Doom Story Update

4k words

***

The internal lining of the cockpit was made from resilient stuff, but the mech still rang like a gong around him, the noise drilling into his eardrums. Sharrya launched off the ground and sailed across a nearby crater, crashing into the dirt on the other side.

The gruelling sounds of gunfire, both demonic and mortal, morphed into the backdrop as Andreas moved his mech around the obstruct, pausing with a dozen odd meters spacing him from the Baroness. There was a control panel next to the grip on his right arm, and he flicked the one that activated the mech’s communicator.

“Baroness Sharrya,” he announced, Sharrya glancing up from where she lay. He expected her gaze to be full of malice, but of course there was a shit-eating grin below her visor, her eyes no doubt reflect her humour.

“Seargent Andreas,” Sharrya replied, but her tone wasn’t aloof. In fact, it was the exact opposite. “You said you would ‘shit on my parade’ as you so eloquently put it, and you have not disappointed me. Nice suit, by the way.”

“Was about to say the same thing to you,” Andreas said, gesturing with the cannon arm.

“You like it? I wore it just for you,” she cooed, propping herself on her plated arms and presenting her breast to him. She looked like a yoga teacher holding a pose. The armour was slim and conformed to her curvaceous form, and he knew from the way she’d been running that its weight wasn’t a hindrance on her, whatever alloy it was constructed of must be very light. “I only wear it when confronting my most challenging of opponents, and I consider you to be among their number.”

“You look good in blue. It’d bring out your eyes if you ditched the helmet.”

“Oh, Seargent, always with the flattery. Perhaps challenging was the wrong word just now…”

She raised herself up, nursing the shoulder she had landed on. Her eyes flicked over his mechanical shoulder, and Andreas was about to dog her about using such lowly methods of distraction, when his proximity sensors warned of three demons moving up behind him, breaking off from the main battle.

“Leave him!” Sharrya roared, Andreas twisting his mech to see three startled imps giving her strange looks. She tossed a fireball at them when they didn’t move. “Away with you, he’s mine.”

The demons scampered, Andreas chuckling under his breath. “Sure you don’t want their help, Baroness? I’m not one for boasting, but Pilot Andreas hits a lot harder than Regular Andreas.”

“They are needed elsewhere,” Sharrya replied, her meaning obvious. He could hear the gen one mech stomping around the Rallypoint gates, endless streams of ordinance firing from its torso.

“I’ll say. I bet you and your whole legion soiled yourselves when that big fucker came walking out of the gate.”

“Your robot toys won’t save you, even with the aid of surprise,” she replied. Her tone was offhand, but there had been the briefest hint of hesitation in her voice. “But none of that matters now. The last we spoke, you said you were not going to run any longer. I hope you aren’t planning on forfeiting now, of all times?”

“Why do you think I came charging over like a bull?” Andreas spread his mechanical legs wide, just like Eva and the foundry engineers had trained him. “You wanted a showdown, now you’ve got one.”

“Yes…” Sharrya growled, adjusting her footing as she dropped into her own combat stance. “Just your augmented strength, versus my augmented strength. No more running, no more distractions.”

They both stood defiant against each other, a moment passing where nothing else seemed to exist but themselves. Sharrya reached behind her and produced a spiked mace, the handle longer than his entire torso. She beckoned to him with it, and in that moment, her shiny armour caught in the last embers of the sun and bathed in fury, Sharrya looked as beautiful as she was deadly.

“Come then, Seargent, this rivalry has gone on long enough. Let us put an end to things.”

Andreas seized the moment, bringing his particle cannon to bear. The barrel became wreathed in blue light as the energies were brought to life, his finger pressuring the trigger. He was warned there would be a slight delay in the cannon, but not slight enough for the Baroness.

