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The Devil May Care

Part 32

For DuskCypher

By Draconicon

As they hovered at the edge of the realm of Gluttony, right where they could see everything and all their weapons could be seen, Dusk made his decision. The black cat, the second Satan in all but name, moved to the front of the cockpit and sat beside his bodyguard. Arnis arched an eyebrow at him as he reached for the command console of the plane, pulling the speaker cord and dragging a microphone to his lips.

"Attention," he said, letting the echo of his words fade outside before continuing. "This is Dusk Von Doom speaking. Those of you that know the name know what it means. I have come here to punish Brutus Diel for all that he has done, and the trespasses against myself and the other realms of Hell that he has committed. If you choose to stand with him, you will be as utterly destroyed as his realm will be.

"I am giving you five minutes to disperse. Run. Run as far and as fast as you can from the House of Diel, and you will be spared. Stay, and you will see my full power put on display.

"The countdown starts now."

He put the microphone down, leaning back in his seat with his arms crossed. He didn't like waiting, but he knew that this was the only way to keep the realm of Gluttony from completely turning on him after he took care of Brutus. The big boar needed to be brought low, but if he didn't do this right, then the entire realm would rise up against him as soon as his back was turned. It was hard enough to keep control of Hell as it was with just one big demon set against him. Having all of Brutus's officers set against him after this would make it all the more impossible.

Dusk gritted his teeth as he imagined how much better this was supposed to be. He had the power of the devil himself. That was supposed to grant him a life of ease in the mortal world, give him the power to do what he wanted, as he wanted, to anyone and anything. Instead, he had been dragged into the power struggle for a realm that he didn't care about, and set against the powers that be in a way that utterly distracted him from his pleasures.

This was supposed to be fun. It no longer was.

"Sure that giving them time to prepare is a good idea, boss?" Arnis asked.

"It's not smart, but it will save us time in the future."

Looking over his shoulder at Ornar, he could tell that the black orc had some approval of the action. Much as they all hated Brutus Diel, it was better to take this slowly. Politically speaking, it was the right move. Just not necessarily militarily.

He won't be able to take us down. That much he was sure of. Their plane was surrounded by drones, and the power that he was drawing on, the sins of Pride, Greed, and Envy, were creating more and more with each passing second. The power of Wrath allowed them the chance to create powerful weapons, including miniature versions of nukes that spun around the plane, waiting to be deployed. And that discounted the power that he, Ornar, and Arnis wielded individually.

Three minutes, he thought, looking down at the landscape. The household and the demons within it were so far off that one could barely see them, but he could make out the little dots of some of the demons fleeing. They ran in the opposite direction of the plane, likely fleeing to other realms of Hell, trying to find sanctuary well away from the weapons that he had brought to bear for the war.

Some of them have some little intelligence...or are just cowards. Either way, they'll live to fight another day...

Hopefully on his side, but he wouldn't hold his breath. Gluttony, the realm of ambition as much as Pride was, though of a very different sort. They never stayed down for long.

As they reached the two-minute point, the sides of the distant House of Diel changed. Stone figures came to life, gargoyles that were slowly flexing their wings. They took to the air, and for a moment, he thought that they might be flying the other way.

They were not.

"Well, looks like someone's not taking the deal," Arnis muttered. "Coulda called that one."

"We never expected him to, but it makes us look better to offer it," Dusk muttered.

"So, what do ya want me to do, boss?"

"Loose drones. And start the barrage."

"Even with two minutes left?" Ornar asked.

"He started this," Dusk said. "If he wants to cut the timer short, they can blame him."

Brutus stood on the roof of his own House, his spellslingers and gargoyles active for the first time in centuries. For all that he believed that there was a chance to win against Dusk, he wasn't going to start slow and build up. He needed to break his opponent, and he needed to do it before he could loose those weapons. They were different to the various tools that the demons had used for millenia, and he knew for a fact that they were different to the weapons of the world above.

What did you make, you little shit? he wondered.

