Doom - Evil Unleashed 3.1

Inferno – Part 1

I woke up with a gasp. Was it all just a horrible dream?
Looking around, I realized that unfortunately, it wasn’t a dream. I saw the remnants of the cyberdemon a few feet away from me.

The time unit in my helmet’s Heads Up Display informed me that I had slept for six hours since I saw the awful truth about Deimos’ whereabouts. The sight of Hell had ruined all hope for me. I was doomed. I would never return to my beloved Earth and ahead of me lay nothing but torment and evil.

After having climbed down from the roof of the tower’s central building, I had simply collapsed on the floor. Having realized that I was beyond salvation, I had suddenly felt how insanely tired I actually was, having battled terrifying monsters, which turned out to be nothing less than demons from Hell. I had fought for hours without getting any sleep. My body was sore from all the fighting and I had felt dull.
And all the fighting had been in vain.

According to my time unit, I had been fighting almost non-stop for approximately 30 hours. It was now 36 hours since I leapt into the fray. I was thirsty. Horribly thirsty. I pulled out my drinking bottle and drank half of it.
I felt stronger now, but I realized that I was as good as dead.

“Oh God” I muttered. ”The damn bastards opened a gate to Hell! Hell of all places!”

I suddenly remembered the philosophical question I always asked myself before being sent on a mission. “Is there Life after Death?”.
I nodded slowly to myself.
The sight of Hell had been undescribable, but I knew the instant I saw it that it was truly Hell and I knew now that a Life after Death did indeed exist. Unfortunately.

Since Hell had proven to be real, there was a kind of Life of eternal suffering after one died. I still didn’t know whether there was a Heaven, where good people would go when they died, but Heaven was also the least thing, which was likely to enter my mind now.
I suddenly saw all the faces of my fallen comrades before me and the feeling of hopelessness was substituted with a burning rage, which completely overshadowed my fears.

I gritted my teeth with a sudden feel of determination. I was not a helpless damned soul, for the demons to play around with. I was an elite marine with weapons to went my grievances on the critters with! And I was still alive and more determined than ever to stay that way.
I didn’t plan to give up my soul this easily. I also realized now that my battle with the demons hadn’t been in vain after all, as I had shut down the gateways, preventing the hellspawn from entering my own dimension and do more damage. I was trapped here, but that presented an opportunity to wreck havoc in Hell and give the infernal demons a little payback - something I had always wanted. I promised myself that I would make the bastards sorry they ever heard of me.

I suddenly felt my morale rise and smiled evilly.
My enemies were responsible for everything bad in my world, so now I could bring down blood-dripping justice onto the true evil, making those bastards get a taste of the evil they caused in my world. I picked up my weapons and began to explore the now empty tower. I found a hole in the floor, which hadn't been there before and noticed a spiraling staircase leading downward.

It’s time to hunt some demons! I told myself in my mind and went down the stairs.

-

The staircase led to a small, fiery room. At the center of the room was a large, hellish teleportation pad composed of a blood red marble tile with a pentagram carved in it. Stepping onto it and felt a horrible rushing feel in my gut.
A flash of green light, and suddenly I found myself in a strange hole. The walls appeared to be of large intestines and an evil eye in front of me stared lifelessly out in the air in front of it.

It was insanely hot down here. I decided to swallow yet another climate adaptor as my first one wasn’t strong enough to withstand the enormous heat. I felt better after swallowing it, but now I noticed the horrible sounds.
I could hear millions of wailing, screaming, howling voices, begging for mercy – the voices of the damned.
I realized that I could only hear them in my mind. It was the spiritual echoes of the tortured souls. It was very difficult to ignore the wails in my head and in addition, another feeling bothered me now. Fear.

I didn’t know why exactly I felt so terrified, but the mere atmosphere was enough to frighten me. I realized that Hell apparently had an effect on me and was able to make me fear, despite my previous encounters and experience. Any man or woman, no matter how “fearless” the person was, would apparently feel dread in Hell.
Then I began to think of my buddies again, on all the evil that plagued my home world and on how I would gladly mutilate every demon in sight to get my revenge.

My hatred ultimately prevailed and my fears gave way to my growing lust for demon blood. I went closer to the disgusting eye and punched it hard with a wet thud. The eye closed and to my surprise, the disgusting, squishy floor beneath my feet began to rise.
A button? I thought casually. Now I was in Hell, everything seemed possible and little would surprise me anymore.

The floor stopped rising and I found myself in a large courtyard with the disgusting intestine floor and several scattered, dead trees, or rather what appeared to be trees.
Three brown monsters stood around me – fireball hurling things. They hissed at me, but my reflexes weren’t dulled, despite the insane babbling of damned souls in my head, and I blew off the nearest monster’s head with my shotgun, dodged the two fireballs, which were thrown at me from two opposite directions and took down the two other monsters one after the other.

