Hellmarine ch. 3 rough draft

The Overmaiden observed the young man as he emerged from the cryopod, looking much different than he had moments before. Heralded by a series of cracks, pops, and other horrendous sounds, the man in the cryopod had been virtually reborn, his body growing and changing as it responded to the serum.

The changes were most pleasing. Already well built, his muscle mass had nonetheless increased by over two hundred fifteen percent, and his body elongated to a nearly inhuman height of approximately seven feet tall. The young man's godlike figure looked as though he had been chiseled from stone or even the bulkhead of a starship. The Overmaiden watched as his dark, shadowed eyes flitted from one person to another in the room as the healing process in his abdomen completed.

At his new height and mass, his old clothes no longer fit. They hung from his frame in tatters or fell off him completely, leaving nothing to the imagination. Before she could say a word in greeting to him, the young man’s face twisted with fury and stared past them as he ripped the entire cryopod out of the wall, raised it over his head as though it were weightless, and hurled it in their direction.

Everyone ducked or flinched away from the massive projectile except for the Overmaiden, who was aware of the creatures quietly emerging from one of the nearby service ducts. The cryopod cruised safely over the heads of the marines and Dr. Hughes and crushed the intruders into demonic pulp. When they looked back, they found the pod embedded several feet into the stone behind the wall itself, warping the supports and paneling around it.

“Ho-ho-holy shit!” Cox laughed, clearly impressed. The mashed remains of the demons oozed slowly from the narrow space between the ruined cryopod and the hole in the wall. Everyone’s attention turned back to the nearly naked man, who was now visibly calmer.

“How did you know?” Dr. Hughes murmured to the Overmaiden. The AI couldn’t help but look a little satisfied with herself. 

The hologram gestured to the lab. “These were his people. Look what he did not just to protect them, but to avenge them.” 

Dr. Hughes glanced around at the carnage that was difficult to discern much from due to the chaotic co-mingling of human remains, demonic bits, and assorted debris. For an AI like the Overmaiden, reconstruction of the scene was relatively simple. She fed the simulation to the doctor’s visor as she continued to explain. 

“These are the sort of feats we came to see,” the Overmaiden explained quietly. “With little more than a sidearm and improvised weapons, this man wreaked havoc on the enemy. He is possessed of a singular determination that is difficult to quantify. Paired with your scans, I was certain we had found what we came for.” 

“What about the rest of them?” Dr. Hughes asked, glancing at the unnamed man as he brushed past them toward the main lab. “Was it all pointless to bring them?” 

“Not at all,” the Overmaiden assured her. “They got us here, and now our secondary objective has been upgraded to our primary.” 

“Which is?” Dr. Hughes pressed a little impatiently. 

“Secure whatever information we can and evacuate any remaining survivors,” the Overmaiden finished. Though there weren’t many survivors to speak of in the lab, it had never been their intended objective. Once they got back out into the town and the surrounding area, she expected they would find people holed up in relatively secure locations running low on supplies. Most colonies had emergency bunkers in the event of a disaster or act of alien aggression. Most weren’t built to withstand prolonged demonic incursion, but there was still a chance that many had simply been overlooked. 

The young man, now augmented, scrounged the lab for whatever he could find as a weapon. Each of the marines stood back to watch him, unsure of what to make of the individual. 

“Who are you, if you don’t mind my asking?” the Overmaiden inquired politely, hands still clasped calmly behind her back. “Your name, I mean?”

The man responded without looking up to acknowledge her properly. “The death knell of demonkind.” 

“I like ‘em!” the Master Sergeant proclaimed heartily. “He’s got spunk!”

By the time they reached the surface by retracing their steps, the young man had picked up a small collection of belts, straps, and assorted items to hang from them for the purpose of combat. Chambers offered to spare a few actual weapons for the man, but the Overmaiden held a hand out to stop her—she wanted to see more of what he could do. 

“Supporting and cover fire only,” the Overmaiden ordered as they stepped into the lobby filled with hunters scouting for stragglers.

“Ma’am, he’s buck-fucking-naked,” Cox objected. “They’ll tear him to pieces.” 

“With a hog as big as his, he could probably club them like baby seals,” Chambers remarked, earning a round of uneasy chuckles from the rest. The man’s endowment had not been lost on the Overmaiden, who realized custom armor would need to be modified to account for his bulk in more ways than one. 

She also noted that Dr. Hughes was interested in the size differential as well. The young doctor’s eyes practically bulged to the point of rolling out of her head. She licked her lips and whimpered something like, “Goodness gracious,” before forcefully averting her gaze.

“I’m the one that does the tearing,” the man said as he fired up a medical chainsaw he’d lifted from one of the secondary labs on the way to the surface. The Overmaiden recognized it as a model designed specifically for easily cutting through the bones of elephant-sized beasts. 

