The room that Jack appeared in immediately set him on edge.
Even more so than the average room in Hell did. He remembered, at least, to step off the teleport pad as he did a three-sixty, making sure to scope everything out immediately. But he was alone. Not a roaring Demon or groaning zombie to be seen. He had appeared in a small, asymmetrical room. The floor was multicolored cobblestone and the ceiling was a bland, smooth grid of tan rock. But it was the walls that were getting to him.
They were made of dark green rock covered in rivulets and holes and ridges and bumps, all of it random and ugly, and something about it made him squirm.
But the walls beyond the pair of openings he could see ahead of him were actually worse. They looked to be made completely of some alien, pale green vines, so thickly dense that he couldn't tell if they were the walls or they had grown over the original surface. When he wasn't looking directly at them, sections of them seemed to writhe and twist, just barely within his sight. But they stopped when he looked squarely at them.
He genuinely couldn't tell if it was his imagination or not.
As the others teleported in one by one, he took stock of the rest of the room. Besides one tall, oddly narrow door with red trim, (and in this case trim meant stacks of red skulls embedded in the wall to either side of the bullet-riddled metal door), there were just some brass candle-holders stuck in an asymmetrical ring around the center of the room.
"Fuck this place," Hollenshead muttered as he came in.
"Yep," Jack replied. "Let's just get this done."
"Where to first?" Cortez asked.
"Lemme check the map," Jack muttered, making sure one more time that they were safe, then calling up the digital overlay. The thing they were looking for, ironically, was right behind them, through the locked door. He sighed. "Cortez, see if you can get that door open without a key."
"On it," he replied.
Jack went back to studying. This place was pretty big. There were two other ways out of this room, both open and clear for the moment. The one to the right led to not a whole lot, just a few other rooms according to the map, the left led to the rest of the lair. And of course the teleportation pad that led to the Icon of Sin was at the far end of the left section. And since he had no idea where everything else was, i.e. keys, he didn't really have a good plan beyond: search it all.
"Can't do it," Cortez reported after another few minutes.
Jack sighed. "Figured. All right, let's start search and slaughter," he said. "We'll get this right area out of the way first."
They set to it, heading through the right opening, Jack leading the way, Hollenshead watching their six. They found a weird section of wall that was two big wooden blocks with skulls embedded in them, and a small tunnel, the floor of which was recessed down and filled with a pool of blood. He readjusted his grip on the double-barrel shotgun and got to work.
Ten minutes later, the squad was back where they'd started, having found about as much as they'd expended wiping out a dozen seemingly random demons who had been waiting for them behind closed-off sections of walls just for the opportunity to jump-scare them. Jack and his fellow Marines had been more than happy to reward them with a faceful of lead for their troubles. But there were no key-cards or skull-keys hidden among any of the rooms or hidey-holes.
They moved down to the only passageway left to them, coming into a tunnel that began broadening as it twisted around to the left. Strange, five-foot spiky protrusions jutted up out of the floor like alien growths. They gave them a lot of room, unsure of what the fuck they were or what they might do, and then slowed as they came to the final section of the passageway.
"Whoa..." Jennifer muttered.
"All right, see, this is what I imagined Hell looking like," Cortez said quietly.
Jack said nothing as he slowly walked forward, coming to the edge of a small drop that was ringed with green-burning torches and let out into a huge cavern. It all looked strangely incongruous, but Cortez had a point: it looked kind of like Hell.
The walls were random green-white rock and the ceiling was made of manufactured-looking gray cobble, smooth and strangely uniform. The floor was made of what looked like baked, cracked desert earth, dark green in color. It was broken occasionally by much larger cracks that revealed a glowering red rock, cracked by pressure and heat, that looked like magma but was clearly too solid to be. To confuse matters more, farther off in the room were huge, thick pillars of dark rock covered in an intricate spiderweb of cracks, through which a pale yellow light shone. And even farther on, all the way on the other side of the room, he saw what appeared to be a channel of running blood cut into the wall.
"Jesus shit, man," Hollenshead muttered.
"Where is everybody?" Jack asked finally. "Besides the handful of idiots in closets we found..."
"Maybe they're busy elsewhere," Jennifer replied. "Either way, I'd like to get on with this while the getting's good."