Her arm flung out, the one holding the mace. Andreas blinked when the spiked ball dislocated from the handle, arcing across the space between them like the deadliest basketball. It crashed into the joint at his mechanical elbow, close to the base of the cannon, the mech twisted away by the forceful blow. The arm went wide, Andreas’ blood freezing as the barrel swerved onto the Rallypoint wall on his immediate right. He let the trigger go, the barrel losing its strange glow. That had been too damned close.

A blur of movement occupied one half of his canopy, Sharrya closing in on him rapidly on her long legs. Rattling chains chased her every stride, and he noted that the mace was still connected to the handle by a link. Sharrya’s form bloomed until she was right on top of him, throwing all her weight into her shoulder as the two collided.

The mech left trails meters long as it skidded through the ash, the hydraulics wheezing in complaint against Sharrya’s weight. He could feel his world spin as his centre mass was thrown off kilter, Andreas teetering like a bowling pin. With his left arm, he gripped Sharrya’s bulky shoulder with his metallic fingers, using her for both balance and leverage to drive his leg into her stomach.

Her grinning face filling his vision turned into an expression of pain, steel meeting steel in an echoing crash. He made to backhand her with the cannon, but she planted a hoof into his chest and dodged away.

She thumbed a mechanism on the handle, and the mace-turned-flail began to retract, the chain links slithering along the ground, the mace leaving a long furrow. With a snarl, Sharrya twirled on the spot, handle held out in front of her like she was a hammer throw athlete. The flail whistled through the air, too fast to keep track of until its bulk slammed into Andreas’ shoulder.

Even though he was protected by inches of steel, the metal crumpled inward in a visible dint, a critical warning system blaring an alarm through the cockpit.

He let out a trying grunt as he seized the chain links in his fist, pulling it in the hopes of throwing her off-balance, but Sharrya was charging towards him. He dodged out of her path, letting the chain fall from his grip, pushing out a leg into her knee. His leg collided with a satisfying crunch, Sharrya stumbling into the wall hard enough to leave a dent.

Before she could recover, Andreas darted in behind her, grabbing her by one of her branching horns. The motors in his arms groaning, he drove her helmeted head into the wall of steel, the impact of the blow travelling up his arm.

Her head lolled as he pulled his limb back, then rammed it into the wall a second time, a crack spitting down the middle of her helmet.

On the third swing, Sharrya came to, her elbow swinging into the cockpit glass. A grainy crunch was quickly followed by a pair of tendrils blooming from a point on his lower right vision, not thick enough to blind him, but enough to obscure parts of it.

“Not bad,” Sharrya growled, leading with her flail as she whirled on him. He blocked the attack with his forearm, the impact knocking him back. “Your technology is formidable, even if it is not true strength…”

She grabbed up the chain, swinging the flail in lazy loops as she sized him up, searching for an opening. Andreas activated his weapon systems, the sound of priming guns reaching his ears as the guns on his torso powered on. Muzzle flashes left yellow afterimages as he opened up on Sharrya, the Baroness covering her face on reflex. Like bullets ricocheting in a spaghetti Western, the rounds pinged off her cybernetic armour noisily, even the fifty calibre bullets rendered useless against her protective layer, but he knew firsthand that she couldn’t be brought down by conventional means.

The burst of gunfire gave him enough time to dart forward, clocking Sharrya across the chin before she could block. He followed up with a brutal jab to her gut, the raw power of the mech the only thing allowing him to knock the wind from her lungs, the Baroness expelling her breath in a wheeze. 

Andreas delivered another swipe to her helmet, but Sharrya recovered, grabbing him by his metal wrist. She dropped her flail, reaching down with her other hand to grab his shoulder. It looked like she was about to break his arm, but even she wasn’t strong enough to do that, was she?

He tried to break her grip, batting her with the oversized particle cannon, but she shrugged off the swipe, Andreas’s eyes going wide as a sense of weightlessness settled over him. His suit had to weigh upwards of sixty tons, but he could have sworn he felt his feet leave the ground as Sharrya hoisted him to the side, tossing him away like a sack of bricks.

