The alarm sounded sharply at 3:17 AM. He silenced it with a swift motion, rolled over, and encountered cold metal beneath his fingers instead of fabric bedding.
His eyes opened abruptly. The dim illumination revealed an arched ceiling constructed of darkened steel, its crossbeams secured by rivets the size of his fists. The air carried traces of gunpowder and something more ancient—perhaps burnt ozone or the metallic scent of blood long dried on stone. Rising too quickly, he noted the armor plating along his forearms striking against his thighs—thicker than his own.
His gauntleted hands traced the engravings in the floor: a snarling demon's visage encircled by chains, its grooves worn smooth by countless footsteps—his own included. Recognition struck with sudden intensity. He knew this place intimately—the weight of the Praetor Suit's servos humming against his musculature, the station's slightly heavier gravitational pull compared to Earth's.
A deep, mechanical hum resonated through the deck. Below, machinery activated—the BFG cannons powering up, their cores emitting a steady thrum. He rose unsteadily, his armor protesting like an aged beast rousing. The door slid open before he reached it, revealing a corridor lined with weapon racks: plasma rifles retaining residual warmth, shotgun shells arranged with military precision.
Through the viewport, Earth hung suspended in the void—but not his Earth. A sleek silver station orbited nearby, bearing the emblem "JL." His stomach tightened. The Watchtower. Familiar from media depictions. This realization expanded the threat beyond mere demons—the BFG cannons weren't merely decorative.
VEGA's voice transmitted crisply through the speakers: "Slayer, we face a complication." The AI's holographic avatar materialized—a shifting matrix of blue light pulsing rhythmically. Displays showcased Earth's besieged locations: Gotham's skyline obscured by crimson haze, Metropolis streets fractured like eggshells, winged entities circling Washington Monument. "Demonic incursions have breached multiple population centers. And..." VEGA paused briefly. "Local defenders are engaging. Ineffectively."
He leaned forward, gauntlets denting the console's edge. One screen depicted The Flash maneuvering through fiery corridors, his suit smoldering. Another feed showed Wonder Woman's sword fracturing against a Baron of Hell's armored exterior. Static interrupted, followed by Batman's strained transmission: "Retreat. These adversaries resist conventional tactics."
The chamber's atmosphere thickened with the odor of overheated circuitry and adrenaline. VEGA's lighting dimmed. "Your recommendation?" The AI's tone bordered on apprehension. He flexed his hands. The suit's HUD activated, marking global targets in pulsating crimson. The solution was evident. He grasped the shotgun. "We proceed."
The weapon settled familiarly in his grip. Thumbing the safety produced a sound resembling bone fracture. Gotham's status as the invasion's focal point required no confirmation from VEGA. The wrist-mounted portal device whined as it initialized, its verdant glow reflecting off the shotgun's barrel. The air before him ruptured violently, revealing a smoke-choked skyline echoing with screams.
He adjusted his neck—left, then right—vertebrae cracking sharply. The AI chip engaged his suit's port with an audible click. Pain accompanied the process—by design. The armor shuddered before securing tightly. VEGA's data stream whispered through his consciousness: thermal signatures, civilian concentrations, something massive moving beneath the city's foundations. He stepped through.
Gotham's atmosphere struck first—acrid, thick with combustion and blood. The portal sealed behind him. He stood amidst devastation where a subway station once existed. The ground trembled. Unseen entities laughed in the darkness. The shotgun's pump-action cycled. A shell chambered audibly. He exhaled. Let them come.
Three blocks east, a winged terror swooped—too slow. The shotgun erupted. Its payload tore through chitinous plating. The demon shrieked mid-descent, its body rupturing against the remnants of a shattered billboard. Fluorescent viscera painted the pavement. Distantly, rhythmic impacts signaled something heavier approaching. The HUD pulsed warnings—bio-signatures clustered beneath. Subterranean movement.
A mechanized roar split the night. The Flash blurred past, his suit charred. "They're tunneling!" His voice cracked with exhaustion. Before he could vanish again, a spiked appendage erupted through the asphalt. The Speedster twisted—almost evaded—but the barb grazed his calf. He collapsed, clutching seared flesh. The Slayer pivoted. The Baron of Hell emerged fully, its bulk displacing concrete like water. Its burning maw yawned wide.
