Dashing devil 5 bold beg.., p.51
Dashing Devil 5: Bold Beginnings, page 51
The demon spun on his heel and thrust his spear out in a short jab as the golden light gathered around Archangel. When he didn’t appear in what was previously behind Boyd, the Changed Hero jumped straight up, narrowly avoiding a sweep of his opponent’s left three energy wings. He must have canceled the teleport and charged forward with his relatively slow flight in an attempted surprise attack.
Boyd reminded himself that unpredictable opponents who had been driven past the point of self-preservation were dangerous—especially when they had S-Ranked energy weapon constructs at their disposal.
He pushed himself back to the ground with an extension of his wings then kicked off to the right, getting out of the way of an attempt to skewer him with both energy blades. The big demon kicked to the right as Archangel flashed away again, this time thrusting his spear back to his left just in time to catch one of the Blonde Buffoon’s many-bladed energy wings with the Black Flame-charged obsidian tip. His energy-destroying dark fire did its job, shattering the shell that contained the golden fire and causing the flames within them to burst forth before they disappeared.
“Aarr,” Archangel’s cry of rage started in front of Boyd but ended behind him, “rrhgg!”
Boyd leaped into another dive, kicking it into a side roll and coming up with a spin of his spear in a wide arc. Archangel had tried a pincer attack that time, although Boyd wasn’t looking for patterns. There likely wouldn’t be any—but if he did note any, they would be as subject to change as the unstable man using them.
The demon’s golden eyes gleamed with determination and intelligence as they took in every detail of the battlefield, his features set in a confident grin. The Blonde Buffoon's eyes blazed with fury and madness, his classically handsome face twisted into a rictus of hate. As they continued their deadly dance, Boyd remained calm, cool, and collected. His excitement at the coming moments threatened to disrupt his mental state more than any fear of this broken man.
“Why won’t you just die!?” Archangel screamed after Boyd decided he’d let their little game go on for long enough. “You’re supposed to die! I’m the Hero and you’re the monster!”
“No, Archangel,” Boyd shook his head with a sad, understanding frown, “between the two of us, you are the real monster, and now the world knows it.”
“ARRHHGGG!” Archangel threw his head back and let out a primordial scream of rage before flashing away.
Boyd spun on his heel and his spear shot out with all the speed his coiled S-ranked muscles could manage. Archangel appeared and then let out a cry of surprised pain as he aborted his planned wing sweep to stare down at his right leg, where the tip of the narrow obsidian spear penetrated his white suit, pierced the meat of his thigh, and dug into his femur.
His shocked eyes slowly moved up to Boyd’s face as he continued to gape.
Boyd returned his slack-jawed expression with his most devilish grin before he growled, “And today is not about putting on a show.” The demon twisted the darkly burning spear as he extracted it and, in another flash, drove it into the Blonde Buffoon’s other thigh until he felt the tip grind into bone.
“Wha-ARGGGGG!” Archangel’s responding cry displayed a blend of confusion and agony before he flashed into the air.
Boyd dropped into a crouch then sprang up after him, reaching where the Blonde Buffoon thought it would be safe to hover and collect himself forty feet in the air only a second after he reappeared. Another lightning thrust of his pointy spear found Archangel’s right scapula, piercing the meat of his shoulder to reach it. The big demon twisted it to break the needle-sharp tip from where it had wedged into the man’s bone and retracted it just enough to expertly spin it around and bring the butt, a darkly burning four-inch diameter ball of obsidian, directly down onto that same shoulder.
With a very satisfying crunch, Archangel was sent rocketing back into the sand of the battle grounds. Boyd had been curious as to what would happen if he landed on his golden energy blade wings, but either the pain or instinct caused them to flicker out of existence just before he impacted the ground. The force of his collision with the ground sent shockwaves through the air, sending sand flying in all directions and creating a deep crater.
With a single powerful flap of his wings, Boyd sent himself arrowing after his quarry. The impact sent another, much smaller shockwave through the soft ground as he drove his spear through the Blonde Buffoon’s already ruined shoulder, pinning him to sand that was already starting to collect his blood, portions of it turning red.