His bulk worked against him, and Andreas was staring at the sky once his mech settled, the first few night stars fading into the blue canvas. His chin touched his neck as he glanced own the length of the cockpit, seeing Sharrya stoop to retrieve her flail.

She thumbed the mechanism again, and the chain grew in length, Sharrya holding it in both hands over her head. She brought the flail down on where he was lying, leaving Andreas only a moment to roll onto his shoulder and let his side take the brunt of the attack.

As his mech shook, another warning appeared on the canopy, this one telling him there were malfunctions in the joint circuits in the arm. If he took any more hits like that, or she’d disable him.

She threw the flail into the air, the chains curling like a whip into the sky. It hung motionless at its peak, and then Sharrya gave the chain a tug and it fell right down again. This time it smashed into one of the machine-guns on his chest, the barrel exploding in a shroud of plastic.

Andreas snagged the flail that had come to rest on the canopy glass – another glass crack forming beneath its bulk – and yanked it hard. Sharrya snarled as she came stumbling into range of his leg, his metal joint connecting with her face in a loud smack. She threw her hands to her mouth, and when her fingers came back, the tusk growing from the left corner of her lips like an ivory stalagmite was broken.

Andreas twisted the mech’s legs one way, his torso remaining as level as a gyroscope. He used his knees to raise the mech from the ash, keeping the arms out straight, just as he’d been taught to do should he lose his balance.

Andreas primed his remaining chaingun, but he didn’t fire on the Baroness. He lenaed forward, squaring the sights over the flail, severing the middle of the chain with a thunder of gunfire. She gave the handle a questioning look, then discarded it.

“Give it up, Sharrya,” Andreas breathed, his chest rising and falling as though he’d just run a marathon.

“Now why would I do that?” she snarled, spitting a wad of blood between her feet. “Your bastion is overwhelmed, and my legions are unstoppable.”

“You sure about that?” he asked, kicking the flail away. “Turn around.”

She narrowed her eyes, then glanced over her shoulder, suspicion turning to shock. While the two of them had been occupied with eachother, the battle raging around them had developed. The skirmish between the gen one mech and the cyberdemon was the focal point of the battle, and one side had emerged victorious.

Sharrya’s trembling hands turned into fists, the Baroness quickly returning her attention to him. She seemed to meet his eyes even through the canopy. “This changes nothing,” she snapped. “The cyberdemons were a distraction, and their usefulness ended once you came to me.”

“The mech’s going to tear your legion’s a new asshole,” Andreas replied. “You’re not getting into the Rallypoint.”

“Damn the Rallypoint! Damn the cyberdemons, damn the Maykyrs, damn everything! All of that is beyond the scope of our bout, and I care not for any of it.”

Andreas thought of ancient Roman gladiators, basing their whole lives off glory and honour, and thought Sharrya fit that bill pretty well.

Sharrya voiced a war cry as she rushed him down, the sound chilling his blood. He raised his arm to block, but she feinted, harrying his canopy with a series of swift, savage punches. The glass creaked in protest, more cracks worming up the canopy as Sharrya pushed all her strength into the attacks. It was becoming harder and harder to see.

Andreas raised his knee into her gut, then backhanded her across the jaw, the demoness stumbling away in a daze. He grabbed her two horns like they were bike handles, then brought his forehead to hers, pulling her against the metal bars looping over the top of the canopy. The headbutt sent her swaying, that yellow eye-slot in her helmet shattering to pieces, its glow pulsing on and off like a fried lightbulb.

He thought her vision might be impaired, but she came right back at him without pause, delivering a swift kick to his knee joint. He buckled under the blow, failing to dodge away as her fist came pounding into the glass. He could hear it threatening to give, and when she struck him a second time, it did.

Shards rained over his face and chest, clinking off his combat armour as a small, two-inch wide hole appeared in the opaque window. Sharrya punched that spot again, and the gap grew another inch, Andreas feeling fresh air woosh into the cockpit.