The gargoyles took flight, rising through the air and flying towards the plane in the distance. From where he stood, the boar could just barely feel the hunger that burned in the belly of the black cat, a hunger that he had felt when they'd first met, a hunger that was as fulsome as it was deadly.

He still didn't know just what Dusk wanted, which was rare for him. A demon of Gluttony specialized in knowing the hungers of others and knowing how to tempt and feed that sin. It was something that they did just to survive. Yet, here, and every other time that he had met Dusk, he had not been able to draw out the exact hungers that the cat felt. He knew that there was the need for power, the need for strength, the need for freedom and sex and everything else that the cat pursued, but there was no clear path.

You want the throne's power, but not its responsibilities. You want the subjects, but not the obligations. You want everything, and yet...

It was a foggy mess, but if he was confused by it, he imagined that his enemy was no less confused. Brutus hoped that he could take advantage of that in this battle.

The gargoyles swarmed in the air, only to be met by strange, whirring things. Drones, he knew, but different to the drones that the mortals used. Not little things with cameras, but rather dashing, bullet-spitting things that raked through his gargoyles with surprising power. If it hadn't been for the sheer might that he had purchased from Greed and Wrath to empower their stone, they might not have lived through the first wave of attacks.

Still, it was enough to keep the miniature death machines from swarming down over his lands and dispensing their destruction as they wished. He nodded at the minor demons and his officers, the spellslingers, as they took their positions on the edges of his House and its walls. They raised their hands, furred, clawed, and scaled fingers pointing at the sky and unleashing Hellfire, black balls of destruction flinging through the air at the plane.

At the same time, it released its payload, and Brutus could not have imagined what the first missile that slipped through the net could have done.

#

The explosion shook the world beneath them, and even so far up as they were, Dusk and the passengers on the plane felt the shockwaves. The black cat grabbed the arms of his chair as he was almost shaken from it, staring out the window to see the crater and the miniature canyon that the nuclear missile had created below them.

Well, the payload's good enough...

Now they just had to get the blasts through. That was one missile out of a hundred on the bombing run that had actually gotten through the black balls of fire that were coming their way. Ninety-nine had been blown up before they got anywhere close to the ground, which meant that the air was filled with the effects of radiation and whatever else he had managed to pump into the nukes.

Thankfully, for the three of them, that was little more than a tingle of pressure on the edge of awareness. They were all hardy enough to take that. However, it wasn't going to be enough to get just one blast through. He needed to hit Brutus with more than that.

"Alright...Arnis, Ornar, can you handle the drones for a moment?"

"Yeah, boss. What's the plan?"

"I'm going to see just how good his spellslingers are."

He closed his eyes, and he pulled on the power of Wrath again, but this time, twisting it with the power of Envy. There, there it was. Not just the power to break and twist and destroy, but the envy of being around someone that was better, the petty spitefulness to find a way through their superiority. All it would take was a little, something to twist the power that he was using, something to make it harder to stop.

The missiles spawned again, then doubled. One hundred became two hundred, and they were loosed from the plane. The balls of Hellfire came faster, harder, blowing up the heads of the missiles, no longer keeping up just as they were leaving the plane. Some traveled further, some blowing up just behind the gargoyles, and some fell towards the great canyons and blasted lands of Gluttony, taking off the tops of hills and coming close to scarring the land.

None of them hit hard enough to actually do what the first one had done, but he knew that he was pushing the spellslingers hard. They were throwing everything that they had at him, trying to bring down the missiles in ways that would keep them from doing as much damage rather than trying to keep them from doing any damage. They had no power to throw at him directly while they were dealing with the payload that he was dropping on them.

So, he pushed them again. He grinned slowly as he tripled the load. One hundred, two hundred, three hundred missiles that appeared in a circle around the plane. They were spinning like an angelic halo of wrath, pointed and tipped with destruction.

For a moment, he almost thought that he could feel the fear in the distance before he let them loose. They shot out from around the plane, arcing through the air. He could have dropped them straight below him, blasted the ground and the demons that were gathering there, but he decided to use them to break the spirits of the spellslingers, to leave them shaken, to show them that they needed more than their magic to stop him.

