03-09-2015, 11:15 PM
Argento wasn’t impressed by the town’s demonic transformation.
He had stared down the hordes of Diablo. The run-of-the-mill monsters that festered in the town’s dark shadows paled in comparison to his conviction. “Back to the abyss with you demons!” He roared as the area around him shone with an unnatural light. From his flanks, his celestial followers flowed forth, their bodies gliding half a foot above the ground as they brought their light swords to bear upon the twisted, mutated beasts that lurched forward to prevent the spread the Holy Light. The unclean creatures fought viciously, but they were no match for the revenants who sawed them down in a flurry of sunbursts and rays of purifying light.
“Where do your masters dwell?” Argento bellowed, his voice augmented as his divine strength flowed through his veins and suffused his being. “Come out and be brought into the Light!” When no such response came, the paladin furrowed his brow and clenched his hand around the mighty hammer that he now used with only one hand, despite its immense size. “Then I shall hunt you down in this bastion of shadows and purge you.” He added as he swung the Day’suis forward and released a beam of concentrated sunlight that vaporized everything in the street before him—monster and random city debris alike.
A few blocks removed from the onslaught that was Argento’s divine fervor, Shang Tsung threw his shoulder against a wooden door. Aged beyond its years by whatever had transformed the rest of the town, the door broke apart, revealing another hallway that didn’t match up with the original map of the Sanitarium. “Damn it,” the sorcerer seethed as he clenched and unclenched his fists. This was the third time that he’d thought he had a route out of the building, and instead, he found himself looking at yet another hallway made of metal grates and suspended inside what seemed to be a giant air duct. Rusted fans spun slowly, their old motors wheezing as they tried to keep the devices powered. In the shadows, the sorcerer would occasionally have to do a double-take to ensure he hadn’t seen something scurrying around.
“You want to play this game?” He asked to no one in particular as he glanced behind him at what had once been an employee lounge. Now it was filled with overturned gurneys and abandoned wheelchairs. Glancing back at the hallway, Shang squinted and noticed something familiar near the center of the hallway. It was a circular grate. In any other circumstance, no one would have paid attention to it or believed it to be out of the ordinary, but Shang knew he’d seen that same unique shape in the other hallways he’d avoided.
This is the same damn hallway, isn’t it? The revelation made a grin spread across the face of the sorcerer who promptly slammed the door shut. “No. I am the one who plays the mind games! Me!” He screamed as he heard the familiar sound of something heavy and metallic scrapping against the floors of the building. It was that creature he’d spotted earlier—the one with the metal pyramid head and the impossible physique that was equal parts bodybuilder and Quasimodo. “I’m not playing these games.” Triggering his Tarkatan blades, Shang stormed out of the door back into the hallway and turned to see the behemoth on the other end of the hallway.
It was certainly the same ‘man’ he’d seen before (if it was really a man beneath that massive helmet). From head-on, he saw that it was dragging what amounted to a giant, person-length cleaver. With each lumbering step it took, it had to pause to pull the heavy blade across the floor, eliciting not just the familiar screeching noises but also a handful of sparks as metal grated against metal. “You want to threaten me?” Shang muttered as he extended a palm. “You’ve no idea who you’ve crossed.”
With a vooom, a skull-shaped fireball erupted from in front of the sorcerer’s hand. The projectile sailed across the corridor and exploded against his foe’s chest. An attack that would kill or grievously injury lesser men, the creature simply continued to lumber forward, oblivious to the small fires burning across its chest and shoulders. A second fireball found the exact same mark, but had the same exact non-effect.
“Fine,” Shang muttered as he lifted his arm-blades and glared at the slowly approaching behemoth. When it got within five feet of him, it stopped and stood fully upright, revealing a height of about eight feet. If the ceiling had been any lower, the top part of its steel head would have scrapped against it. After standing up, the sorcerer watched as it grabbed the handle of its giant weapon with both hands. A beat later, it lashed out—the ‘sword’ tearing clean through the wall en route to a meeting with Shang’s midsection.
Jumping, Shang retracted the Tarkaten arm blades in time to grab hold of the iron grate ceiling and pull the lower half of his body up out of the path of the oncoming weapon, which crashed effortlessly through the other side of the corridor. Before the pyramid-headed giant could wrench his weapon free from the mass of twisted steel, Shang dropped down nimbly to the floor, released his arm blades, and dove at his prey. Hopping off the ground, he drove his right blade deep into the creature’s chest, punching through the thick skin and muscle, and doing—
—No damage?