Jack sighed heavily. "Yeah. Hollenshead, with me. Cortez, Jennifer, watch our backs from up here."
He and Hollenshead hopped down. Jack expected some riotous uproar to happen the moment he did, but it remained silent. Eerily so. They began their search, moving through the area, checking out a few alcoves and sections tucked away behind the curving rock walls of the confusing cavern. They found...
Nothing.
There was some evidence of UAC occupation, but not much. The demons seemed to have not just trashed the stuff they'd left behind, but destroyed or removed a lot of it. In the end, they wound up near the blood channel cut into the wall, because it was their only way forward. There was supposed to be another way out, according to the map, but it was blocked completely by a solid rock wall with no obvious way around or through.
"I really, really don't wanna go down there," Jennifer said.
"Yeah, I mean, it's on fire," Cortez muttered.
"And covered in blood," Hollenshead added.
"I know, but it's the only way we could find," Jack said. He crouched down. There was an opening they could just make it through in their bulky armor that dropped into a narrow hallway, and really it was more of an alcove, just barely big enough for them to move through in a single file. The problem was, the walls were literally flames, the floor was what looked like blood. As was the ceiling. But it also might not have been blood...
He couldn't be sure. But what mattered was that he had a weird feeling, an intuition. There was something artificial, something unreal about the fire on the walls. Carefully, he reached his hand into the opening, prepared to snatch it back. Even with the fireproofing on the armor, he would be able to tell if it was actually a corridor filled with fire.
But there was no change. Jack typed something into his wristpad, getting a read on the ambient temperature. It was around fifty five degrees in the main cavern, and it was only a few degrees warmer when he stuck his hand back into the opening.
"It's bullshit," he said.
"How?" Cortez asked.
"No idea, but it's just a trick...I'm going down."
"Please be careful," Jennifer said.
"I will," he replied, and then slipped through the opening. When he landed, he expected there to be a splash, but further inspection revealed the floor not to be made of blood. Or, if it was blood, it wasn't in a liquid state. Carefully reaching out, he put his hand against the nearest flame-wall. It was solid. Almost like a projection screen or something. "I'm right, it isn't real."
"Well, I'll be damned," Hollenshead muttered, and joined him.
After a moment, they were all down in the tunnel, Jack leading the way. It didn't take long to get out into the next huge section of the Spirit World.
And it was worse than the previous one.
The tunnel let out onto another platform that gave a view into an even bigger cavern. The walls of the platform, mostly to their immediate left, were that same bizarre pattern he'd seen on the pillars. Here it looked like red rock this time, and the light shining through the cracks was closer to yellow-green. The floor was dark rock, shot through with a million angry red cracks, like Hell itself was trying to break out from down below. The platform they stood on extended into a pathway that led out into the vast cavern beyond.
The walls of the cavern were covered entirely in blood, flowing down eternally. The floor was more of that not-liquid blood.
No one said anything for a few moments as they stared at the vast place.
Finally, Jack roused himself.
"You three, stay here, watch my six. I'm going down to check it out...something's wrong," he said.
"What's wrong?" Hollenshead replied.
"I don't know, but I can just tell. Something's wrong with this place, and I want us all ready to act on it when it gets even wronger."
"Jack..." Jennifer said, making him hesitate. He glanced back at her. She seemed caught between wanting to tell him not to go alone, and knowing that they were all putting their lives on the line here, and that there was a decent chance none of them were coming back alive.
"I'll be careful," he said finally.
She finally just swallowed and nodded. Jack readied himself. Something bad was going to happen, he was sure of it. But something bad was always on the verge of happening in this place. Walking up to the edge, he double-checked his weapons, selected his plasma rifle, and then made the leap down. Again, he expected something to react the second his boots touched down, but nothing did. He slowly began walking out into the huge cavern.
The place was extremely open, with the only real thing blocking his point of view being a large pillar of that cracked glowing rock in the middle of the area. That was, he realized as he thought of the map in relation to where he was now, where the teleport out of here lay. There had been no way into it from the path above, so there had to be some way inside down here. Jack began making a broad circle around the central pillar, hoping for the best and expecting the worst.
