On a filthy cobblestone hell-road outside the infinite walls of
Double-Dis, the Super Wizard From Space stared up at the
triumphant face of the Super-Devil. The monster's massive grin
dribbled thick lava as he shouted out "Hey there, jerks! Welcome
to Double-Hell!"
The super wizard stood up fully and began to glow with an internal
star-fire.
"Oh no you don't!" barked the Super-Devil, and brought his massive
golden pitchfork stabbing down. A booming crunch, the weight of
the enormous weapon knocked the lit shape flat against the
cobblestone, trapped among the three tongs. A stray star-bolt
flickered up along the golden handle, dispersing harmlessly into
the air as the Super-Devil laughed.
"Wow, I didn't actually think this would work!" admitted the
hell-monster. "On your mortal realms, my hell-powers would be at
quarter of their full strength. But if I could somehow trick you
into coming here, to my realm where I'm at my full strength...
well, shit... here in Double-Hell, only the Super-Devil can be
victorious!"
The gloating was interrupted by a weak coughing.
All eyes turned to the grievously wounded Devil, still lying on
his back in a pool of his own hell-blood. With a grit of his
teeth, he finally managed to yank his two-pronged pitchfork out of
his gut, letting it rattle onto the road.
"I almost forgot about you, you little asshole" the Super-Devil
taunted.
Wiping hell-blood out of his mouth with the edge of his ragged red
cape, the Devil slowly managed to work his way to a sitting
position. "I have fulfilled my part... I have delivered you the
Super Wizard From Space. Now release me from my death-punishment.
Let me return to my Hell as we agreed in our bargain."
"Oh! Ha! You mean this?" the Super-Devil chuckled, snapping his
fingers. A huge sheet of parchment unrolled from nothingness, the
binding hell-power of an infernal contract burning the edges of
the paper. "Ah, but if you read the damned thing, you'd know that
you only get out from Double-Hell after I defeat the Super Wizard
From Space in the cosmic tournament, in an official cosmic
battle...
"Which I have absolutely no freaking intention of doing!
"He'll be joining you in several particularly excruciating
punishments I've been planning! Why should I risk a fair fight
with him and let you off the hook when I can instead run both of
you morons through a million painful hell-tortures?" the
Super-Devil laughed maniacally.
"You're double-crossing me?"
"Of course I am!" was the reply, sounding almost insulted. "It's
not like this is the first time." { Diabolical Devilman #12 }
With a snap of clawed fingers that echoed like distant thunder,
the flame-licked contract rolled itself up and disappeared. The
Super-Devil sneered in disgust. "What, are you dense? Are you
retarded or something? Who the Double-Hell do you think I am? I'm
the goddamn Super-Devil!"
The Devil looked up at his oversized twin with a pain-filled
stare. "No, I suppose I knew this would happen," he admitted as he
reached into his shorts and pulled out a small piece of paper,
barely the size of a crumpled playing card and smeared illegibly
with ink. He contemplated it, as if holding that simple small
scrap made everything all right.
The Super-Devil narrowed his eyes suspiciously. "Whatcha got
there?"
The Devil smiled with a dastardly satisfaction. "Insurance."
The little scrap floated out of of his hand. The edges sparked
with hell-fire.
The Super-Devil's eyes widened. "Oh shit."
The cobblestone road cracked and shattered in orange fireworks.
All three tumbled through a sudden inter-dimensional emptiness,
falling through an infinity while also not falling at all. A heavy
black mist seemed to yank at them, dragging them down past
twenty-one and twenty-four and twenty-seven glome-like dimensions
at faster and faster speeds. Sound was nonexistent, light was
nonexistent, but they could feel the massive wooden gateway, the
chaotic iron wall of the infinite fortress city, all of
Double-Hell that contained it whisked up and out and away from
them.
The black mist didn't so much as give way this time as turn into a
slicing cold rain, slashing down from an angry nighttime sky. All
three crashed into what looked like a swamp on fire, bouncing
violently off petrified stumps and splashing in hot, sickly mud.
No matter their size, no matter how much any of them flailed, none
could seem to find purchase, none could seem to free themselves
from the endless mud. It took all their effort to just keep their
heads above the surface.
"What have you done, you little bastard? What have you done?"
screamed the Super-Devil, belching lava fitfully.
The super wizard managed to wrap his arms around the massive
three-pronged gold pitchfork, clinging to it like a drowning man
would cling to a broken oar. Spitting slush and dirt from his
mouth, wiping muck from his stinging eyes, he saw a wounded form
struggling beside him. Without hesitation, he grabbed onto the red
cape and pulled the Devil to the relative safety of the floating
pitchfork.