Pushing a charge of Black Flame into the spear that would sustain it for several minutes, Boyd stepped back, resting his hand on the hilt of his sword in case something went wrong.
“I wouldn’t try to port,” Boyd warned, rumbling to be heard over his opponent’s panicked panting.
As if the demon’s words reminded him he was Powered, Archangel tried to flash away, turning into gold light for part of a second before returning to flesh and blood with a cry of agony. Once that was out of his system he began rambling like a mad man.
“This isn’t happening. No. It’s a nightmare. You’ll wake up any moment now. Then you’ll go kill that filthy demon that took her from you. Yes, this isn’t real. This couldn’t happen to me.”
Boyd let out a sigh. “You don’t feel pain in your dreams, dolt. I can assure you this is actually happening. This is what reality feels like. I understand that it’s something of a new experience for you, but most of us are very familiar with it.”
“Shut up, demon!” the wide-eyed pseudo-angel panted at him. Then he let out a whine of pain. “Ahhhh… you aren’t even real.”
The demon rolled his eyes and then stepped forward to give the spear a slow quarter twist.
“ARRRRGGGHH!”
“Seems pretty real to me,” Boyd rumbled, then stepped back again, watching the injured and trapped madman carefully. “So, here’s the thing… it doesn’t matter if you believe this is real or not. However, I feel the need to explain what is about to happen anyway, so you’re going to sit there quietly and bleed while you listen.”
Boyd spoke mostly for the benefit of the cameras but kept his eyes locked on his foe.
“You see, Silver had this idea to send out a survey last night. It only had one question: ‘What punishment should Archangel face for his crimes.’ She sent it out to almost two billion citizens and received nine hundred million responses. The citizens have spoken—or at least enough of them to satisfy me. Seventy percent of them said that you should be tortured to death, just like you did to all those women and children. They said that the execution the Authority will grant you is too much of a mercy… much too humane for a monster like you.”
“Shut up… demon,” Archangel whined more than seethed.
“Your Handler… Victory Seeker? He was my primary Mentor from the age of six to eighteen,” Boyd continued in a smooth almost casual tone as he glanced up to where his former tor-mentor sat at the back of the stands in a gray suit. “He taught me well, but I’m sure you’ve already gotten his lessons about always giving the citizens what they want. When he taught those lessons, he meant things like wearing a brave smile when facing overwhelming odds, living up to the image of a Hero, and being the force for justice that they need you to be.”
He paused and then dropped his confident grin in favor of all the loathing he felt for the evil creature before him.
“I’m choosing to take it more literally today,” he growled.
Boyd’s tail lashed out to drive the hardened spade tip into his leg, adjusted the angle, and stabbed deep into the bone of Archangel’s hip until he felt it crumble.
“Arrrgghhhh!” the Blonde Buffoon let out a satisfying agonized scream.
“I’m not sure that any of them will get to see the footage being gathered,” Boyd rumbled in a tone that revealed his good spirits. “Blackwall and Davis will make a decision about that, largely depending on how much they think it might traumatize the viewers. They might not get to see my service to them, but that doesn’t remove my duty. I will give the citizens what they asked for. You will not be allowed to die quickly. You will suffer as you have made others suffer. I will not relent until you plead for death, just as you took pleasure in making others beg to be allowed to live.”
Boyd snickered as he pulled his tail out of the man’s hip and drove it in to the other side. “And your arrogance is what made it possible to do it legally. You set the terms as death, which removes our ability to surrender. This duel will only end when I finally let you die.”
There was actually another potential condition, but if the Blonde Buffoon didn’t know it, Boyd wasn’t going to tell him.
“That’s right demon,” Archangel hissed through gritted teeth, “show them that you are the monster you appear to be. Show them the darkness that lurks within you. It will make proving my innocence that much easier after I kill you.”
Boyd gave Archangel an honest smile and nodded with a rumbling, “That’s the idea.”