Only what he ended up with was somehow actually worse than the worst.
In a flash of green light, he suddenly found himself staring at another Spider Mastermind.
Jack froze. Utterly froze, staring at this immense beast not fifteen feet away, just behind the large pillar. It stared back at him.
He heard shouts of surprise and the strange sound of more things warping into reality behind him, and tossing a glance back towards the others, he saw that a quartet of Arachnotrons had spawned in behind him.
His tired, abused, hell-shocked mind suddenly snapped into focus with a clarity he'd rarely experienced, and a plan was formed.
The Spidermind was spooling up its chaingun.
Jack opened his channel and roared, "HOLD FIRE! FALL BACK!"
And then he was off and running, back in the direction of the Arachnotrons, which were powering up their own plasma cannons.
It spoke to their discipline and how much they trusted him that Jack heard not one of his three allies opening fire. He indeed had a plan, but it required a lot of luck on his part, and no action on theirs, not yet anyway. It wasn't a particularly original plan, but if it wasn't broken, don't fix it. His synapses were firing like a machine gun as he sprinted back and then skidded to a halt. He waited, frozen like a statue, watching the Arachnotrons coming for him. Behind him, he heard chaingun fire start up and then choke off, and then the sound of immense machinery moving, huge legs pounding. He could feel the vibrations in the ground.
The Spidermind was coming closer, moving around the pillar to get at him.
Perfect.
And then the Arachnotrons opened fire. Jack started moving, feeling a strange energy come over him, an intense focus. He was aware of each stream of incoming plasma fire and keyed his movements to match them, to keep just out of their incoming line of fire, and returned fire with a few bursts of his own to piss them off more.
Behind him, the Spidermind rumbled closer.
He kept dancing around, dodging plasma fire, waiting for that perfect moment. Even if he did it just right, he knew it might not work, but at the moment, he didn't have anything better in mind. No BFG9K this time around.
Finally, it happened: the Spider Mastermind came in behind him enough that he was caught in the crossfire of it and the Arachnotrons, who seemed increasingly pissed off now. This was it, moment of truth, do or die.
Jack began sprinting towards the Spidermind, going as fast as his battered body would allow. He could see its chaingun spooling up, its maddened alien face and giant, pulsing brain. It let out a shriek of triumph, no doubt thinking it was going to murder him, when he fired off a burst of plasma into its face and then went into a slide. He barely managed to avoid the incoming fire as the chaingun started up and it shrieked again, this time in rage, and he slid right under its huge body. Exhilarated terror roared through his veins as he managed to get to the other side. He kept on going, rolling several times as it stamped around and barely avoided being crushed by it, and then he staggered to his feet and ran just to put some distance between them.
Turning around, he saw that it was working. The Spider Mastermind wasn't turning around, as plasma fire washed across it from the Arachnotrons. It was shrieking and yammering as it returned fire, the massive chaingun spraying out bullets to stop the Arachnotrons, who were in turn upping their own fire to defend themselves from this sudden new threat.
"When two of the little ones die, blast the big one with everything you've got!" Jack said.
"Copy!" Jennifer yelled back, her voice loud in his helmet.
Jack readied himself, hastily reloading his plasma rifle while he had a moment to do so. He was glad that at least one of them had snagged a rocket launcher, because if there was ever a time for it, that time was now.
He heard the distinct sound of an Arachnotron exploding.
On its heels, the sound was repeated.
And then a hail of gunfire opened up. Jack began hosing the Spidermind down from behind with his plasma rifle, emptying the whole cell into it. As soon as it was dead, he primed and threw three fragmentation grenades in a row, managing to get all three of them rolled beneath the mammoth beast. Then he was reloading his plasma rifle.
The grenades exploded, staggering the demonic spider thing, and then it roared as the distinct sound of twin rockets bursting accompanied a large plume of flame. As he opened fire again, pouring another stream of plasma into the Spidermind, another explosion occurred, and this one seemed to do the trick. Because it set off another, and another, shattering bits of metal and brain matter all over the place until the whole thing went up in a huge fireball.
After that, with bits and pieces of the Spider Mastermind raining down around them, they finished off the single surviving Arachnotron.