The missiles exploded as they flew from the plane, filling the air with miniature mushroom clouds as they were detonated here, there, everywhere. The fallout drifted down, burning the lands, turning Gluttony's few rich areas into desolated badlands. Dusk pushed the missiles harder, guiding them with his mind, detonating their fuel cores to make them fly faster. The spellslingers had only taken half of them, and the missiles were more than three quarters of the way to the House of Diel.

Just when it was almost at the point of blowing the house up, the gargoyles turned, flying at a speed that he would not have expected of them, and intercepted the remaining missiles. They pulled at the metal rods, dragging them up, taking them to the sky as the spellslingers lost the ability to keep up with so many at once.

Of course, with their backs turned, it was the perfect time for the drones to take their chance. They flew up behind the gargoyles, their bullets - enchanted and stronger than ever after the first wave - ripping through the stone bodies of the flying beasts. The missiles and the gargoyles plummeted to the ground, exploding in small craters around the House of Diel.

"He's not going to recover from this," Ornar muttered.

"Maybe, maybe not, but I'm going to make sure that he learns where he belongs. Today."

"What's next, then?"

"Arnis, do we have air superiority now?"

"Heh, long as we keep pumping out drones, we do."

"Give us a bombing run. Clear us a space to land, and then set the plane to auto-pilot."

"Oh ho ho, we're going in proper, huh?"

"You bet we are..."

Brutus Diel could hardly believe what he was seeing. The power of his spellslingers had been legendary throughout the realms of Hell. They had fended off some of the greatest powers that old Lucifer had sent against him in the past, and had been instrumental in maintaining what independence he had. Now, they were all but ripped apart, exhausted from the fight that had taken less than a minute.

How does he...

It was the power of the second Satan, he realized. Dusk had all the powers of Hell, all the different Sins at his disposal. Of all of them, he could create and manipulate things faster and with more variety than any demon could individually. He lacked the masterwork of the Hellsmiths, and he lacked the utter devastation of the greatest of the Wrath demons, but for what he lacked in specialization, he more than made up with in raw flexibility. He could literally do anything that Brutus could do, anything that the various realms could do, and switch from one to another on the fly.

And now, without the spellslingers to fend off the missiles, without the gargoyles to deal with the drones that had been deployed, his demons were helpless against the next bombardment. He stared into the distance, watching as the bombs and missiles fell. In that moment, the realm of Gluttony turned white.

Dusk was almost blinded by the explosions, but the key word was almost. He could see the death and destruction that he had leveled on the realm of Gluttony and its inhabitants, though, and knew that it was only a precursor to what he could do if he was really pissed off.

He stood up from his seat, going to the rear of the plane where the loading ramp was. Arnis was already guiding them to a lower altitude, getting ready for the drop, and Ornar was already there at the back of the plane waiting for him. The black-skinned orc smiled, his jockstrap tented slightly from the display of power. Or at least, that was what Dusk assumed was going on.

"Ready for a fight, then?"

"I haven't had a chance to indulge in a more physical fight for some time. It will be interesting to see if I've lost my touch," Ornar said.

"Do you have a weapon?"

The orc snapped his fingers, and a black, barbed whip appeared in his hand. He flexed it from side to side, and even on the light swings, it cracked hard. Ornar smiled.

"A little bit mild, but it will do."

"Mild, hmm?"

"A weapon of lust and control rather than death and destruction, but I think that it will get the job done."

"Wielded by you, I'm sure of it."

The orc's boner twitched slightly, and he chuckled. Ornar really was an interesting one.

Arnis joined them, the wrath demon calling up a gatling gun out of nowhere. Dusk arched an eyebrow, and the bear demon shrugged.

"Hey, I got some modern stuff, too."

"Is that all the modern stuff you have?"

"Well, special bullets and shit, too."

"That'll do."