Although it had a three-foot blade buried into the right side of its thorax, the monster didn’t falter, roar, or make any sort of indication that it felt anything. Even when the sorcerer ripped his blade free and released a sputtering spray of blood from the ghastly wound, his attacker stood firm and unmoving. When Shang reeled back his arm to lash forward with another blow, the giant simply leaned forward and shoved him with a palm. Despite not seeming to put much effort into shoving the sorcerer, the force threw the smaller man from his feet and down onto his backside. As Shang watched from his haunches, the pyramid-headed monster tore its sword from the wall and lifted it for another strike.
I refuse to be bested. With his eyes narrowing and his lips curling back to reveal an almost animal snarl, Shang sprung up off the ground and started to slash with the arm-blades, much like a manic Tarkatan would if they had been cornered. Even as ribbons of flesh started to flutter amidst the flurry of blades, their intended target never stopped his slow and methodical movements, and with a firm and overwhelming motion, it slammed the ‘pommel’ of its cleaver-like weapon into Shang’s chest. As the sorcerer stumbled, his attacker lurched forward and closed its giant hand around the sorcerer’s jaw and mouth. With an ease that bordered on the supernatural, it lifted the man up off the floor and slowly began to squeeze down, prompting an increasingly panicked Shang to slash and tear at its exposed arm.
Something cracked inside the sorcerer’s mouth, but his focus was wholly on the exposed bone that he could see through his blurring vision. With a last burst of desperation strength, he brought one of his blades down onto the bone with enough force to fracture it, causing the grip on him to loosen enough to facilitate his escape. Without a second thought, he turned and limped through the door into the metal grate hallway, slamming the entrance behind him as he hobbled his way through the tunnel. It was only when he reached the other side and essentially fell through the doorway that Shang allowed himself to draw breath.
As he lay there on the floor, the sorcerer realized that it took a little too long for him to refill his beleaguered lungs. Even with the searing pain of a broken jaw, it shouldn’t be so hard to breathe…
Looking out, he noticed that his hand was different—the skin was shriveled and weathered. Shang slowly rose to his feet and already knew what had happened, so a glance into a nearby pane of only partially rusted steel revealed the obvious truth. The face staring back at him was old and withered—the by-product of a human lifetime of age and decay. In his mad dash to escape from the creature, he’d managed to overexert himself… he would need to restore himself or risk whatever happened when you died in Silent Hill.
Reaching down into his satchel, Shang’s arthritic hand closed around the gun he’d stolen earlier from the boardroom. He drew it up and took a moment to verify that the clip still functioned and that it had enough shots to prove useful. Once the safety was off, he kept it in his hand and tried to figure out his current location within the Sanitarium.
He had stared down the hordes of Diablo. The run-of-the-mill monsters that festered in the town’s dark shadows paled in comparison to his conviction. “Back to the abyss with you demons!” He roared as the area around him shone with an unnatural light. From his flanks, his celestial followers flowed forth, their bodies gliding half a foot above the ground as they brought their light swords to bear upon the twisted, mutated beasts that lurched forward to prevent the spread the Holy Light. The unclean creatures fought viciously, but they were no match for the revenants who sawed them down in a flurry of sunbursts and rays of purifying light.
“Where do your masters dwell?” Argento bellowed, his voice augmented as his divine strength flowed through his veins and suffused his being. “Come out and be brought into the Light!” When no such response came, the paladin furrowed his brow and clenched his hand around the mighty hammer that he now used with only one hand, despite its immense size. “Then I shall hunt you down in this bastion of shadows and purge you.” He added as he swung the Day’suis forward and released a beam of concentrated sunlight that vaporized everything in the street before him—monster and random city debris alike.
***
A few blocks removed from the onslaught that was Argento’s divine fervor, Shang Tsung threw his shoulder against a wooden door. Aged beyond its years by whatever had transformed the rest of the town, the door broke apart, revealing another hallway that didn’t match up with the original map of the Sanitarium. “Damn it,” the sorcerer seethed as he clenched and unclenched his fists. This was the third time that he’d thought he had a route out of the building, and instead, he found himself looking at yet another hallway made of metal grates and suspended inside what seemed to be a giant air duct. Rusted fans spun slowly, their old motors wheezing as they tried to keep the devices powered. In the shadows, the sorcerer would occasionally have to do a double-take to ensure he hadn’t seen something scurrying around.
“You want to play this game?” He asked to no one in particular as he glanced behind him at what had once been an employee lounge. Now it was filled with overturned gurneys and abandoned wheelchairs. Glancing back at the hallway, Shang squinted and noticed something familiar near the center of the hallway. It was a circular grate. In any other circumstance, no one would have paid attention to it or believed it to be out of the ordinary, but Shang knew he’d seen that same unique shape in the other hallways he’d avoided.