Jack finished reloading again and tried to get himself under control as he looked around, terrified of something else showing up. Why not pop in a fucking CyberDemon, for fuck's sake? But they remained alone.
"Holy fucking shit!" Hollenshead cried as they jumped down and joined him in the cavern. "That was absolutely mind-fucked nuts! Is that the big bad spider fucker you killed up on Mars?"
"Well, we were in Hell, but yeah. This was our boss battle the first time around," Jack replied, kicking a piece of the Spidermind's metal frame. "It was a lot easier this time. Fuck."
"We got lucky," Jennifer said. She looked pale and miserable. He was sure he did as well. "Really lucky."
"Yep," Jack agreed. "Come on. Keep pushing."
"Are you sure you don't need, like, a break or something?" Cortez asked. "Because that was intense."
"Later," Jack replied.
They pushed on, finding a door that the Spidermind had been guarding. It led into the central pillar, but it too was locked down, this time needing a yellow key to get in. He sighed and ignored it. It didn't matter for the moment anyway, but he would've liked to have seen that teleport. They found the way forward not far away, in the form of a bizarre stairwell with walls made of some weird flickering blue-red material.
Getting to the room at the top led to, somehow, an even more fucked up thing.
"Every single time I think I've seen the craziest shit this place has to offer...it proves me wrong," Jack muttered as he walked into the room.
The floor was made of that cracked red material, the walls more of the flickering blue-red shit, and the ceiling the glowing yellow-green cracked stuff, but all this just acted as a frame for four pillars spread equidistant around the room.
Like a scrolling advertisement from Hell, they were covered in constantly rotating faces. A plaster of faces, all melted together, screaming in eternal silence. To make matters somehow worse and far more ominous, at the head of the room, on a slightly raised platform, was what appeared to be a throne made out of flickering red rock that somehow at once looked like both fire and flowing blood. It was empty.
Directly ahead of it, in the center of the room, was a broad pillar octagon about half the height of the room.
"What the fuck sits in that throne?" Hollenshead muttered.
"Don't know, don't care," Jack replied as he walked over to where there was supposed to be an exit. They had, according to the map, come to a place that should lead them back to the initial large cavern they'd first come across. Given how each room seemed to hold a new, worse horror, he wouldn't mind making some backwards progress. Unfortunately, there was just a wall where the map showed an exit.
"Fuck," he muttered, staring at it, then looked around. He sighed heavily. "We need to find a way to open this. Start looking around. See if you can find anything that stands out or a hidden switch or button, anything. Faster the better."
They got to it. Nearly ten minutes of miserable, wretched searching went by before he heard Jennifer say: "Wait."
He turned around and saw her looking up. Following her gaze, he saw that the ceiling had a design with a deeper channel cut down the direct middle, and the walls of this channel were made up of blocks with skulls embedded into them.
"What?" he asked.
"This one's different," she said, pointing to the skull in the middle, near the octagonal pillar.
He looked at it and surmised she was right. Looking around, just to double-check, he hesitated. "So's the one directly across from it."
"What does that mean?" Cortez asked.
"It means we've got a choice. One of them might open the door...the other might do something really fucking awful," Jack replied.
"So how do we chose?" Hollenshead asked.
Jack sighed. "Guess. Get ready." He drew his pistol. Everyone tensed. With the throne to his back, he aimed for the one on the right and squeezed the trigger. A loud click accompanied the gunshot and a section of wall to his left slid open, revealing a stairwell and the red skull-key.
"Son of a bitch," Jennifer muttered.
"Finally, something's going right," Jack said, walking over, snagging it, studying it briefly, then pocketing it. "Let's keep pushing."
They followed the stairwell up and came to possibly the strangest hallway yet. Though the floor and ceiling were both shockingly unremarkable dark green brickwork, the walls were made of what seemed to be a spinal column, one for each wall, running the whole length, and constantly moving, rolling along. They pressed on without comment, and came to another stomach-churning room. The ceiling had been replaced by flattened intestines, and some of the walls were made of what appeared to be human skin, stretched and dried and nailed into place.
The way ahead was a stairwell that would take them back to the first cavern, but there was one more room to check out, around to the left of the door they'd come through, and although Jack knew he really needed to stop being surprised that the demons were somehow ramping up the horror with each consecutive room...