The chainsaw-wielding man hurled himself at the hunters as they converged on their position. He met the first with a sweep of the chainsaw’s blade, wielding the hefty two-handed machine with only one. The blade caught the creature under the jaw, cleaving its skull in half and spraying a line of blood and gore across the lobby’s linoleum floor. Not satisfied with simply bifurcating the demon’s skull, he rammed the chainsaw into the gooey divide he’d created, churning up the inside of the demon’s chest cavity before ripping the chainsaw free. 

He caught a leaping hunter by the neck with his free hand, causing the creature to thrash around wildly with its claws in the air a few feet above the ground. Seeing it wasn’t getting anywhere, the hunter opened its mouth and lashed out with its deadly tongue, which wrapped around the man’s thick neck. Before the demon could pull it tight, the man let out an annoyed growl, cutting the tongue free with the chainsaw before severing the hunter’s lower half from the part he held. 

One of the hunters in the rear of the pack let out a shrieking wail, signaling to soldiers to converge on its position. 

“Shit’s about to get real, folks,” Ramirez warned them, hoisting his weapon and readying himself. Seconds later, the front doors of the lobby crashed open as a throng of soldiers and forsaken swelled inward. 

The Overmaiden placed a hand on Ramirez’s rifle, pushing it down slowly. “Wait.” 

With a herculean throw, the young man lobbed the whirring chainsaw through the middle of the group, parting it in a gory parody of Moses and the Red Sea. He replaced the weapon with a TA-12 mining gauntlet he’d picked up along the way and, with a roar of primal fury, hurled himself into the fray heedless of his personal safety. The mining gauntlet was designed with three polarized blades made to cut through some of the hardest materials workers might encounter in the tunnels, augmenting their strength with interior mechanisms at the same time. It wasn’t intended as a weapon, but the Overmaiden couldn’t argue with the results. 

At first, his movements were sloppy, driven solely by rage and fury. Even so, demons fell before him in rapid succession. But as he pressed through the group, his movements became more intentional and precise, pausing only to brutalize the occasional demon that had truly annoyed him. He did this often at the expense of his safety, with claws, talons, and teeth tearing thin, shallow wounds in his skin with blistering fireballs and acid that followed. The damage, though relatively superficial, would eventually add up if he wasn’t careful. 

“Alright, marines,” the Master Sergeant called. “Break time’s over. We’re back on the clock!” 

“Master Sergeant,” the Overmaiden objected, but the man shot her a withering look. 

“With respect, ma’am, we’ve got places to be,” the Master Sergeant replied. “We can’t stand around all day with our thumbs up our asses while nature boy here takes his sweet time serenading demons with his lovely singing voice.” 

The young man let out a primal, guttural roar as if to punctuate the Master Sergeant’s point. The Overmaiden let out a defeated sigh and waved her hand. “Very well, go ahead.” 

“Open fire, Marines!” The Master Sergeant hollered over the chaos, ushering in a hail of gunfire after that narrowed the field of focus for the murderous young man considerably. 

The Overmaiden watched with interest as the young man's savagery not only effectively felled the enemy directly but also inspired the marines, bringing up the rear to do the same. Seeing his reckless abandon instilled confidence in the group, allowing them to make more reckless maneuvers that ended up paying considerable dividends. It was an interesting phenomenon to observe as she and Dr. Hughes brought up the rear. 

They emerged onto the street, encountering even more resistance from demons drawn to the sound of battle and the scent of bloodshed. The clashes came in fits and starts, allowing them to cover a great deal of ground as Cox and Hughes worked in unison to identify signals and biosignatures to investigate. Each stop they made earned them more combat but netted them more lives to be saved. 

“Overmaiden to Shotgun Opera,” the Overmaiden said aloud, her voice projecting through a comm channel to the drop ship awaiting them at high altitude. “We have survivors here on the ground in need of immediate dust off.” 

“Roger that, Overmaiden,” the pilot responded. “ETA in three minutes.” 

“Clear an LZ,” the Master Sergeant ordered, gunning down a pair of soldier demons prepping fireballs for the civilians in their care. The bunker hadn’t been much, and many of the people were injured in one way or another, but the naked berserker in the Marines’ midst was creating a lot of space for them to do more controlled work. 

Within moments, the area was open enough for the drop ship to touch down, throwing the back ramp open even as it blasted everything around with dust and debris. A few of the Marines peeled off to help survivors onto the ship, securing them in the bay before stepping back off and signaling for the ship to take off. 

“Sir, we’ve got a vesper coming in at ten o’clock,” Wall cautioned the Master Sergeant. 

Before any of them could get a bead on the creature, the young man ripped a panel free from the shelter door and hurled it like a discus into the air. The panel tore through the wing of the descending vesper seconds before it could make contact with the departing drop ship. Unable to maintain altitude, the creature plummeted to the ground, where the young man sprinted to meet it. There, he jammed his foot into its back, grabbed hold of the wings at their base, and pulled them free of the demon’s body with a wet popping of bone and tearing of sinew. 

“He’s absolutely insane,” Hughes remarked in awe. The Overmaiden detected some distinct shifts in the woman’s biology, indicating a mixture of fear and arousal. She pried her eyes off the naked, gore-soaked man to check her visor. “More survivors due east.” 