Panic began to spread its roots through him, Andreas groping with his hand to shove her away, but she caught his limb in her armorued fingers, so strong that even the mech’s power wasn’t enough to break free. He batted at her with his particle cannon, unable to shoot her from this range, but it bounced off her spiked pauldron harmlessly. She held him like that, like he was an action figure she could pose at a whim, and her voice took on a much more surreal quality as she leered closer to the breach in the canopy, their eyes almost level.

“You’re mine,” she growled. “I’m going to pluck you from that toy suit and whisk you away. I wonder how the mortals would react, seeing their saviour abducted right before their very eyes.”

“And I wonder,” Andreas replied. “how sensitive are your eyes?”

She cocked her head as Andreas activated the floodlights topping his mech, millions of lumens worth of power shining directly into her face. The pressure on his mech released as she raised a hand to her head, failing to see Andreas readying his fist.

He pulled back his arm, bringing all the mech’s power to bear in a vicious uppercut, the attack as solid as it was deadly. Andreas felt a white-hot sore travel from his hand to his bicep as his limb connected, Sharrya’s head snapping at an awkward angle as she was lifted off her feet, flying for a few meters before touching back down, flipping once before she settled in the ash.

She lay there in hesitation for a handful of moments, and when she looked up she was staring down the steel barrel of his particle cannon, that blue energy coalescing over its length. She made to rise to her feet, but too late, the cannon was fully charged, a green indicator flashing on Andreas HUD.

He pulled the trigger.

A blue line connected the muzzle to the ash between her hooves, like a laser pointer, and then a white ball about three meters in diameter was drawn around the point, Sharrya’ bulk disappearing behind the sphere. It grew to a brightness that slowly became unbearable, and as Andreas shut his eyes, a thunderous report like a nuclear bomb erupted all around him.

His mech was tugged backwards by the shockwave, and for a horrific moment he thought he was too close to the blast radius. The light cleared in the next second, and Andreas put such worries aside. He was still in the mech, still outside the Rallypoint, but there was one thing that had been removed.

The place he’d aimed the cannon, Sharrya included, was gone. In its stead was a neat hole in the ground, the exact same dimensions as that glowing sphere. There were wisps of smoke rising from the ash, which had taken on a look of black glass.

He’d put an end to things, as Sharrya would have said.

He turned to the side, the giant outline of the gen one drawing his gaze. With the cyberdemon’s gone, it was cleaving the ranks of the lesser demons with its many guns, the Earth trembling whenever it put its railgun to use. Towards the rear ranks of the legions, some of the imps had seen their Baroness obliterated, and their morale crumbled, Andreas spotting clusters of the demonic taking to the ruins.

Not all of them were fleeing, but it was a clear tell that things were over. Their attack had failed, the mech was cleaning up the main force, and their leader was dead.

A strange feeling settled when that last one reinforced itself in his head, Andreas staring back at the new crater in mild disbelief. All these days of fighting, all his interactions with the Baroness, and now it was all over, in a single blink. It seemed rather anticlimactic, and a little disappointing, but perhaps not for the right reasons.

For a long while he just stood there, the motors in the mech hissing as the adrenaline from the fight bled away to leave him tired. He expected to be relieved that his mission was finally over, that the Baron was gone, yet relief was the last thing on his mind, he realised.

“Seargent?” a voice called, and for a second he thought it was Sharrya, and his heart skipped for some estranged reason. “Seargent, are you well?”

A drone came floating into his view from on high, Andreas recognising it as the one Eva had borrowed. “Yeah,” he replied. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“You did it,” Eva said, patched into his helmet’s communicator. “I watched the whole thing. You did it, Andreas! I’ve already sent word to the Commander, she should be more than happy of the news. With the high command gone, the attack is doomed to fail.”

“Yeah,” he said again. He was still looking at the smoking crater.

“Seargent? Are you sure you are well?” Eva asked, hovering closer. “Your voice patterns are analogous to distress, but you’re not critically injured. What’s wrong?”

