The|MULTIVERSE

EPISODE 45: Bowser Down!

A familiar gush of annoyance jolted all up and through Hanakin's sensationally vindictive body. Her stomach was a knot of vexations, her limbs shared the ache and most of all, her molten pride began to boil and topple over the brim of her perilous psyche. That frost demon-cicle really got on her bad side and to get the better of her punched the ticket to daemonite-ville. And as she stood within the dismal depths of her shadowy consciousness, awake before the precipice of a monstrous creature in black, it all caved into a stygian poof as darkness clapped in a gust of nothing and there, in the void, echoed a familiarly thick accent.

She groaned. Her tongue was soaked in the iron-tinged taste of blood. Cornelius called her again, and in that grip of agony, she stirred, pushing herself to her knees.

"Nethric demons were never your strong suit," said Cornelius. He had taken a knee next to Hanakin and clutched her shoulders in aid. She was dirty and without a care to her hair and looks. A demon-hating barbarianess that left little to the imagination save for that cloak and cowl on her back—and that didn't do a thing to conceal her completely.

"I had him, myself," she told him, grimly, and a little out of it. Still didn't deter how mean in the throat she was, or how much of a true bitch-face that never seemed to abandon her comely, now dingy mug.

Cornelius twitched a grin. "Didn't look so on my end, mon ami."

Words like that made Hanakin slip him a bad eye. No use. Cornelius cracked a sliver of a kind grin and if she thought him to be Ricven it could be now. But it wasn't. Just a Caijun concerned for his own. The obvious exchange of expressions clashed with Hanakin's dark discontent dampening under the slight spark of the gunslinger's small but warm smile.

And how quickly their little moment was splintered when Ricven's silver-clad boot crushed the black ice crystal of unpleasant energy to smithereens followed with a pulverizing foot grind for added measure. "Two in the casket, a third for the hole!"

"Make that a giant third," Chip said. She and the others arrived behind Ricven and spotted the icy mess beneath Ricven's boot. The ginger tinkerer then stretched her digi-visored gaze beyond the crags and machine-junk spires. Scannings told her nothing, but if the big one decided to return and pitch a fit over the demise of his brothers, now was the time. "The biggest of them all, I'd say. That thing's the size of an Italian plumber's worst nightmare."

Ricven came and looked Hanakin right in the eye. She took another blow to her kill-joy and like Cornelius and the others' perceptions, the scornfulness of Hanakin wasn't as sledgehammered as suspected. And that was because any kind of jab to her dark dignity fed the gloom that swaddled the beast within. "Still in there?"

Hanakin casually gloomed at him. "For now." She stared past him, burning her glare into something else, preferably the smoked path leading into the depths of Tortartus' known whereabouts. "Where's the other...?"

"We saw it kaput not too far from here and it hasn't stirred a peep," said Deo. He stood behind Chip, seemingly at her hip. His special-tech goggles on the job as they both observed what little data fed into their receptors. "Nethric energy low. Assumed exhaustion's imminent. Taking a nap...?"

"Conceivably forever," Chip said.

"Gremlyn thinks it killed itself after losing shit all over the place," the goblinite hoped.

"Shooting stars. A wish that'll never be," Wickels replied. It was common knowledge that villains, from the D-list to the A, were never truly finished. They just came back for another helping as ass whoopings—usually during the post-credits. "We all should gang up on it before it decides to lose another one of its dumb shits again."