Sanguis ad Messem
No one quite understands when they showed up in Pride…
Heck, they might have been in Hell longer than anyone realized.
I remember when Mom and Dad first talked about them. They showed up in the outskirts of Pentagram City one day and quickly made their way in, killing anything that moved.
At first everyone thought they were a bunch of sinner that organized to try and take over the city and somehow made a bunch of really powerful weapons to do so.
Then, according to Dad, the really big ones came.
Half of Pentagram City was leveled by the time they retreated into the hellish wastes of the Pride ring.
I was young when I heard about all this, like ten or twelve, I can't remember.
Everyone thought that was the end of it, just come in and wreak the city and leave.
But it wasn't. They came back.
The same thing happened about two years after.
No one knew who they were and where they were coming from.
They didn't even speak.
They just came, destroyed, and left.
I thought that was the end of it.
I was in my twenties when I discovered that they weren't just coming in to attack Pentagram City.
No it was so much worse.
They were taking people, sinners, hellborne, anyone dead or alive.
Sinners in Hell couldn't die unless it was by the hands of the Exterminators from Heaven. If you killed a sinner with anything but angelic steel then they would come back, good as new. Hellborne weren't so lucky.
But for most of the sinners who were taken by them, they came back…broken.
Some would come back a few days after an attack; said they were killed not long after being abducted.
But they also said the bodies they took were taken for one thing.
Blood.
They wanted blood.
Everyone was confused as to why. The cannibals thought they were like them.
That wasn't right.
It wasn't until an Overlord by the name of Vox proposed a theory that they were machines.
No one believed him because when they attacked the denizens of Hell would of course fight back. Bullets didn't work on the big ones so well, but explosives did the trick. They could be wounded because they bled. What machine could bleed?
But a small one with a flamethrower was destroyed one day and they couldn't take the body back with them. And when people discovered it, they found out it was a machine, Vox had been right.
Then ten years after the first attack, a sinner reappeared. She was screaming bloody murder for days. More of them would start reforming as well. None of them were reportedly the same.
When my parents managed to get one of the newly reformed sinners for an interview, they…didn't expect what he had to say.
He told them that he was taken by one of the ones that kinda looked like old diving suits with weird metal coffins on their backs that no one could guess a use for. Well turns out, they put people in them.
That sinner was trapped in one of those metal coffins for ten years…ten years. And the reason? His blood.
Blood.
They wanted blood.
They where machines that ran off of blood.
Who in their right mind would make something like that!?
Things got even more confusing when one year.
When the extermination was called and Heaven descended on Pride once more, the machines showed up.
It wasn't to attack Pride this time, no. The machines came to defend the city from the Exterminators.
They fired on the angels with their weapons and ignored the panicking sinners in the city. None of the angels died, nothing from Hell can kill an angel, but they managed to tie down a large portion of Exterminators which spared a larger number of sinners than ever before.
The machines took a lot of casualties doing so.
And then they left.
Nothing about them made sense.
And the machines kept doing this every year. Every extermination since.
Heaven got mad at Dad, but he just waved them off.
"It's not my fault that you can't fend off a bunch of sinners. Maybe you just need to try harder next time." My dad told them.
It was during one E-Day that Mom realized what the machines were doing.
"They're protecting their crops."
I was horrified.
I begged them to do something about it. Pleaded with them that no one deserved to be tortured like that.
Dad eventually decided "I'll see what I can do."
He left one day to confront the machines, but he came back wounded and bleeding!
Dad said that when he found where the machines were hiding they attacked him imminently. He fought them off and destroyed a lot of them and he would have been fine, but then the giant machines appeared. He said they towered over everything and were covered in weapons.
He couldn't get close to them; they never gave him a moment to breath.
When they downed him briefly he said the machines tried to capture him alive. It was then he fled.
Dad was furious for a while, but there was little he could do for now.
Years passed and a new rhythm in Hell set in.
Every few years the machines would attack Pride killing and taking whoever they could. E-Day also continued, but the Exterminators got even more blood thirsty as they would always get into huge fights with the machines.
It was like that for a while until the machines killed an Exterminator.
Well, no one was sure which of the machines did it, but that didn't matter: an Exterminator, an angel, had died.
In response, Heaven increased the number of Exorcists that attacked Hell which lead the machines to bring more of themselves into conflict.
I still remember the first time I saw those giants striding through Pentagram City as it burned.
But violence begets violence and things just kept escalating.
There was so much suffering, so much pain.
No one deserved this.
MY people didn't deserve this!
It was the reason I came up with the idea to redeem sinners to Heaven. The only place where the machines couldn't get to them and where Heaven wouldn't hunt them.
But things didn't go as I hoped.
My parents separated after nearly ten thousand years.
I couldn't get in contact with Mom.
My dad didn't believe in my dream.
All of Hell thought I was a naïve idiot that was just chancing rainbows.
Heaven outright rejected my idea.
And even the people around me didn't think I could do this.
Hell is forever, he told me.
It's not! I know it's not!
When I brought my case to the council of Heaven I was ignored and stopped at every turn.
They didn't get it: people could change! I showed them proof!
But the council didn't care and now the Exterminators where going to destroy everything I worked on. They wanted to destroy my dream.
….
….
"I guess that's what brought me here now," I said as I looked up to see the mass of machines surrounding me.
They were quiet. They didn't talk and only a few made any kind of noise, but they weren't words.
I could feel the nervous sweat falling down my head but I kept my face determined and stood my ground.
"Please, help me protect my dream! You fight them every year, so please help me defend my people!" I shouted at the quiet congregation of blood fueled metal surrounding me.
They did nothing for a long time. Maybe I should have asked the cannibals.
It was then that a machine approached me. It had a head of metal like the rest, but possessed a feminine turquoise body with a number of moving metal tentacles from its back. The machine floated forward and stopped a few feet in front of me.
Then it spoke in the artificial voice of a woman. "G IVE U S HEA VEN'S BLO OD."
I stared straight into the vertical slit that I assumed was its eye and parted my lips to respond.
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….. COMPLETE
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"…and can you take a look at these mechanics! There ain't nothin' like dis I guarantee it!"
"I know 1! And the paint job too! It looks good with a nice dark blue with the yellow lights. Bit weird it has wings, but can't say it doesn't pull it off!"
"Yep! Never would I have thought that a machine could run off of blood of all things. Bet the lab boys'll enjoy looking into this, 2."
"Oh I'm sure, but remember what the boss said: This thing needs to stay intact. Says that they might be able to get this thing up and running again if our initial scans are anything to go by."
"Yeah, yeah, Iz rememba. Hold on there something underneath some of this dirt here."
"What'd ya find?"
"Looks like some kinda model number. Let's see here."
"V.1"
"Wonder what that means?"
Ultrakill has been a brain worm for a while now. Gave me the crazy ideas.
Kinda supprised that no one has really done a Hazbin Hotel/Helluva Boss crossover with Ultrakill. You could do a lot with it. So I decided that I'd play around a quick style one shot here. Listened to Heaven Pierce Her - Danse Macabre the whole time i wrote this. LMAO
Had fun with this one, let me know what you guys think.