"What happened?" the super wizard demanded, yelling to be heard
over the crashing of the slashing rain and cursing of the panicked
Super-Devil.
"I certainly couldn't trust him, now could I?" the Devil replied
between coughs. "So I signed an alternate contract. A backup deal,
just in case."
"Contract? With who? Where are we?"
"Everything can die. Everything. And there is a twice-terrible
place reserved for the denizens of Double-Hell when they pass on,
with punishments and sufferings three-thousand-fold more harrowing
than anything found in their own realm..."
A bubbling appeared in the mire around the thrashing Super-Devil,
a drowned booming from deep underneath the swamp's mud. Five great
pillars of black rock rose up on all sides of him... and then
clutched him as they were revealed to be massive jagged fingers of
a stone hand.
Surfacing from the depths was a gigantic humanoid beast made of
cracked granite and glowing embers. It had armour of jagged cast
iron, two empty eye sockets that each had a burning deer skull for
pupils, and three curving horns protruding from it's forehead. In
one hand it had a massive wooden pitchfork, it's four prongs
dripping crude oil. In the other hand, it squeezed the Super-Devil
like it was a toy.
"WELCOME TO TRIPLE-HELL!" it roared with an evil smile.
The Devil managed to fish his own two-pronged pitchfork from the
swamp mud. Lighting it with a hell-glow, he pointed it at the
Super Wizard From Space. "With the Super-Devil not upholding his
end of the bargain, I'm refusing to uphold mine. I will use my
hell-powers to send you back to the mortal realms."
"What if this new monster also betrays you?"
"Oh, I'm expecting it!" the Devil laughed. "Let's face it,
we're
not a trust-worthy lot, are we. That's why I signed more than one
contingency contract. Just in case."
The super wizard only nodded grimly.
A simple crackling came from the Devil's iron weapon, and a
pentagram-shaped hole tore behind the wizard. On the other side
lay the dark cathedral and piled corpses of the alien-cultists
distant world. Then the Devil placed the two prongs on the
wizard's chest and pushed him through the hell-fissure to safety.
The super wizard collapsed on the floor, the dark walls of the
auditorium lit by the morning light filtering down through the
collapsed roof. He was covered in grimy ice, dusty red clay, and
black swamp mud, but alive. He looked up to see the Devil, still
trapped in the terror-swamp of Triple-Hell, giving him a single
friendly wave.
"Good luck in your cosmic tournament, old friend," the Devil said
cheerfully before the portal snapped shut.
.........................................
AUTHOR'S NOTES
When I first started this series, I didn't think I'd do more than
a single issue. Then, when I decided to write more, I figured most
issues would effectively be stand-alone stories. Now I've written
a three parter. So far, this series has been amusingly
unpredictable to write.
One advantage of splitting this issue into two was that I suddenly
found myself ahead of schedule, a situation I believed to be
inconceivable! So this issue and the next one will enjoy a longer
look-over before being posted, some that became extremely useful
as I had to be careful clarifying how similarly-named characters
interacted.
Speaking of the multiple devils, I really had fun with the concept
of the hell of hell, and the hell of hell's hell. Naturally once I
started down that slippery slope, the only thing that stopped me
from going even deeper was clarity. Still, if I manage to keep
writing this for long enough, we will definitely return to this
joke :P
NEXT ISSUE: THE SECRET OF THE SILVER SKULL MACHINE!
.........................................
Wil Alambre, follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/wilalambre
"Hurry, uni-scribe! We have less than one space-hour to get to the
negotiating table before the Great Disaster arrives!" The desperate uni-diplomat paced back and forth in the room. He kept
looking at the space-clock, watching the moments tick away and
whinnying quietly under his breath. The light in the room was starting
to fade away as ominous clouds rolled in, covered up the twin suns. It
was as if the very planet understood the impending doom and was losing
hope.
"Very well, we agree. A tournament, then, to end this rampage. But you have witnessed the power at his disposal. He has a billion billion years of our science-sorcery at his command. Will all you great super-civilizations commit your super-champions to this?"