This is the same damn hallway, isn’t it? The revelation made a grin spread across the face of the sorcerer who promptly slammed the door shut. “No. I am the one who plays the mind games! Me!” He screamed as he heard the familiar sound of something heavy and metallic scrapping against the floors of the building. It was that creature he’d spotted earlier—the one with the metal pyramid head and the impossible physique that was equal parts bodybuilder and Quasimodo. “I’m not playing these games.” Triggering his Tarkatan blades, Shang stormed out of the door back into the hallway and turned to see the behemoth on the other end of the hallway.
It was certainly the same ‘man’ he’d seen before (if it was really a man beneath that massive helmet). From head-on, he saw that it was dragging what amounted to a giant, person-length cleaver. With each lumbering step it took, it had to pause to pull the heavy blade across the floor, eliciting not just the familiar screeching noises but also a handful of sparks as metal grated against metal. “You want to threaten me?” Shang muttered as he extended a palm. “You’ve no idea who you’ve crossed.”
With a vooom, a skull-shaped fireball erupted from in front of the sorcerer’s hand. The projectile sailed across the corridor and exploded against his foe’s chest. An attack that would kill or grievously injury lesser men, the creature simply continued to lumber forward, oblivious to the small fires burning across its chest and shoulders. A second fireball found the exact same mark, but had the same exact non-effect.
“Fine,” Shang muttered as he lifted his arm-blades and glared at the slowly approaching behemoth. When it got within five feet of him, it stopped and stood fully upright, revealing a height of about eight feet. If the ceiling had been any lower, the top part of its steel head would have scrapped against it. After standing up, the sorcerer watched as it grabbed the handle of its giant weapon with both hands. A beat later, it lashed out—the ‘sword’ tearing clean through the wall en route to a meeting with Shang’s midsection.
Jumping, Shang retracted the Tarkaten arm blades in time to grab hold of the iron grate ceiling and pull the lower half of his body up out of the path of the oncoming weapon, which crashed effortlessly through the other side of the corridor. Before the pyramid-headed giant could wrench his weapon free from the mass of twisted steel, Shang dropped down nimbly to the floor, released his arm blades, and dove at his prey. Hopping off the ground, he drove his right blade deep into the creature’s chest, punching through the thick skin and muscle, and doing—
—No damage?
Although it had a three-foot blade buried into the right side of its thorax, the monster didn’t falter, roar, or make any sort of indication that it felt anything. Even when the sorcerer ripped his blade free and released a sputtering spray of blood from the ghastly wound, his attacker stood firm and unmoving. When Shang reeled back his arm to lash forward with another blow, the giant simply leaned forward and shoved him with a palm. Despite not seeming to put much effort into shoving the sorcerer, the force threw the smaller man from his feet and down onto his backside. As Shang watched from his haunches, the pyramid-headed monster tore its sword from the wall and lifted it for another strike.
I refuse to be bested. With his eyes narrowing and his lips curling back to reveal an almost animal snarl, Shang sprung up off the ground and started to slash with the arm-blades, much like a manic Tarkatan would if they had been cornered. Even as ribbons of flesh started to flutter amidst the flurry of blades, their intended target never stopped his slow and methodical movements, and with a firm and overwhelming motion, it slammed the ‘pommel’ of its cleaver-like weapon into Shang’s chest. As the sorcerer stumbled, his attacker lurched forward and closed its giant hand around the sorcerer’s jaw and mouth. With an ease that bordered on the supernatural, it lifted the man up off the floor and slowly began to squeeze down, prompting an increasingly panicked Shang to slash and tear at its exposed arm.
Something cracked inside the sorcerer’s mouth, but his focus was wholly on the exposed bone that he could see through his blurring vision. With a last burst of desperation strength, he brought one of his blades down onto the bone with enough force to fracture it, causing the grip on him to loosen enough to facilitate his escape. Without a second thought, he turned and limped through the door into the metal grate hallway, slamming the entrance behind him as he hobbled his way through the tunnel. It was only when he reached the other side and essentially fell through the doorway that Shang allowed himself to draw breath.
As he lay there on the floor, the sorcerer realized that it took a little too long for him to refill his beleaguered lungs. Even with the searing pain of a broken jaw, it shouldn’t be so hard to breathe…
Looking out, he noticed that his hand was different—the skin was shriveled and weathered. Shang slowly rose to his feet and already knew what had happened, so a glance into a nearby pane of only partially rusted steel revealed the obvious truth. The face staring back at him was old and withered—the by-product of a human lifetime of age and decay. In his mad dash to escape from the creature, he’d managed to overexert himself… he would need to restore himself or risk whatever happened when you died in Silent Hill.
Reaching down into his satchel, Shang’s arthritic hand closed around the gun he’d stolen earlier from the boardroom. He drew it up and took a moment to verify that the clip still functioned and that it had enough shots to prove useful. Once the safety was off, he kept it in his hand and tried to figure out his current location within the Sanitarium.
![[Image: Shang.jpg]](http://www.omniverse-rpg.com/images/Shang.jpg)