The shotgun dropped. His fists ignited. The suit's servos screamed as he launched forward. The Baron's claws met his gauntlets in a shower of sparks. Beneath them, Gotham's fractured streets groaned under the weight of what was yet to surface.
The demon's maw gaped—a furnace stinking of sulfur and molten iron. He seized its jaws with both hands, fingers locking behind tusks slick with Flash's blood. Armor plating buckled as the Baron thrashed, its spines shredding asphalt. Momentum carried them backward—his spine inverted midair—and six thousand pounds of hellspawn met pavement in a suplex that cratered the intersection.
Before the creature could bellow, he wrenched its head sideways. The fragmentation grenade's pin spun away. Its spoon pinged off his visor as he crammed the explosive deep into the gullet where its throat should have been.
Flash's eyes widened. The Slayer rolled clear. The detonation peeled back the Baron's armored hide like rotten fruit, spraying boiling ichor across storefronts. Beneath their feet, the tunneling ceased. Then—silence. Until something much larger answered the challenge with a vibration that shattered every remaining window for blocks.
The Flash gasped as the Slayer hauled him upright—no gentleness, just efficiency—before ripping the twin chain gun barrels from their armored housing. The weapons spun to life with a mechanical scream, their rotating chambers glowing white-hot within seconds. The Speedster swallowed hard. "You're not gonna—" The Slayer shoved him aside just as the street erupted upward in a geyser of flaming rubble.
Something enormous breached the surface—a Dreadnought-class Hell Engine, all segmented plates and piston-driven claws. The chain guns roared. Tracer fire stitched across its carapace, each impact kicking up showers of molten slag. The beast howled, swinging a claw the size of a subway car. Concrete shattered where the Slayer had stood half a second prior—his leap carried him onto the monstrosity's back, boots cratering armor as he emptied both barrels into its spinal vents.
Flash watched, clutching his leg. The air tasted of copper and spent uranium. Every ricochet sent fresh tremors through his bones. Then he saw it—the Dreadnought's tail rising, barbed tip dripping neurotoxin, poised to impale the Slayer from behind. He opened his mouth to shout. Too late. The tail struck. The Slayer didn't flinch. The barb shattered against his shoulder plating like glass against an anvil.
The Slayer pivoted mid-burst, his left hand snapping out with hydraulic precision. His fingers closed around the twitching appendage just beneath its armored segments. The Dreadnought screamed—a sound like splitting continents. Twin chain guns still belched fire into its exposed nerve clusters as the Slayer's other arm tensed. Musculature strained against servos. Hydraulics hissed. With a wet *crunch*, the tail came free in a spray of blackened lymph and snapped tendons, its last convulsions sending venom arcing uselessly into the night.
The Dreadnought's roar became something else—a panicked, guttural noise as it recoiled, its balance faltering. The Slayer didn't pause. He swung the severed tail like a flail, its barbed tip carving a molten trench across the beast's remaining ocular sensors. The chain guns' barrels glowed cherry-red now, their spin slowing as overheating warnings flashed across the HUD. He ignored them. The Dreadnought staggered, its piston-driven legs buckling as it swung blindly. One claw grazed the Slayer's chest plate, scoring deep grooves in the ceramite before he drove the tail's jagged stump straight through its gaping maw.
Something in the beast's thorax ruptured with a sound like a dying star. The Dreadnought collapsed forward, its own weight driving the impaled tail deeper until chitin split vertically from mandibles to pelvis. Flash limped backward as pressurized fluids geysered upward—thick, boiling ichor that steamed where it struck the asphalt. The Slayer stepped clear, his boots leaving prints in the liquefying pavement. Then the ground trembled again. Deeper this time. The chain guns' spin resumed with a whine as fresh thermal signatures bloomed across the HUD—not from below. From above. The storm clouds parted. Something with wings the length of city blocks descended. Flash's blood ran cold. "Oh god. Not *that* one."
The Slayer ejected both drum magazines with a thumb flick. They clattered amid the carnage—still too hot to touch. His forearm housings retracted with a pneumatic hiss, swallowing the chain guns' glowing barrels whole. His other hand moved before Flash could blink—crossing his torso to grasp the assault rifle's textured grip from its magnetic mount. The scope unfolded automatically, its targeting reticule flaring crimson as it synced with his retinal display. Distantly, three more Barons materialized from alleyways. Flash's breathing hitched. The Slayer exhaled through his nose—once. The rifle's bolt cycled with surgical precision. This required finesse the chain guns couldn't provide.