On a distant world, a mummy-robot and a brown-robed monk silently made their way to the center of a blasphemous cathedral. Though the robot lurched ungainly, it's servos making an uneven whirring sound as they moved the broken machine through black-stone hallways, it held it's bandaged head high, the ghostly
Cocytus the demon-glacier had the Super Wizard From Space engulfed in its icy grasp, forever to be a frozen prisoner of the ninth circle of Hell. Meanwhile the victorious Devil stood atop the massive field of ice, grateful to be back home. The Devil tilted his head back, closed his eyes, and just basked
In the ruins of an ancient city of pillars, an alien octopus pointed eight dangerous looking ray-guns at a white-bearded hermit. "You best be giving me that there data-cylinder, Gavrilo, or I'll vaporize you right where you stand, I done swear it!"
Two figures hurtled through a scarred green warp tunnel underneath the skin of the universe toward the lost planet of the silver skull machine. The Super Wizard From Space was leading the way, encased in a cocoon of hard light that protected him from the rigors of space travel. His companion, a filthy bearded hermit,
The Super Wizard From Space and the Hermit Wizard From Space were trapped in an asteroid belt by a swarm of gigantic space-bees! As it's fellow drones circled uniformly, one particularly grusome space-bee broken from the formation. It was as massive as any of the drifting asteroids, it's gigantic yellow black body big enough to drag smaller free-floating
A monstrously giant bee made of hollow electricity used its clawed legs to peel open the hull of the crashed rocket-ship. It glowed brightly with a pale light, partially transparent and seemingly fragile as it opened up the armored cockpit as if it was made of tinfoil. The ship's two occupants didn't even have a moment to shake off the shock before
The two super wizards stood stock still as the two floors of the building above them were eaten by the ghost of a cosmic megalodon. Bigger than a rocket-ship, it nonetheless hung effortlessly in the air, it's fifty-five rows of cleaver-like teeth surrounding their room as it floated vertically above them. The daylight of the alien sky shone
I am Theodor. I am a rainbow blue fish. I lived on a planet far away. Then I died. But that is was not the end. That was the beginning. I became a ghost. I became part of the infinite school. Thanks to wise Rex. This is the story of Rex. He is big fish. A big shark. Many sizes big. From a far away blue
It took nearly every ghost fish of the infinite school to confidently herd Sharkasaurus Rex into the depths of the invisible galaxy. The megalodon's monstrous instincts were near impossible to fully understand, a hundred million space-years of predatory instinct and insatiable hunger. The spectral school's entire telepathic concentration
"Oh dear me!" shouted Brody Dharma to the marble diamond hall, his gecko eyes spinning in shock as the ghostly forms of Geisel and Theodor circled over the sticky yellow remains of Queen Buzz. "Fish! Please! Contain yourselves!" "Tyrant!" flared out Geisel angrily, telepathically sharing horrific
"Master hero! Master hero!" cried out the young boy, frantic enough to ignore his disciplined training. "A terrible occurrence! The infinite school have lost their hold on their grisly teacher! The cosmic crown reacted suddenly and cut off their psychic leashes! Sharkasaurus Rex is loose!". The young boy wildly rang the same small gong all the monks in this
Geisel was gone, his phantasmal form torn apart in savage fury by the recently de-crowned Sharkasaurus Rex. The equally ethereal Theodor watched the entire sudden rending in still shock. As did the rest of the infinite school, millions of fellow ghost fish that had all gathered to psychically leash the mighty megalodon.
"Sharkasaurus Rex is feeding on the simple people of this planet," said the
Super Wizard From Space, pointing to where a sticky-looking red hue spread in
the red mist for a space-minute before the fin moved on. "He's converting their
psyches into spiritual mass, growing exponentially. This incredible instrument
is our only hope."
He was lying on the ground. Still at the top of the mountain
monastery. Yes, he was certain of it. There was no mistaking. He
remembered the feel of these particular stones. And the scent of that
particular moss. But he could not remember how he had came here. It
was like his mind was rattling around in his head while at the same
time trying to swell larger than his skull could contain.
I warned him not to use the Gong Ago, as the volume required from that sacred instrument would have unintended side effects. But like an old mule wearing ragged blinders, he rung it out anyway. And that powerful pitch has freed me and my like-minded brethren. My name is Andy Dharma. I am the master villain of the Invisible Monks.
In a clearing at the center, a nine-foot lizards bowed respectfully to his duplicate. He dressed the same way. He moved with the same simple grace. He stood with the same relaxed posture. And he looked back at him with the same calculating eyes, measuring the short distance between them, judging the smallest of movements.
"You are unbalanczed. You cannot be truszted with coszmic power." Her hand closed into a fist and squeezed. From every direction, the spectral fish tossed out their determination in crisscrossing grey lines, trying to ensnare his mind.