“Let’s move!” the Master Sergeant ordered, pressing on as the drop ship disappeared from view on its way to the Midnight Sea. 

They managed only a few dozen feet before a towering figure rounded a corner of the nearest ruined building. It towered above even the tallest of humans, save for the berserker leading the pack. It was covered from head to toe with black armor, spiked, bladed, and warped as though the material had been contorted by the torturous attentions of Hell itself. Hateful eyes glowed from within the horned helmet as wisps of acrid smoke curled up through slits in the faceplate. 

“Christ, sir,” Cox muttered into the comms. “That’s a fucking knight.” 

“I’ve got eyes,” the Master Sergeant responded, motioning for the marines to spread out slowly in order to avoid being caught in the larger blasts the demon was capable of letting loose on a whim. 

“The fuck is a knight doing here?” Ramirez wondered, keeping his rifle trained on the towering figure. 

“An interesting question for another time,” the Overmaiden replied. Though true, she was more interested in how their newest fighter was going to handle the situation. 

The answer was the same as it had been with the others: he charged right in. The knight stood ready, summoning a massive sword from smoke and hellfire as the blood-soaked man hastily approached. 

“The fuck does he think he’s doing!?” One of the Marines exclaimed through to comms. 

As the young man closed the last few feet, the knight sprung into action, bringing its blade around in a powerful swing that left a searing arc of hellfire behind it as it went. The man intercepted the strike with the mining gauntlet, which barely managed to hold up under the power and magic infusing the knight’s sword. He followed with a swift uppercut into the knight’s armored body, lifting him an inch or two off the ground and causing him to stagger backward a step. Despite the hellscape around them with its chaos and destruction, the Overmaiden could have heard a pin drop at that moment as the Marines all went silent. 

There was no mistaking the distinct dent that the man’s fist had left in the blackened hellplate of the knight—a feat that had been inconceivable with bare hands until that very moment. Time seemed to slow down as the knight planted his sword in the ground for additional support while he got his bearings. The young man kicked the sword away with his bare foot, forcing the knight to stumble forward, where he met him with a haymaker with the mining gauntlet. The knight spun to one side as pieces of the helmet scattered across the ground. He stumbled several times, dazed by the impact, before falling forward. 

The young man glanced at the busted gauntlet and discarded it. Picking up the knight’s sword, he stepped forward and drove the blade into the demon’s back, pinning it to the bloodstained earth. Black fluid leaked from the wound for a brief second before the man drove the blade further in—down to the hilt—causing a terrible bubbling to form from the wound and the pool of black blood forming beneath his fallen foe. 

The Overmaiden noted a spike in Dr. Hughes’ hormone levels as well as those within Julia Chambers. The rest of the Marines stared in awe for a moment before Master Sergeant Gray broke the silence. 

“Alright, kiddies, let’s stop standing around and get the fuck on with it, shall we?” He barked, coaxing the group back into action toward the next group of survivors. 

They found half a dozen more groups of survivors in that fashion, each recovery resulting in a furious firefight to clear the area for the drop ship to convey more survivors to the carrier in orbit. The young man never slowed down, never grew tired, never wavered, and never showed mercy. By the time they were forced to wrap it up, he looked ready to press on, hoping to find more demons to carve up. 

“It’s time to go,” the Overmaiden informed him as the drop ship came in for the last time amid the desolated town square of the man’s former home. “We’ve done what we can for now.” 

“I can do more,” the man rumbled, cracking his neck to stay loose. 

The Overmaiden glanced back at the rest of the Marines boarding the ship as ordered while Hughes lingered behind to observe the man’s behavior. The AI nodded slowly. “Of that, I have no doubt. But there are no more survivors to evacuate here, so we’re done.” 

“I’m not done,” he growled, looking back at her with narrowed eyes. “It’s never going to be done.” 

“What’s the hold-up, ma’am?” Cox asked impatiently over the comms. “We got a boat to catch.” 

The AI’s face scrunched up in annoyance as she took a few steps closer to the enraged young man. “Your strength and fury are admirable. They’re everything that I hoped for and more, but we must wield that strength in a way that deals the greatest possible damage to our enemy, wouldn’t you agree?” 

He regarded her silently, his nostrils flaring. 

“We created you to be the instrument of destruction against the most severe threats that the hordes of Hell have to offer. You can sit here and waste your time tearing through the tissue paper of the grunts or we can find you something bigger and nastier to contend with.” The Overmaiden crossed her arms over the ample swell of her avatar’s breasts. “You are no mere man now. You are the Hellmarine. I have priority targets in need of attention, and I intend to wield you as my weapon against them. Will you or will you not be my weapon?”

The Hellmarine looked around at the chaos and destruction of their surroundings. His fury abated slightly, his blood-soaked chest heaving as he came down from the murderous high he’d been riding since stepping out of the cryopod. His gaze settled on the AI’s avatar once again, offering her a slight nod. “I will be an arsenal.”