He flexed his fingers, cracking his knuckles as he dragged his sword from his sheath. The blade given to him by Hellsmith would be particularly good for this. He wanted the entirety of Hell to see what happened when you pushed him the wrong way. He wanted them to realize and understand the error of Brutus Diel's ways.

He wanted them to see him for the man he was. The one that would take no shit, and the one that did what he wanted, regardless of the costs.

"Alright. Open the hatch."

Ornar hit the button, and the landing ramp descended. The world below was on fire, and in a very different way to the usual. Instead of the thick red and black flames that burned in the other realms, Gluttony was burning with flames of white and yellow, something that burned and ravaged them to a point of being utterly uninhabitable.

You will never again rise to oppose me...

Thankfully, it was only on the outlands that he had struck this hard, somewhere past the core of the Gluttony realm, but it would keep them from rising up. The people could live in the core, could do what they could to be well-enough off, but he had shattered Diel and his successors' ability to wage war, to have the surplus that they needed to fight him directly.

And now, it was time to show them what would happen when they challenged him.

Looking at the demons still on the road to the House of Diel, Dusk pointed his sword down at them. The runes along the blade glowed, and then...he jumped.

As he fell through the air, he gathered not just the power of the Sins, but the power of the Devil's Aura. The great, black, fiery pit of power that lay in the depth of Lucifer's soul, the power that had been given to him when he took it, the raw strength that came to dominate all life that crossed his path, and more. That was the power of the Devil's Aura, and he could almost see the black energy that streamed off of him as he fell. The only light around him came from the runes on his blade, picking up the energy of them falling, the kinetic energy building up more and more as he came closer and closer to the ground.

Finally, he hit earth, and the energy was released. The explosion rippled through the ground, creating a crater as large as the one the first nuclear bomb had made. He leaped upwards, launching himself into the air before coming down on the first goat-like demon, the impact of rising and falling making the blow all the stronger. The goat's head popped like a melon, blowing chunks all around them.

The other demons were too stunned to immediately fight back, and he smiled.

I guess it's time to see what this power can really do...

He had flexed the Devil's Aura a few times, pushing it out against those that stood against him. Once he had done it to an angel, and several times against Mercy, testing her before he realized the power that she could bring against him. Those had all been limited by being in the mortal world, however, around those that might have been rather damaged by what he did. Down here, nobody cared. Down here, he was essentially able to do whatever he wanted.

So, he let it out. The darkness spread in his eyes, flooding through the earth, through the air, arcing out as a bubble-like, expanding wall around him, while dark energy arced like lightning from demon to demon. They stiffened, eyes wide as he exerted his power over them, showing off his control, and more, showing them what they were to him: pathetic little insects that could be crushed at any time.

He felt them beneath him, and he clenched his fist. All seven Sins combined into utter destruction in the first rank of demons around him, exploding in a shower of blood, flesh, and bone, and they disappeared in a mist of utter obliteration.

Dusk slowly raised his sword to the next rank, smiling at them. They fell back a step before his power, and again when he took a step forward, raising their own weapons of spears and swords and weak little weapons that they had to realize threatened him not at all.

"Heh..."

He smiled, and then snapped his fingers. Arnis landed beside him, hefting the gatling gun.

"You mind, boss?"

"Not at all."

"Heh...I've been waiting to test out this baby..."

The demons almost relaxed. Almost. They didn't have time to finish going from confused to terrified before Arnis let loose with his gun.

The bullets flew like a storm of knives, except that no blade could have cut through so many demons at once as the gun did. The demons fell backwards, dropping like flies as Arnis cut them down with a laugh that could only come from a demon of Wrath. He walked forward slowly, sweeping his gun from side to side as the demons tried and failed to storm through his bullets.

With the Devil's Aura at full force, he could feel each one as they fired. They were all enhanced with Arnis's own strength as a Wrath demon, but that would have been merely dangerous, not utterly deadly as these were. But with the enhancements that came from being so close to him for so long...well, there was nothing that would stand up to them in the realm of Hell.