The winged horror banked sharply—a Behemoth-class Hell Archon, its ribbed underbelly pulsing with bio-luminescent veins. Wind shear from its descent uprooted an overturned bus. The rifle's stock settled against his pauldron. His index finger hovered millimeters from the trigger. The scope's enhanced optics zoomed—past flailing membranes, past armor plating—zeroing in on the single chink in its biology: a ganglion cluster beneath its third right ocular slit, throbbing with every wingbeat. He didn't blink. His grip adjusted minutely. Three Barons charged. Flash swore. The rifle barked once.
The Archon's wingstroke faltered midair. Its shriek peeled paint from buildings. Fluorescent ichor erupted from the precise perforation in its neural nexus—a single depleted uranium round traveling faster than pain signals. The monstrosity listed sideways, its wingtip shearing through a skyscraper before its bulk crushed two Barons into gory paste. The third skidded to a halt—just in time for the Slayer's armored knee to meet its jawbone with enough force to send yellowed fangs spinning into the stratosphere.
He holstered the rifle with mechanical smoothness as the Archon convulsed, its remaining wing thrashing through a department store facade. The Slayer strode through collapsing rubble, his wristblade deploying with a sound like a guillotine's drop. The blade sank into membrane where wing met calcified shoulder joint. Sinews popped under torsion. The Archon's remaining eye rolled wildly—until the Slayer's opposite fist pistoned into its ocular cavity. Wet crunching preceded the grotesque spectacle of his gauntlet emerging from the back of its skull clutching a fistful of optic nerve.
Smoke curled from the Archon's ruptured cranium as he wrenched the blade sideways, severing vertebrae with the ease of parting wet cardboard. The decapitated head came free trailing spinal cord like a grisly trophy. He held it aloft—just as the surviving Baron lunged. The Slayer pivoted on his heel, swinging the cranial mass like a morningstar. Bone fragments and teeth embedded themselves in the Baron's thorax upon impact. Momentum carried them both through the remnants of a bank vault's security doors.
Flash watched from behind a flipped taxi—his pupils dilated—as the Slayer straddled the Baron's twitching form. One gauntlet pinned its skull to the melted asphalt. The other raised. The wristblade gleamed under emergency flares. Then descended. And kept descending. Through carapace. Through marrow. Through twelve feet of subway tunnel beneath them. The Baron's death rattle shook the ruins of Gotham National Bank. Distantly, more portals opened. Flash swallowed bile. The scent of opened bowels mixed with cordite. The Slayer rose. His HUD flickered. New coordinates overwrote tactical displays. Metropolis. Star City. Tokyo. The blade retracted with a hiss.
A gloved hand seized Flash's collar. He gasped—half airborne—before slamming back into reality against the Slayer's armored flank. The plasma rifle's heat sink glowed violet against his ribs as they moved. Every step pulsed agony through Flash's ruined calf. The Slayer didn't speak. Didn't need to. The rifle's power cell clicked audibly as he cleared a path through flaming wreckage—each plasma burst vaporizing lesser demons mid-leap. Flash's fingers twitched against ceramite plating. "I can—" The Slayer adjusted his grip. The message was clear: shut up. Run later. For now, survive.
They breached a crater where Fifth Avenue's intersection once stood. The rifle's muzzle tracked left. Three imps ignited mid-scream. Right. A Hell Knight's torso became silhouetted plasma. Behind them, the Archon's corpse twitched—one final synaptic discharge sending its talons scraping concrete. The Slayer's boot crushed a still-beating heart beneath his heel. Something in the rubble shifted. Flash tensed. Too slow. The Slayer pivoted—rifle stock meeting a charging Pinky's snout with enough force to cave in its sinus cavity. Brains painted a fire hydrant.
Flash's vision swam. His fingers brushed the Slayer's forearm housing—where medical nanites hissed behind armored slats. The Slayer ignored him. The rifle's scope extended. Three blocks north, a winged shape circled Wayne Tower. Not demonic. Not yet. Batman's cape swirled as something colossal stirred in the bay. The Slayer's grip tightened. Flash felt servos engage. Felt the plasma rifle's cycling whine escalate. Felt the ground tremble as something ancient breached Gotham Harbor's surface in a cataclysm of frothing brine. Then—movement. Relentless. Inexorable. Toward the epicenter. Toward the Bat. Toward whatever fresh hell awaited.