"Andy, don't do this," whispered Brody, "You can't." "Yes I can! Yes I will!" he shouted back at him. "No more bad habits disguised as tradition! No more of yesterday's rules deciding today's fate! I will show you what change can accomplish!" He spat on the floor in disgust, and backflipped off the balcony.
On the side of a small lake, a simple man was fishing off the end of a rickety dock. The lake was usually a clear blue, filled with many delicious fish. It was not so now. It was murky, tinted pink and red, the fish preferring to stay closer to the bottom, where the water was cleaner and lines could rarely reach. It meant the man would be lucky for even a small catch, but that would be enough. He lived alone on this shore, in his cabin up the hill, and had only himself to feed.
He wiped his hands on his bloody apron, then stroked his long grey beard with a smile. It was with great experience that he could judge the quality and balance of a blade and in all the experience, he had never worked with such magnificent instruments.
A portion of empty space bubbled and bulged, like plastic melting in a fire, then peeled away to reveal the spitting green end of a warp tunnel. Wrapped and protected in a cocoon of pale starlight, the Super Wizard From Space blasted out of the tunnel opening at incredible speed. The wound in black reality mended behind him with a practiced flick of
Sharp super-lightening split across a sick dry sky as a lone yellow cab pulled up in front of a long abandoned university. The pale driver scratched at his unkept beard. Hunched over the steering wheel, he got a better look through the windshield at the derelict campus. "You sure this is where you wanna to be?" he gruffly asked the passenger in the back seat.
"I will not tolerate your
presence here. Nor your trickery. I will burn away every molecule. I
will crack every atom. I will unravel your infernal form down to the
minimalist components and grind the remains under my boot."
"Once upon a time, five dark lords of multiple underverses made the mistake of signing a series of magical contracts in an attempt to insure some level of trust between them. Inevitably, all five of them went back on their words and now the tangled wording of those contracts have trapped them in the stone sepulchres of Quinto-Hell."
The ashen remains of the gorgon sunk into the circling river of molten rock and disappeared down the sinkhole in reality, pulled toward the punishments of Triple-Hell. A bleating car horn sounded. The Devil tugged at the wizard's shoulder. "Come along, guv. Our ride awaits."
Somewhere in the dank musky darkness swamp, a single snapping growl was followed up by a chorus of hungry grumbles and hollers and howls. Jagged trunks of twisted trees creaked and cracked as something massive pushed through. Huge lungs filled up and expelled, making for a thunderous breathy bass echo.
Black glass and brittle shale and oddly shaped boulders all bashed against each other in the tornado ferocity of the space between conceptual realities. Every small piece was both nonexistant and an immense solidity to itself, dragging and throwing and colliding with its surroundings as the entire mess fell through infinite layers of fractal
Looking about, he could see endless desert interrupted by black stone squares, similar to the one they were taking refuge on. A long wind was blowing, picking up loose dunes, shifting them up and over and around in an ever-moving landscape. It gave everything a burnt look, a rising sea of sand that just faded without an horizon. The only thing cutting through the leather-colored sky was the sun, massive and oversized, ten times larger than it should be.
The Devil, The Secret Living Language, and the Super Wizard From Space stood upon a massive square of black stone half buried in blistering desert sands. "This is it, end of the line," the Devil announced.
In the seedy bowels of a seedy mining camp, Cephalo Paul roused from blurriness to found himself at the mercy of an unkindness of anthropomorphic ravens. The lot of them stood on four clawed talons, spoke through horrifying beaks lined with serrated edges, and had too many ruby-coloured eyes.
"My name is senior lieutenant Yuri Gigan Topithecus, last survivor of the once-mighty space-sasquatch race. I was a hero of my people and a triumph of my government, becoming the first of my planet to journey into outer space... and as I completed my first orbit in my prototype capsule, I helplessly watched the Super Wizard From Space destroy my world."
The Super Wizard From Space towed his wounded prisoner to a dying system in a lonely constellation. It was a place that had been full and vibrant when the universe was young, a very long time ago. Now, it's small, dense white star bled away its diminishing heat and weak light into empty space.
Across the vastness of galaxies, a nameless forager bee achieves a stable geosynchronous orbit with distant Planet M. The ladened insect has been in contact with appropriate representatives, has deposited it cargo. It now maintains a microwave relay with the surface, and only awaits permission from the Hive to open communications.
"I-hereby-challenge-the-Super- Wizard-From-Space-to-combat," spits out Emperor M, the bile broadcasted from his loudspeaker face, "and-you'll-bear-witness-to-it , you- insufferable-bitch."
