Machine
To fight, yes. That is my purpose, yet now free to make decisions, I find myself again choiceless. If I wish to seek something, then I must preserve my survival. Thus, the gibbering horde before me must be dealt with.
They were armed with ramshackle weapons crafted of wood, metal, and bone. They braced their crude tools with twine and coiled wire. The more brutal clubs and blades were even sewn together with dried skin and sinew.
The abhorrent forms of those before me twisted and writhed without end. Their frail bodies were built only to provide the souls within with an agonized existence. Demons, some would call them. No such thing exists.
These were no demons, but instead sinners. Like the one I had shared a heart with, these creatures were finally free to leave hell, yet still, they were cursed with a form that denied them anything else but punishment. Why face me now? It grants them nothing. Perhaps they wish to die.
If they wish for death, I would deliver it freely.
A mix of varying shapes and sizes, each one far removed, yet closely parodying what was once human. Meat, bone, and muscle had been shaped into a sickening masterwork. Some were still fitted with the various tools and bindings once used to torment them. Barbed wire dug through flesh like writhing serpents, long railroad spikes hammered through bone and were reddened by rust and blood. Chains and shackles dug into wrists that were deathly gaunt or disgustingly swollen.
But amongst the screaming, snarling, and grunting masses, one stood holding his head high with pride and power. Regal dripped off the inky abyss of his flesh. The other figures were nude, yet he wore a pristine white cloth marked with a singular crimson, eye-shaped seal.
Some horrible sensation rammed through my sensors as I tried to scan it. The matter of its body was something unnatural and undefinable. It was swirling, semi-liquid, and impossibly black. It stood slightly hunched, its shoulders high up its body like those of a gorilla.
Each of its fingers curled into impossibly sharp blades that could scare be compared to claws. Its eyes, no, not eyes. Its hollow pits stared deep into my own. Its skull was large and canine, the teeth were made up of the same material as the rest of it. Each brutal tusk was composed of nothing but shadow.
It hummed with power. It was not some feeble, suffering thing like them. This was a king, a black beast with a horned crown. Four massive horns curled upwards, they were glorious.
I wanted to know.
I wanted to understand what stood before me. The snarling grunts of its troupe told me I hadn't much time. They held themselves back. No, they weren't holding back. The air before them buzzed with something unseen. It corralled them with a show of silent, still domination.
My vox grated to life, but before I could ask my query, it cut me off with its own. "Angel, your kind is revolting. What father would do this to his children?" It dragged a finger across its horde, a grim look curling across its inhuman visage. "Tell me, why do you look upon your god with reverence and worship?" The sound of its voice was flat, monotone, and devoid of any defining characteristics past that. This was communication in its purest form. The sound carried no warmth, no life, nothing but an icy, tangibly violent control.
"Answer my query, beast." Its stark command pushed away the hailstorm of intrigue its voice gave me.
"I am no angel. I am a creation of mankind, a weapon of war," I said flatly. My voice somehow held more of a tone and character than the creature's own.
For a moment, it paused. Its empty sockets looked across me analytically. "Angels too are deceivers. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree." A faint amusement began to fill its tone. "Men can create swords and spears and things of such nature; we can make great temples, if given enough time. But you are a creature of some kind. You are alive, moving and thinking. Only God can make life. I am no fool, I am not disarmed by your falsehoods."
I silently armed my weapons bays as I understood two things:
This creature has no awareness of modern technology. If it was human once and was sent to hell, it likely happened a long time ago.
The situation could turn violent, as this creature and those around it likely hold angels accountable for having their damnation.
"What are you?" I spoke out. I was yet wanting to understand why this creature was so different from the other misbegotten.
Then it laughed…
The sound was as flat as its voice, yet somehow it held something darker: a torrent of concealed rage that seemed to slowly bubble up to the surface as it spoke once again. "Long ago, I had mastered the arts of sorcery."
Pride began to eat away at its hollow voice. "I gave blood and flesh to the pagan deities that I had worshiped, and in return, they granted me their many and bountiful gifts. The betrayer you angels work for, the one who created this world, and the realms of heaven and hell, is an arrogant, selfish beast who would send his children to suffer eternally for merely respecting and dealing with his lesser cousins."
Its lips now curled upwards into a rueful grin. "Although they were lesser than him, they never feigned benevolence and they always gave what they said they would give. They would always take what we, their mortal champions, would offer."
Yet its next words were far warmer, almost grateful. No, truly grateful.
"For the sin of heresy and witchcraft, I was cast down to hell. When your god abandoned you, I went free. My lord, my true god Istha, spiller of blood, taker of sinew and skin, had granted me her sweetest gift."
Its fingers caressed the crease of its brow. Pebbles around its body began to swirl like meteors. It clenched a fist, and the stone bullets were compressed away. The stones cracked away till they turned to dust. The brown sand began falling away as it released its grip. "Look at me, angel. LOOK AT ME. This is the love of Istha. She doesn't command worship, she doesn't force us to restrain our desire, she only demands one thing."
A strange tension filled me as I asked, "What does she demand?"
Without missing a beat. With near ecstatic joy the beast roared. "She wants us to fight, to kill, to rip and tear and bathe in the splattering crimson."
It spoke softer, its zealotry coated with something sweeter, something near intimate. "God, he filled us with the fruit of life. That was one thing I will grant him. Istha, wishes, and so I wish, to bathe the world in its pulp. Glistening bone, singing viscera. Oh, Istha, let me show you my gratitude, let me show you my Love."
It looked at the horde of sinners, a sliver of buried empathy within its eyes. "The ones before me… have also come to follow Istha. Our bodies were made by your angelic kind into vessels of suffering. So Istha gave me a body fit for a king and prophet."