“No, nothing’s wrong,” he said. Eva tilted her drone, like a parent who’s just caught their kid out on a lie.

“Andreas, come on, it’s me. I read your emotions almost any day, I can tell when the cat’s caught your tongue.”

“It’s just… she’s gone,” Andreas relented. “You know?”

“Yes…” she replied, dragging the word into another syllable. “I do in fact, know that to be the case. Why are acting so weird?”

“Well, I thought… I thought things would go differently.”

“Andreas, you shot her with a particle cannon. Everything caught in the blast is reduced on the atomic level. There was only one way that could have gone.”

“I thought she’d, I don’t know, get out of the way or something.”

Eva hovered closer, scrutinising him with that single lens. Like Sharrya, she seemed to know exactly where his face was. Maybe the canopy wasn’t all that opaque after all.

“Seargent,” she snapped. “You can’t be seriously…. Are you upset that she’s gone?”

“What? No,” he said, but the denial didn’t come out all that well.

“Yes you are! Andreas, Hell is mankind’s greatest evil, and Sharrya was one of their top generals! How can her death make you feel anything but joy?”

“She wasn’t evil,” he replied, Eva scowling at him. “Alright, maybe there was a little evil in her, but she’s far off from being a monster. Monsters don’t show mercy, and she did that to me several times before.”

“Be that as it may, she tried to destroy the Rallypoint, its people included. This isn’t to mention all the things she’s done to Spain before our arrival, plus whatever other crimes she’s committed on these other worlds she’s mentioned. She had to answer for all that.”

“I… I suppose so,” he relented, but that feeling still weighed in his chest, one that wasn’t quite disappointment, but very close to it.

“I’m sorry, Andreas,” Eva said. “I know she meant something to you – even though I cannot comprehend why this is – but what’s done is done. You saved a lot of people by bringing her down.”

That cheered him up somewhat, and he brought up his argumented hand, Eva responding by extending her claw and slapping it.

“We should report our success to the Commander firsthand,” Eva said. “I’m sure she-”

“Ooohhhh that’ll leave a mark...”

“Did you say something, Seargent?”

Andreas turned to the source of the voice, which had come from the particle cannon’s crater. He realised he that was wrong, it had come from beyond it, where a deep trench furrowed into the ground beyond in a long gash, following the curve of the Rallypoint’s corner section.

The trench was around ten meters at its lowest point, and as he stood upon the lip, he saw something blue odwn there, and it didn’t take a genius to know what it was.

“Oh come on!” Eva complained. “She lived through that, too! How?”

Andreas supposed his aim with the cannon had fallen just short enough she could get out of its range, though it seemed she hadn’t gone unscathed. The front of her chestplate was completely gone, a giant burn mark bloomed beneath her breasts. Her hands were charred black, a couple of her claws and fingers missing, and just like the ash, smoke was trailing from her cybernetic armour.

His approach brought the Baroness out of her fugue, one of her ruined hands reaching up to her head. Her helmet was cracked all over, and she ripped it off with a kind of lazy patience, exposing her snarling features. She let the helmet roll away, where it settled by her ankle, Sharrya looking up at him tiredly.

“I think… I should have taken you up on your offer, Seargent,” Sharrya chuckled, but the laughter only seemed to hurt her more. “What on Hell did you hit me with?”

“Particle cannon,” he said. “Supposed to destroy your atoms or some shit.”

“It destroyed more than that,” Sharrya said, holding up her hand and staring at the stumps she had for fingers. “Something tells me I’m not regenerating this one anytime soon.”

She reclined on the slope, staring up at the heavens. “I have finally found my match,” she mused. “Thirty-nine worlds it took, and you have fought for this one harder than any other. Fought very well.”

“I blast you to Hell, and you still compliment me?” Andreas asked. “You are one crazy bitch, Sharrya.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny that,” Sharrya replied. Her eyes flicked to Eva, then to him, her arms bobbing in a shrug. “Well? What are you waiting for? End it.”