In the clarity of the desert night, a single point of light smolders against the blue-black curtain. And it slowly grows the closer it gets, falling toward Us through immense distances. The Super Wizard From Space is coming to Planet M.
Emperor gestures back to the great monolith and declares, "At-the-behest-of-our-electronic-ennead, I've-entombed-the-Super-Wizard-From-Space-within-the-Pyramids-Of-Ka! His-power-will-feed-our-preservation-batteries-for-countless-cycles."
"The Szuper Wizard From Szpace is sztill alive. And He sztill has Hisz coszmic crown." We say it aloud. Not to anyone. To ourselves, as swirling shaking thoughts become cold and real. This is real. This is happening. "Why? Why have you done thisz?"
If you'll indulge me, I'll tell you a story about how some people ( who were much too smart for their own good, I'm afraid ) tried to find an easy, quick solution; by doing so, they doomed countless lives to AGES of suffering.
Now, I was halfway through a tale about countless doomed lives... and yes, my friend, I do know the difference between 'countless' and 'seven'. Those tragic academics were only the first direct victims of these newly formed cosmic crowns. What happened next was intended to prevent more loss of life, but it actually placed the entire universe in peril.
"Hello Dragutin. I wouldn't be here if things weren't desperate. But things are desperate, and seeing as you're partially to blame, I think it appropriate to give you the chance to resolve it."
Vaso sneers at the world below. "I don't trust Sixth Columnists, General. They're an unstable bunch, every lot of them. And they splintering apart. Hard to be sure what bent their worship takes."
"A swarm! A monster swarm! Oh! Oh gods, they were everywhere. They killed everyone. They stabbed them and killed them. And the dead changed into more and went to do the same. Stabbing and changing and stabbing. Everyone's gone!"
Long spear-length stingers, glints of wet toxin at the tips. Wide crystal wings banging against torsos, making thrumming thunder. It's a *blanket* of angry buzzing. Getting thicker as they crawl over each other. At me. Looking to smother me. Kill me. If I'm lucky.
"What I'm doing, it has to be done. Because someone has to do it. Because no one else is doing it. They're scared of what might happen. Scared of what they could lose. Scared of things they can't change. We can't live like that."
Do you have any idea how this looks? We aren't at war anymore. The tournament is supposed to *prevent* this exact sort of conflict from flaring up again. You can't just go around dropping armies on the *home planets* of the universe's seven super-races."
His ancient race long ago unravelled the laws of physics, and they then learned how to redefine them. They harvest fusion fire to sustain themselves, and they hollow out suns to build their private strongholds. They are guardians of the spaces they know and explorers of the spaces they don't.
Somewhere on Planet M, a forlorn survivor is losing her grip on her unusual authority. "I'm... what? A surrogate? A stopgate? Why keep me and then lie to me? Why save me and then despise me so much?"
"The philosophies of your unconventional brother go against your own... he would do _anything_ to ensure your safety. With his assistance, we will prevail."
Andy Dharma bent over the Stringer's prone body, wrapped both arms around his head, and with a single fast wrench, broke the super-wizard's neck. KRACK!
He'll head toward Genovefa. Maybe not immediately, but inevitably. She can't hide from him any more than he can avoid her. The Cosmic Crowns draw them together. Its a drive. Its a feverish heat.
"The Schrivener has the Crown. The cosmic tournament is between him and Queen Buzz. Walk away from all this devestation. Put an _end_ to this madness."
"That's exactly what I intend to do."
"We've _sztudied_ you for thiz entire Tournament! Without your cosZzmic weapon, you're no threat! You're little more than a ztubborn _nail_ for me to hammer down."
“Iz thiZs what you’re reduced to? A cockroach, sZcurrying and hiding underneath the firmament? If make Uz chasZze after you, We will bring the heavenZz down upon you.”
Reality stretches like canvas pulled taut. Time stutters and scratches and skips, between moments and months. The Wizard takes refuge within the umbra of the system's innermost planet, little more than a corner to be backed into.
"Born of cozmic power, with a mind the sZzize of the universZze... and you thought death would stop her? What szort of sZzimple idea did you take her for, that she'd die szo quietly?"
In the calm eye of it, I can just make out Melisende's massive shape, pacing and stomping and _screaming_ at them, her voice amplified overtop the cacophony. "Are you happy now? That'z it! It'z over!"
Playing tour guide's certainly been more agreeable than playing babysitter. As far as pointless distractions go. If nothing else, its been interesting visiting old haunts, if only to see what's left of them.
