafening roar, a solid pillar of fire erupted forth from him, wider than he was tall, and burst through the open wound in the side of the plane, straight into the still open maw of the Leviathan.
In the vast, lumbering mind of the gargantuan beast, a ponderous thought registered, a concept the brain had not encountered before. Spicy, it thought to itself, naming the sensation, and it gave a satisfied belch.
Panting from the amount of power he'd just unleashed, the hybrid gagged as a putrid stench washed back in through the hole, the titanic burp so potent it physically repelled the plane away on the air currents. Reiko choked and hastily rose to his feet, ripping away two of the dangling breathing apparatus that had been dropped over the seats in case of emergency. Giving one to Arson, he put it over his mouth as a primitive gas mask, the hybrid doing the same. Looking down to Zone, he was relieved to see that the rodent had dissected a passing serviette and wrapped a torn off piece around his head and muzzle, forming a face-rag.
"We need to get to the parachutes!" Reiko yelled through his mask as the half-crippled plane shuddered.
"Are you insane?!" Zone yelled at the vampire, "You want to dangle around on a parachute in the open air like fishing bait? Why stop there, I'll stick a fork in my furry ass and we'll line up on a buffet table for it!".
Reiko cursed irritably, not appreciating the hamster's sarcasm, but grudgingly conceding that he had a point. Parachutes were not the answer, not with the Leviathan picking snacks out of the air. As the plane began to corkscrew, unbalanced by the loss of one wing, the vampire took desperate measures. Wrenching the chair besides him out of the floor, he grabbed the others and along with the seat, dived out of the hole.
"Couldn't bear to leave business class behind could you?" Zone asked rhetorically as they sailed atop the seat into the open sky. Reiko would have rebuked him, but in truth he was making this up as he went along.
"At least the view is nice" Arson remarked as they hung thousands of feet over the city. The cloudy scenery would have been serene if they weren't dropping through it like a stone. However, this wasn't the worst of their problems, as the remaining wing of the spinning plane rose up under them like a giant steel flyswatter.
"Oh…" Reiko muttered in awkward concern. The normally calculating vampire had been too rushed to foresee this particular risk of jumping out the hole made by a missing wing when the plane was spinning.
"Shit" Arson added, the normally clean-mouthed hybrid summarising what they were in a great quantity of.
As the wing arced up to bring their diverging voyage into one-seated aviation to a sudden conclusion, there was a flash of light and suddenly they were jerked to the side. With a stomach-lurching sense of mass and inertia, the wing swept narrowly passed them, sending the trio tumbling, struggling to hold onto each other.
Reiko eventually managed to bring the chair he still wasn't sure why he was hanging onto under control, Arson clutched to his back. He looked back to see Zone gripping the hybrid's coat, laser gun in one paw. The rodent had cut the recoil suppressor and used a burst of energy to shove them out of the wing's path.
"Nice work" Reiko complemented breathlessly, impressed by and grateful for the hamster's quick thinking.
"Thanks" Zone replied with a grin. "Our success is still up in the air though" he added, punning even at a time like this. He had been about to shoot the wing itself, but the mental image of the broken off section spiralling into them anyway had prompted the normally headstrong hamster to pick a less direct approach.
Reiko looked past him to see the Leviathan circle round to finish off the plane. He suddenly thought of the other passengers worriedly. However as he watched, he saw several specks leave the craft, those capable of flight carrying the rest. With a pang of guilt Reiko realised it might have been best to stay and ask for help, but it was too late now, and as the plane was devoured he focused on fixing the problem he'd got them into.
"Hey, um, mister Reiko sir" Arson was tapping him on the shoulder frantically, trying to get his attention.
"What is it?" Reiko asked, turning round, and following the hybrid's pointing arm, which eliminated the need to ask. Their turbulent escape had given them a good deal of horizontal velocity to complement their vertical momentum. The resulting angle was sending them straight towards the side of the Temen-Ni-Gru.
"This is not going well" Reiko admitted as the demon tower filled their immediate future at an alarming pace. Looking to his comrades, he stared at Zone hopefully, but the rodent looked at him incredulously.
"You've got to be kidding!" Zone answered the unspoken question, "I could stop myself with a laser burst, but our combined weight must be hundreds of times my own. There's no way I can cancel out that inertia!".
Reiko's hopeful expression fell as quickly as they were upon hearing this, although it was some consolation that Zone had made no mention or sign of abandoning them, despite admitting he was able to save himself.
"But I've been on the Weight Watchers program, and I really stuck to it!" Arson wailed loudly in protest.
His mind working overtime, Reiko tried to come up with a way out of this, as the shadow of the tower fell over them. Concocting a desperate plan, he angled the seat down, using it to crudely surf the air and make their plummet more vertical and less horizontal.
"Oh great, so rather than splatting against the side of the tower, we'll crash at the base. At least it'll save people the effort of burying our bodies" Zone rambled sarcastically, venting some of his nervous energy.
Reiko ignored his criticisms, understanding the rodent was quite reasonably terrified, focusing on angling them as best he could, given their crude aerodynamics. "Arson, use your swords!" he called out suddenly.
Arson looked down at him in panicked confusion, and then up at the rough surface of the tower rushing past them, only about thirty feet away. As they came closer, he suddenly understood, and drew his swords.
