Demon Axe, Chapter 9

“Daniel! March your butt right back here! Now! Open your goddamn ears for the first time in your life! Get back here, you big baby! Come on! Move it!” None of these energetic threats from Raven could slow down the clomping thuds of Daniel Mercer’s boots. Determined that his newfound “weapon” was still just at toy, the rock god marched back to the portal to the “real world”.

“You can run away all you want to, but Roger is eventually going to hunt your ass down!” shouted Raven, who was floating through the portal space with him. “And then what will you do? Are you just going to give up? Are you going to kneel before the same son of a bitch who murdered your friends in cold blood?!”

Daniel was more distracted by his own angry thoughts than he was by the colors and wavelengths of the portal world. Raven’s words snapped him out of it and earned her a vicious glare from a stone face. “Be angry all you want!” she said. “But if you don’t channel that anger towards bringing justice to your friends and your audience, then you’re just a heavy metal hypocrite.”

“You want to know what a real hypocrite is, Raven?!” roared Daniel. “A hypocrite is someone who has an entire army of soldiers to hunt down one guy, yet still claims to be powerless to do anything about it! Your father is a typical politician: full of empty promises and full of bullshit! Who the hell voted for him to be king?! Seriously, what is he doing with all of those soldiers?! Are they just a bunch of paper-pushers with medieval weapons?!”

The allies were so busy bickering that they failed to realize that they had been shot out of the portal and onto the grassy field of the outdoor arena a.k.a. “the real world”. They stood back up (without each other to lean on) and dusted the grass blades and dirt off of their clothes.

Raven shoved her finger in Daniel’s face and said, “Listen to me, you fucking jerk! I don’t ever want to hear you talk about my father like that again! Some things are out of his control, but he knows exactly what he’s doing by sending you out to fight Roger Zee. Whether you like it or not, you represent this human world. You have its entire weight on your shoulders. If you humans don’t learn to help yourselves, then nobody else can help you either. This is my father’s way of teaching you pathetic humans self-reliance! If you can update your fucking Twitter page, you can goddamn jolly-well learn to catch a terrorist!”

Daniel leaned closer to Raven so that they were face-to-face and said in a hushed, yet angry tone, “There’s a huge difference between self-reliance and complete abandonment. Not only is Roger Zee a product of YOUR society, but the only thing I have to fight him with is…” He swung his “magical” axe microphone in the air and sprinkled more gold dust around. “Tell me how any of this is supposed to make sense!”

“When was the last time any tragedy in this world made sense?” asked Raven rhetorically. “When was the last time that a zealot thought rationally about what he or she was doing? Sometimes things don’t make sense at first, Daniel. Sometimes the best answer to all of this is there are just too many assholes out there. But you…you make more sense than a lot of people from your culture, and that’s saying a lot given your affinity for drugs and alcohol.”

“Then riddle me this, Batman,” said Daniel. “How exactly is a stage prop supposed to slash the head off of someone who can do the same thing to me with just a flick of his fucking wrist?”

“That’s the million dollar question, Mr. Lord of the Pit!” said a gravelly, demonic voice only a few feet away from the conversers. Daniel and Raven looked at each other fearfully and gulped saliva before slowly turning their necks to see that the voice belonged to an enslaved Johnny Vega, his partner Sonia Marquez flanking him. They stood there with arms folded, muscles thumping, veins protruding, eyes glowing, and teeth bared.

Raven took notice of the crowns of thorns on the assailants’ heads. “These wrestlers don’t know what they’re doing. The Order of the Spider once used those crowns to glean information from prisoners. Roger has found a way to use them for complete mind control.”

Daniel patted Raven on the back and said, “Well, Mrs. Warrior Princess, this is your cue then. You’re the only one between the two of us with an actual weapon, so why don’t you just…”

Raven was knocked backwards so far that she rolled across the grass field, all because of a flying martial arts kick from Sonia Marquez, who proceeded to crack her knuckles after such an accomplishment. Daniel trembled as he watched his ally holding her stomach and gasping desperately for air. Sonia mockingly patted him on the shoulder and said in a succubus-like voice, “Well, what are you waiting for, honey-bunny? Why don’t you try that new weapon of yours on me? I promise I won’t bite…hard!”