The demons fell, unable to get close enough to use their own weapons, mowed down too quickly to actually wield their weapons properly. They were useless, an army without the tools to -

The shriek of the gargoyles returning caught his attention. There were no more than ten left, and they were only alive due to their superior speed over the drones. They flew through the air, aiming right for him and Arnis.

He could have destroyed them, but he felt that it would be a waste. Besides, there was someone else that needed to show off a little bit.

The thump of an orc landing on the lead gargoyle's back was unmistakable, and Ornar lashed about with his whip. Cracks like thunder split the air, and the head of the Lust demons overwhelmed them with one strike each, turning his whip into a leash for the last of the gargoyles as a final move. He pulled back, and they rose into the sky, spinning about before coming down on Dusk's side, floating over him.

The black cat smiled at the way that the orc's cock had ripped through his jockstrap on the way down. It seemed that he had rather enjoyed the show of his master being that much stronger than the rest of the demons around him. Shaking his head, he turned back to the field before them.

"Arnis?"

"Yeah, boss?"

"Cut me a path."

"Heh, you got it."

"And Ornar?"

"Mmm?"

"Set up a little parade for me...victory style."

"I can do that with ease, Lord Von Doom."

As the battlefield twisted below him, he knew that the war was lost. Not just the battle, but the war. He had been a fool to believe that the cat wouldn't come down here without the power to fight him. If he had come alone, then that should have told him that the cat was stronger than he looked, not that he was an idiot.

I...I...

Even in that moment, he couldn't go far enough as to think that he had lost. Still, even as his armies were being obliterated, even as Dusk and his allies cut through the demons on the road to his House, he could not entirely believe what had happened. To admit defeat...

It was inevitable.

It was total.

But it need not be the true end of all things.

It was the screaming of the missiles in the air that shocked him from his state of frozen observation, and as he saw the black tubes shooting through the air towards his House, he knew that he had to move. He had not been taken, yet, and if he was smart, he could set something up. A weak plan, a half-prepared plan, but better than nothing.

He seized Gluttony and consumed the space between him and the floor below. He disappeared, reappeared -

KABOOM!

The ceiling nearly shattered over him, and he kept going down, down, down, even as the layers above him were pelted again and again with missiles that would render any defense useless over time. Perhaps, if he'd had the aid of other realms to reinforce his home, he might have been able to weather the bombardment, but not here, not now, not on his own.

There wasn't much time. He reached the throne room, and just as he had expected, he found his son waiting, cowering behind and beneath the great stone throne. He growled, grabbing his son by the scruff of his neck and pulling him free.

"Come with me, Apophis."

"But dad...we're gonna..."

"Not today."

"But -"

"Come."

The bigger boar dragged his son along even as the world continued to collapse around them. The great roof of the House of Diel came down even as he took them to the paths beneath the House. The corridors that had been untrodden save for at his permission for so long were marked with hoofprints and dust, adding to the age of the passage.

Even now, he could hear the clatter and clang of walls, doors, and more being broken down as the damn cat reached the gates of his House. The fact that the building was already on its last legs didn't seem to matter to the feline; he could feel it shattering piece by piece as Dusk followed him through the building.

Faster, faster...

He dragged his son, his cowardly, almost worthless son through the corridors with him. Apophis stumbled, dragged his hooves, complained the whole time, but Brutus didn't dare slow down. The minute that they lost what little lead they had would be the moment that the cat caught them. Apophis would die, and he would likely face the same fate.

Finally, after almost too long, they reached it. The ancient Hellgate that had been kept secret beneath the House for centuries, and the source of their power, burned and glowed with the power of Gluttony just ahead of them. The portal's boundaries, black rock marked with ancient red runes, shimmered with the fiery magic that played inside it. Hundreds of locations in the mortal world appeared and disappeared by turns, places that they could go...

No. Not they. Apophis.

He looked down at the quivering pig demon, shaking his head slowly. The portal was only big enough for one of them, and then it would take a moment before it could send another through. If his legacy was to survive...

Dusk will keep me alive. He will punish me rather than obliterate me. But you...