He drew his gaze back to me, something akin to shame now within its words. "Despite her power, that of your lord has made it such that for the rest of these sinners, their existence remains one of hunger unending, and thirst unquenching, never dead, yet ever dying."
His shame faded away, an eager edge to his voice warned me of oncoming danger. "So she gave us sinners a gift. The suffering of others and the joy of battle is now our drink, our lover, our singular mate."
Istha, that name was not one recorded by history, I wanted to know more, but I could sense the sinners growing restless, eager to fight, eager to kill. Then the beast spoke once more.
"Angel, come now. Speak your condemnation, accuse me of heresy. Or will you feed on my soul instead. Come break me, come crash your armoured fist against my own, come bare your fangs, I'll clip your wings and present them to her. You won't punish me, for revenge, is a knife I alone have the right to wield."
I stood steeled, I stood silent for a fleeting moment. The screeching of the wind, the only sound.
Then my iron wings unfurled, the nanomachines within them screamed to life. Biofuel panelling heated up within them, a hateful red now fully manifested.
My sensors focused on the sinners, x-rays and infrared revealed organs and blood vessels, points of weakness for me to break.
The choked snarls and grunts of sinners, their twisted bodies shifted, muscles tensing, as they awaited the command of their Messiah. The faint ardent glow of my wings cast flickering shadows, drawing the attention of the snarling creatures before me.
The black beast lifted a palm towards me. In response, the sinner let out a strangled battle cry. They dashed forward stumbling, tripping, crashing into one another as their faces twisted in anticipation.
The first one of the bunch was upon me. It was a large, blubbering creature who raised the tree branch it held, as high as it could, before swinging it down with as much force as it could muster.
Initiating combat mode.
The words rang out as the creature swung down but were silenced in an instant. A loud, whip-crack like sound rang out.
They looked away, their ears rang from the blast. As they looked back they saw the crater on the ground where I had stood, and they also saw me tens of meters back.
The asphalt where I had stood was now a perfect crater. Their comrade had been torn apart by the shockwave of my movement
Gore showered over the others and painted the buildings a crimson-red. The air became in that instant, both a hand grenade and a slashing sword.
I stood hunched over. Then in stark contrast to my earlier disposition, I spread my arms wide and bore my long metal fangs.
Externally my calm was replaced with newfound primal violence, but on the inside, I had remained steeled, cold, and calculating.
I looked up as my wings glowed with a baleful light, with a voice of lightning I roared.
The sinners covered their ears and again turned away, this time some swayed with fear. Weapons began to drop, legs began to shake. Terror had the same hold over them as it did all others.
A sinner who had looked at the remains of his comrade with sorrow, had been snapped out of his grieving trance. He looked towards the others. He silently begged them to ready themselves.
They face a foe like none before. The robotic rumble I had unleashed was mixed in with the sound of distant artillery. As the nanomachines began producing my weapons, small pops of gunpowder went off adding their own beat to the hellish cacophony.
The creatures, frozen stiff with terror, were unable to charge. Those who were braver were held back by their comrades, much to the frustration of the black beast.
I held both my arms and my wings in front of me, with the sound of crunching metal and snapping steel, and in a burst of heat and sound. The limbs had become a great array of man-made violence.
Rotary cannons and artillery stood ever powerful, the magazines filled themselves with explosive ammunition that would fragment, tear and rend. My wings snapped back. Innumerable, long barrels finished forming, the belts of ammo slithering across the floor like growing vines.
The mouths of my weapons pointed with single minded focus. Each calibre adjusted in aim and target.
Upon seeing the arms before them, even the most insane of the bunch lost their child-like battle lust. Animal fear was the only thing left.
They feared for their lives, but those lives had already been forfeit.
I would give them the war they craved, I would speak to them with the bellow of guns.
Autocannons punched holes the size of golf balls in some, red funnels of blood and guts and pasted muscle flew out of the exit wounds like water from a burst pipe.
Small arms were equally as effective. My lighter bullets cut through the beasts with pragmatic efficiency.
They writhed under gunfire before hitting the ground. Each one dead with a thud that was almost silent before the thunderous orchestra I was now conducting.
It was beautiful.
This is what I was.
This was what I was made to do.
Oh, finally. Oh so gloriously.
The greatest of my guns were primed.
A grand crescendo, a final hurrah of violence before the city was to fall silent once more.
My magnum opus.
My artillery roared.
A flaming haze enveloped the sinners leaving nothing more than charred corpses.
The bloodied streets were charred black.
Those farther away from the centre of the blast were cut to red ribbon by the oncoming wave of shrapnel that would finally end their suffering existence.
The iron storm would forever devour both phlegm-filled moans and screams of terror with a yet louder, yet vaster, and yet sharper sound that brought with it a final creaking silence.
One remained.
The black creature stood in the centre of the blast. Its dark flesh glowed with an otherworldly, grey light.
Debris, dust and the red haze from its fallen comrades formed a perfect dome around it.
They had been painted across an invisible canvas by a mad painter, smearing dirt and gore over a transparent window in a display of artistic madness, a display of arcane mastery.
Shells and bullets floated around it as they had been slowed down by an invisible force. They were never to mark its body or welcome its unmaking, silent yet unstoppable storm of swirling invisible fury.
"Angel, I offer you my gratitude." Its digitigrade legs bent slightly. Its arms spread wide to match my own.
"You… honour her beautifully." I stepped back slightly, the black beast… it brushed a tear from its eye.
Its joy, or was it, our joy? I needed to know. I needed to fight.