I could feel insanity slowly clawing its way into my mind.
“Well now, my sleepin’ beauties” I grinned after my last kill. “As you are the weakest demons in Hell, I think I’ll call you Imps!” I kicked one of the “Imp” corpses in its side, then turned my attention to the fortress-like building ahead of me. It was made of red marble bricks and the entrance was a wooden door of a kind, I had first seen at the Deimos Command Center.

****

Andrews felt more dead than alive.

He was horribly tired and alone too. He had seen his buddies die one by one and now he was the only one left and what was far, far worse was that he was in Hell – the real Hell. The voices were driving him insane. He could literally feel his own sanity slip away while he tried to concentrate on his surroundings.

He didn’t want to look at the surroundings, but he had to – wherever he looked there was nothing but horribly mutilated bodies hanging from the walls and ceilings. An unholy wind howled through the bloodstained, marble green corridors, sounding like the moaning of the damned. Andrews was exhausted with the many horrible sights he had seen, sights more horrible than anything he had ever seen on Earth.

He wanted to cry, but he couldn’t. As tired as he was, he was so much more frightened. Ever since he arrived on this cursed plane of existence, he had felt a paralyzing dread. It was a miracle that he had been able to keep fighting, but he knew that he wouldn’t last much longer.

Driven half insane by fear, fatigue and the horrible cries of pain and pleas for mercy in his mind, Andrews wandered aimlessly around in the terrifying labyrinth of horrors, while clutching a large, black, handheld gun in his weakened arms. The weapon looked highly advanced with several technical gadgets on it and the gun was very big, the biggest weapon Andrews had ever used.

He couldn’t take the never-ending babbling of souls in his head.

“SHUT UP!” he screamed. “LEAVE ME ALONE!”

As if it was a reply to his screams, several animal-like growls and roars echoed throughout the distant corridors of this nightmarish building.
“No, no, leave me alone” he whispered weakly as he heard the frightening sounds draw nearer. He backed away, then turned around and ran.

He could hear the monsters behind him. They were gaining. Andrews panted. He was so tired and he would soon collapse.
He headed down a wide, gloomy hallway and looked over his shoulder. He couldn’t see them yet, but he knew that they would soon come out of nowhere.

Andrews almost crashed into the wall in front of him. He had run into a dead end.
He spun around. The inhuman sounds draw closer. Lots of yellow eyes suddenly glowed through the darkness in front of him. He lifted his gun and pointed the monstrous weapon at the approaching eyes, gritting his teeth.

He pulled the trigger and the gun started to vibrate, while making an increasingly noisier humming sound. A brief, green flash lit up the area around the marine and the next instant the gun let out a sizzling sound and a glowing substance flew out of the gun, almost immediately growing into a large, glowing ball of green plasma energy. Lighting up the hallway with an eerie, green light, the ball flew at the dark shapes moving rapidly towards the lone soldier. The ball exploded with a bright, green flash and several smaller flashes of green light turned the area into a lightshow.
The advancing monsters were all killed in the powerful blast and Andrews ran out of the blind hallway and raced down another.

-

Panting heavily, Andrews arrived at a large hall. The hall was full of terrible creatures and they all screeched and roared at him when they saw him. He let loose yet another green ball and blasted almost all of the monsters to cinders. Deep growls behind him made him turn around. A large group of bull-like demons charged at him, barking aggressively at him.
He pulled the trigger.
The trigger let out a clearly audible click and a low beep, but nothing else happened. Andrews looked at his ammo counter at the bottom of his helmet’s display.
His weapon had run out of energy cells.

Something heavy slammed into him from behind with an enormous force. Andrews felt the air disappear from his lungs and a sharp pain as he landed on the dirty, blood-spattered floor. The gun left his hands as the thing rammed into him.
He felt too tired to resist and was too dizzy to make out things around him. Something razor-sharp crunched through his already battered armor and tore out a chunk of his flesh from his side with such force that Andrews’ limp body was hurled around. He screamed in agony. The pain was unbearable.
In the fog flowing before his eyes, he could make out a big, burly, pink-skinned figure looming above him. He saw two penetrating, glowing, yellow eyes.
He felt a heavy foot pressing hard against his chest. He felt sharp claws penetrate his armor and skin and wanted to scream, but blood filled his mouth, making it impossible to let out a sound.
Andrews’ vision blackened. He felt a hot, stinking breath and in the next moment the creature’s teeth around his neck and most of his head.
He felt no pain as he heard rather than felt how his own skull got crushed between the thing’s powerful jaws.
Darkness...