The cat would kill his son. Apophis had already been a problem for Dusk in the past, going to the surface world and trying to take him. If he was not killed, then he would be enslaved again, pushed to the point of utter servitude as revenge against Brutus. There would be no coming back, this time.

"Go."

"What? But - dad, I can't -"

"GO!"

He all but threw the smaller, younger demon through the portal, and it flashed for a moment, giving him the view of another city, another place where Apophis had landed. He committed the skyline to memory before the images started flashing again.

Another crash. Dusk was mere rooms away, now, right on his tail. There was no time to take the portal to another place. He doubted that there would be time to run, nor would he be able to fight and keep his life.

There was only one thing to do. He ripped what little clothes he had, and dragged his fingers through the fabric, burning a message to the leather. The great boar staffed it through one of the spines that hung from the back of the Hellgate, just out of sight, and then turned as he felt Dusk on the other side of the wall.

It wasn't a door that came crashing down, this time, but the whole wall. He crossed his arms as the black cat walked in, sword glowing, eyes filled with the darkness of the Devil's Aura. He slowly shook his head, feeling the crackling power of that mighty essence washing over him.

"That means nothing to a Lord of Hell," he muttered.

"I could kill you right now, Brutus. One cut, and not a single soul in Hell would complain of your absence."

"...Heh. You're probably right, at that."

The only one that would complain was on earth, now, and somewhere that Dusk would probably never find him. It was a weak little countermeasure, born out of spite more than anthing else, but it was something.

Behind the cat stood the bodyguard and the whore. Arnis, the same demon that had pledged himself at the party, and Ornar Onsen, the thrice-damned orc that had fought his plans of conquest for all too long, were at the cat's side. No shame from them, only grins at what they had accomplished. Ornar even had the audacity to be naked in his realm, showing off as he led a cadre of Brutus's own gargoyles as soldiers for the black cat.

"So, are you going to kill me, then?" Brutus asked.

"...I honestly should," Dusk said, slowly sheathing his sword. "It would solve a great deal of problems, but I didn't come down here to completely eliminate a realm. Not yet, at least."

"No? You did a pretty damn good job at starting the process."

"Overwhelming force, Brutus."

"And no deal?"

"Somehow, I doubt you would have accepted one."

"The old Satan tried."

"And how well did that work out for him?"

The brat had a spine, Brutus would give him that, and he wasn't wrong, either. The old relationship between him and the Dark Throne had been fraught with all kinds of back and forth renegotiations and more. The pair of them had never seen eye to eye, and it was always pushed in his favor when he rebelled and then backed down. More and more concessions, making old Lucifer struggle, keeping the balance of power from ever becoming stable: that had been his way of operating.

However, regardless of Dusk refusing to take the throne, it was clear that the cat wasn't going to take that lying down. He was taking steps that old Lucifer had never dared take, and for now, it was working...

But only for now.

Brutus smiled to himself, slowly holding out his hands.

"Then I guess I have little choice but to surrender."

"Don't suppose I can gun him down?" Arnis asked.

"Not yet. I'll take him with us...just in case."

"A hostage?" Brutus asked.

"Something like that...something to ensure that the rest of Gluttony doesn't completely rebel. And we'll see just what happens. If you have value to them, then perhaps they'll obey for your safety. If not...then we'll see just how useful you actually are."

And there it was, the one little mistake. Brutus Diel held power through many deals, and had leverage over many different demons. They were not bound to him from kindness or loyalty, but through pragmatism and blackmail. They served him because he could supply them or ruin them at the crook of a finger. If Dusk thought that removing him from the equation would give him anything, then he was sadly mistaken.

But, if he wanted to play that game, Brutus would go along with it. He nodded, hiding his smile.

"Ornar. Get the box."

Box?

The End

Summary: Dusk launches his attack on Gluttony, pushing Brutus to his limits and forcing the boar demon to make a decision.

Tags: No sex, M/solo, erection, nudity, orc, cat, bear, boar, pig, hell, series, magic, fight, fighting, death, blood, gore,