As the tower's surface came within ten feet of them, Reiko gripped the seat with his legs and drew his staff. At five feet, he thrust it out, and his arms jarred with the impact as it skimmed against the hard wall of the tower. In the window of time this bought, Arson stabbed Dragon and Phoenix forwards, sinking them into the side of the Temen-Ni-Gru. The stone continued to blur past and the teenager's muscled bunched with the effort of hanging on, the insane heat of the friction at least no concern to him or his fire-attuned blades.
They scraped a sparking trail down the side of the tower, Reiko having managed to angle them for a line of descent between the odd window-like depressions in its surface. They were slowing down bit by bit, but they were going to run out of before the hybrid won his battle against gravity with their combined weight.
As the ground loomed up, Zone muttering something lost in the rushing wind about too many large things looming at them today, Reiko called out to Arson. "Give us a boost away from the tower!" he instructed.
Arson nodded, too focused on not losing his grip to question the command, and with a grunt he channelled his energy through the blades. Moments later, as they dropped below the one hundred feet altitude mark, a powerful blast of fire erupted from the twin swords, propelling them away from the tower like a jet engine.
"Hold on tight" Reiko grunted, yanking Arson down and holding onto him and the seat, Zone having had a revelation that he needed to be secure now, and subsequently he had scurried into one of Reiko's pockets.
The hybrid's blast hadn't been enough to counter their descent directly, but by angling it to the side, it had transferred most of their momentum into the horizontal. As they arced out on a trail of flame from the Temen-Ni-Gru, the urban sprawl rose up, and met them.
The seat they'd been riding the whole time screeched in protest as it skidded along a rooftop, the material being burnt away by the friction as they ploughed up rubble. With a sickening lurch they shot off the side of the building, sailed for a brief moment over a street, and continued skimming across the next building.
This continued for several rooftops, the seat being built to survive a crash, but a crash while still inside the aircraft it had been taken from. They were able to burn off a considerable amount of momentum as they bobsleighed across the city roofs, but were still going damn fast when they ran out of improvised runway…
----
Zone awoke with that same creeping horror that curdles the soul of a straight man when he wakes up after a party to find himself in bed next to his best male friend, both of them naked. The only difference was rather than regaining consciousness to find he'd had homosexual intercourse, Zone awoke with an ugly headache.
"Owww, my pain hurts" the rodent winced, tenderly rubbing his head and opening his eyes, both moves he regretted. His entire skull stung, and it took a while for his vision to compose itself into anything but blurs.
When it finally did, the sight that greeted him challenged his already shaky state of mind on several levels. Some kind of angelic figure seemed to be standing over him, and the hamster was faced with a question. "I'm dead?" he thought out loud, and then chuckled, "Hehe, I was worried I was due for the other place".
"Well, if it isn't my favourite flammable pervert" the figure said, and Zone thought it was an odd thing for an angel to say. Come to think of it, there was a thing or two out of place about the divine being, the rodent began to notice. For example, it seemed unusually heavily armed, with human-looking firearms no less. On top of that, while Zone was sure angels were meant to be pretty, he was less certain they should be so, sexy.
"Mm, are you allowed to get horny in the afterlife?" the hamster asked as a white smudge resolved itself into a rather sizeable pair of breasts. In answer to his question, the angel held up something black, and the ground near Zone's head exploded, the sudden noise and force clearing his clouded mind in record time.
"I'd be happy to help you find out" the figure responded icily, and in a couple of blinks Zone found he was staring up at Lady, specifically, up the barrel of one of her pistols. He suddenly regretted thinking out loud.
At this point there was a moan and a rumble, and hamster and demon hunter alike turned to the large pile of rubble filling half the street. Several slabs of concrete and stone displaced themselves, and from underneath arose Reiko, the vampire looking terribly stereotypical as he rose from the ground moaning and staggering.
"Ah, the light, it burns" he complained, shielding his eyes from the sun. He rubbed them, and they slowly adjusted to the light. He stumbled off of the rocks and looking around, spotting Lady, and then Zone, glad the latter was alive, but more worried by the expression the former wore than the gun she was pointing at him. "Hello Lady" he said sheepishly, like a child caught making a mess, which wasn't far from the truth.
"Hello" she replied with curt exasperation, lowering her guns as if disappointed she'd bothered to raise them in the first place. "I won't ask about the mess, I'm too tired to here an explanation" she said wearily, looking between Zone and Reiko, and realised something. "Wasn't there three of you last time?" she asked.
As if in answer to this, a noise emanated from the building the pile of rubble was heaped against. It came out of a first story window that looked like something had smashed through it fast, and sounded oddly, like a flushing toilet. Suddenly Arson's head bobbed into view and he waved to them, "Be right down!" he said.
A minute later, and the hybrid walked out from the semi-demolished front of the building, the door falling off its hinges as he opened it. Blushing bashfully at this, he scooted over to Reiko, standing besides him with his head lowered and his hands behind his back, hoping he wasn't in trouble for breaking anything.
Lady gave him a tired expression, and there was a general fatigue about her that became more apparent every moment she stood there. "Are you all alright?" she asked eventually, skipping the sharp remarks.
The three of them checked themselves, and while there was a good deal of torn clothing, frayed hair and messed up fur, miraculously they had sustained no serious injuries. There was a lot of aches, and numerous sores and pains, but their bodies had had some time to recover while they lay unconscious in the aftermath of their landing. They were still stiff, but moving was beginning to walk that off and overall they were fine.
"Alright, come with me then" Lady instructed them briskly after they finished checking themselves. "It's not safe to hang around in the open. A lot has happened since you left, we'll get back to camp and then I'll fill you in" she told them as they followed her, wincing as their bodies recovered from the crash landing…