Chapter 54
The big demon stepped forward and yanked the spear out of the insect it had pinned to the ground with a twist. He took a few rapid steps back as he gave the long spear an expert twirl to clear it of the Blonde Buffoon’s blood.
“We all have darkness in us, Archangel. Most of us try to hide it, but it’s there in everyone. What we do with it is what defines if we are good or evil. You let yours make you rape, torture, and murder women and children. I’m going to use mine to let me do the bad things that my people have said they want done, but don’t have the stomach to do themselves.”
He paused and then shrugged with one shoulder. “Maybe that makes me a monster… but if it does, I’ll be the citizen’s monster. I’ll be the one they call on when the line gets blurry and they need somebody like me. Now get up, the duel isn’t over.”
Archangel flashed up into the air, his wings appearing behind him in an angry blaze, a sword in only his left hand as his right arm hung uselessly at his side. When he flashed again, Boyd swung his spear around, expecting something new from the man who would now be seeking a way to survive. Sure enough, the Blonde Buffoon appeared right in front of him this time, diving forward with his sword to try to skewer the big demon. Archangel likely expected him to have spun around and aimed the strike for where he expected Boyd’s spine would be. Instead, the butt of Boyd’s spear shattered Archangel’s sword before its tip spun around to pierce his gut.
Archangel cried out and brought his wings up in an attempt to use his pincer attack. Boyd’s own darkly burning wings shot forward, shattering the golden constructs and devouring the fire they contained. The Blonde Buffoon’s eyes went wide as Boyd extracted the spear and drove it back into him three more times as he stumbled back, once in his unwounded shoulder and twice in the abdomen.
Boyd was aiming for non-critical injuries, and now that he had removed Archangel’s ability to teleport for a short time, he began putting as many holes in the man as he could without doing fatal damage, all with pin-point accuracy. Each time his spear found a new place to leave a hole, the monster let out another cry of pain. By the time he was able to reform his wings, there were more than a dozen holes that turned his formerly pristine white suit crimson. Just as the six golden wings reformed on his back, the weighted ball of Boyd’s spear crashed into the side of Archangel’s left knee, driven by the force of Boyd’s now S-ranked strength.
With a satisfying crunch, the pseudo-angel was sent corkscrewing into a tumble across the sand. His crippled leg and arm flopped about in a spray of sand. The big demon was done with this and chased his tumbling quarry down to sink the needle tip of his spear into him two more times.
Boyd began bringing the ball down on his other knee while the Blonde Buffoon gasped in agony-induced shock. Archangel flashed away just before it would have landed, the ball crashing into the sand floor and sending out a shockwave and spray of sand once more.
The demon leaped back, finding Archangel hovering a good hundred feet up, likely thinking it made him safe. Boyd’s legs and wings were stronger than ever though, and by using both, the demon was on him before he had a chance to even process his next action.
Since Boyd didn’t want to cripple Archangel’s other arm worse than he had already done, he grabbed the Blonde Buffoon’s ankle, twisted in the air, and threw him back to the sand below. The man landed on his face and chest, sending out another shockwave and spray of sand. With a mighty flap of his wings, the big demon launched himself back to the ground, coming down on his feet and driving the spear down through the back of his opponent’s right knee before twisting it and viciously yanking it free.
With a contemptuous flick of his foot, Boyd rolled the broken and bleeding man over, his ruined white suit not doing much to hide the amount of blood he was losing. Rivulets of red leaked out of the holes his spear had punched in it. Archangel’s face twisted in agonized terror as he stared up with wild eyes at the demon who loomed over him. Said demon, wreathed in dark fire, stared back down at him with cold contempt.
“This—herk—this isn’t happening,” his confused babble was broken by the agony he was experiencing. “This can’t—GAH!—can’t be happening.”
“This is real,” Boyd rumbled in reply. “This is what happens to monsters like you.”
As he spoke, he reached out with the tip of his spear and drew a line in the Blonde Buffoons flesh that led from between his brows up to his hairline, flicking Omega Ray’s crown from his head in the process.