Daniel looked down at his “toy” and gripped the handle with a warrior’s resolve. His trembling of fear turned to trembling of anger. He glared with deadliness into Sonia’s demonic eyes and said, “Die, you motherfucker, die!” With reckless abandon, he hacked and slashed with his magical axe like a battle-hungry berserker. He slashed at her neck, arms, ribs, and legs while screaming every swear word imaginable until his veins burst like dynamite sticks. By the time his vicious attack was over, he doubled over in exhaustion and wheezed hard while spitting acidic bile onto the grass.

“Didn’t your mother ever teach you to be nice to your toys?” said Sonia, who didn’t have a single scratch on her, not even a small bruise of sorts. She stood with her arms folded and her smile arrogant. Daniel on the other hand whimpered so gently that Johnny Vega couldn’t help but give him a “comforting” shoulder squeeze.

“It’s alright, you big baby girl,” said Johnny in a mocking bass voice. “It’s not your fault that you hit like a two-year-old…or cry like one. You probably should have brought a gun with you of some kind. But then again, those are big boy toys and you’re just a little bitty baby. Maybe you should have one of those rifles with a wooden cork at the end of it.”

Sonia and Johnny were laughing it up in their monstrous voices while Raven was squirming on the ground like a snail, trying to get back into this battle, but hurting badly. She was the only one who had true fighting experience and she was easily vanquished. Daniel didn’t think he had a chance in the world. To him, this was truly a shitty way to die. He didn’t know what the minions were going to do to him, but it probably would have involved a shattered skull or a snapped spinal cord. Hearing them laugh about it brought angry tears to Daniel’s eyes.

The Lord of the Pit grit his teeth hard as he thought about Roger secretly laughing about slaughtering his band mates. The trauma of their severed heads came rushing back to him, the voices blaming him for being a failure and running away in cowardice. His adrenaline was heating up like molten steel. His muscles twitched and ached. His heart felt like a bomb vest ready to explode. With one final outburst, Daniel yelled, “Shut the fuck up!” into the microphone like the true heavy metal god he was.

The sound waves of the throaty growl knocked Sonia and Johnny back like human cannonballs. Their crowns of thorns showed small cracks in them as well. Everybody on that battlefield good or evil showed shock on their faces with wide eyes and deep breaths. “Holy shit,” said Daniel softly.

The initial shock wore off and was replaced with vitriolic, passionate fire from the Lord of the Pit. Instead of imagining his band mates as floating heads, he imagined them as full bodies, in their costumes and masks, playing behind him like they were at a concert. Vulture Man strummed his guitar like a wild motherfucker. Pig Man slapped his bass guitar like a pimp who was owed money. G-Pac bashed the drums and symbols with enough anger to put dents into them.

“Alright, motherfuckers!” the Lord of the Pit shouted into the microphone yet again. “You want a battle? Here’s a war!” That last word was prolonged with a raspy roar as he imagined the grinding music in the background. The louder Daniel yelled, the tighter everybody around him gripped their ears in pain. He wasn’t even singing a real song; it was just a firestorm of hateful, disgusting swear words from “cocksucker” to “motherfucker” to “prison bitch” to “Jesus Christ”.

The sound waves from the microphone blew past everyone like a hurricane and smashed their eardrums like G-Pac on his kit. The crowns of thorns formed more cracks. And more. And more. Then the artifacts of control shattered like glass and blew away in the heavy metal tornado. Johnny and Sonia’s heads were bleeding, but not profusely and they were still awake. Raven was shaking her ears with her fingers, trying to get the buzzing out. The Lord of the Pit looked around at what he had done and dropped his microphone in disbelief. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said.