Archangel didn’t process what had happened, too distracted by the pain that radiated through his body to notice that the weight no longer pressed into his head—that is, until Boyd’s tail lifted the crown from the sand and brought it to his hand.
“Wait! No, you can’t!”
“I can’t recover Omega Ray’s crown from the man who arranged for it to be stolen from one of The Authority’s facilities?” Boyd asked, staring at the dark device as he coiled his fingers around it. “This is the item that enabled you to strip Bianca Taylor of her free will… and who knows how many others in the short time you’ve had it. It doesn’t seem like you even skimmed the Hero’s Handbook. Something like this is part of the job.”
With that, Boyd crushed the portion of the crown he had between his fingers.
“NO!” Archangel screamed and weakly tried to lunge at the demon’s leg.
Boyd kicked him in the face with enough force to break his nose without shattering his skull and proceeded to crush the rest of the evil object as best he could with one hand, unwilling to take the other from his spear. He discarded the shattered pieces of the evil artifact to the sand and gave them a stomp for good measure.
Then, as Archangel rolled over to reach for the flattened pile of metal and electronics, Boyd set a tether into the man’s mind and fed him a mix of the same fear and defeat he’d smashed the man’s psyche with in their last duel.
Archanglel’s good arm—actually his better arm—slumped to the sand, and Boyd got what he had been seeking since the start of the duel. The thing he would show Archangel’s supporters to sour the esteem they held the man in: Weakness.
“No…” Archangel sobbed into the sand. “No, no, noooooo, this isn’t happening. This isn’t real. No one could possibly do this to me… not me. I’m a god. This can’t happen to a god.”
“I’m afraid you’re just as mortal as the rest of us,” Boyd corrected the man as he reached down and took a fist full of Archangel’s hair to drag him up to his ruined knees. He had to prop the man up because his body kept wanting to slump forward. Eventually, Boyd got him into a position so the cameras could see his broken face.
Crimson ran down from the line Boyd had carved across his forehead. Streams of tears failed to wash away the blood and sand that stuck to his cheeks. Snot dripped from his ruined nose over his lips.
“This is reality reasserting itself and crushing your delusions. You were never a Hero, and monsters like you need to be put down.”
“No! I’ll give you anything you want. Please, no!” he wailed, his voice breaking into gut-wrenching sobs of agonized terror.
“You have nothing that I want,” Boyd sneered.
“N-nooo! This can't be happening, not to me,” he cried out in heart-wrenching despair.
“How many of your victims begged?” Boyd asked with a cold growl, setting the spear tip in the small wound in Archangel’s left shoulder. “How many of them pleaded with you to make it stop? How many cried out that you couldn’t do this to them? Answer me, and I’ll finish it.”
“M-most of them,” Archangel sniveled, willing to do what it took to make the torment stop. “S-some c-couldn’t.”
“How many?!” Boyd shouted, the fire in his chest burning cold instead of hot.
The sheer volume of his question blew Archangel’s blood and sweat streaked hair back. Boyd would need the comfort of his loves after what he had done today. He needed their reassurances that he wasn’t a monster—or that if he was a monster, he was a good one.
“I d-don’t… I d-don’t know,” Archangel’s eyes were already dull and dead inside. “I d-didn’t c-count. They d-didn’t m-matter. Just f-fucking Changed, n-not people.”
Boyd drove his spear home, pushing it all the way through the man’s shoulder and destroying the joint, but then retracted it sharply to let Archangel fall in a heap.
The big demon stared at the broken figure before him, the once proud Archangel was now a pathetic heap of blood, broken bones, blubbering flesh, and fear. What was left of the man sobbed in pain and defeat. His limbs destroyed, he leaked blood from punctures all over his body. Archangel lay unmoving, except for the rapid rise and fall of his chest.
“My opponent is disabled and unable to continue,” Boyd rumbled as he leveled his spear, aiming it for the monster’s heart. Part of him wanted to drive it home and put an end to this, but that’s not what his plan called for. “Please begin the count.”