He was still surprised.
The room wasn't particularly large, and there wasn't a lot in it. The floor was made of that same compressed intestinal material he'd seen in other places, but it was the walls that started getting to him. They were made of human skin as well, dried and stretched and nailed into place. What was different here, though, was that some of them had ripped open farther on in the room. Behind them was...he wasn't even sure. Red. Meat. Blood, slowly seeping out. He didn't even want to see it. Strangest of all, opposite the entryway, was a section of the room that seemed somehow significant. Or, at the very least, more horrifying.
Two slanted walls, made of raw pink flesh and screaming, distorted faces, bones, flesh, organs, and other things he didn't even want to identify, angled towards a section of wall that was just simple gray stone, but it held more of that stretched skin nailed into place at its center, and at the center of that skin was a large blue eye.
An eye that seemed somehow alive.
"Okay, uh...take a look around, see if there's a skull-key hidden somewhere, and then we can get the fuck outta here," Jack managed.
The others silently complied, hastily searching the area and, when they found nothing, moving on. They hurried down the stairwell without looking back, and nobody spoke until they had navigated back to the room they'd started in.
Jack opened up the door and they moved in, clearing the immediate area, and finding themselves looking at probably the weirdest thing he'd ever seen.
"Is this what their tech looks like?" Cortez asked.
The room itself was simple, just a square of brickwork and old rock, but the thing that sat in the middle, which had some UAC technology hooked up to it, was just...weird. It was a thing of black and dark green metals, something that looked like it had been beaten with hammers, as it had many odd angles and contours. Portions of it looked like leathery, hardened flesh, and rusted silver wires came out of these areas, running along the length of the contraption before reconnecting with another patch of flesh.
The flesh definitely didn't look human, though.
There were a few things that might be considered sockets or outlets, and this is where the UAC had attached its own technology. The thing ran from the ceiling to the floor. Some of the flooring had been broken and pulled away around the base, and it was obvious at a glance that it extended underground as well. Even more curious, a few narrow pipes were attached to it, running along its outer surface, and one of them was broken open.
It leaked out a disturbing, pitch black liquid that Jack immediately recognized as the substance that made up that pool in the dead core of Haydenfield.
"Do not touch that shit," he said, pointing.
"Ah man, that's that shit from Haydenfield, isn't it?" Hollenshead asked, staring at it.
"Yeah, the stuff in the core," Jennifer muttered. "Uh, God. I really didn't want to remember that shit."
"Yep...okay, do we have enough explosives to destroy this thing?" he asked.
"Probably...maybe," Cortez replied. "Let's see what we got."
They spent a bit going through all their inventories, taking turns standing watch to make sure nothing snuck up on them, and in the end wound up with six rockets, nine grenades, a small amount of C4, and several plasma cells.
"Wish we had actual explosives," Jennifer muttered as they carefully set everything up.
"This'll have to do," Jack replied. "I just hope it gets the job done."
Once they'd set everything up, Cortez rigged it to blow and they fell back to a safe distance. Preparing for the worst, they detonated it. A huge explosion tore through the area, making everything shudder once. Jack could've swore that he felt something, some surge of energy snap through him that was unlike anything else he'd ever felt, but he couldn't be sure. When the dust settled and nothing came to kill them, they returned to the room.
Jack felt immense relief as he saw the tech reduced to debris and that awful black substance, which coated everything now and was steadily sizzling.
"I'd call that a job well done," Hollenshead said.
"Yep, now let's find that last skull-key and get the fuck outta here."
...
It took another twenty or so minutes, but they finally located the key they needed tucked away in a room that had been overlooked. They moved back to the cavern where he'd faced down the Spidermind and unlocked the door.
"Whoa...wicked," Hollenshead muttered as they got a look at the teleport that would take them in.
"Looks familiar," Jack muttered.
"You seen this shit before?" Hollenshead asked.
"Yeah, back around the time we were facing the first Spider Mastermind," Jennifer said.
The teleport pad was made of black metal, and surrounding it was an intricate latticework of black crystals that were growing in from the walls and ceiling and floor around it. They left just enough space for a person to step on.
Jack stepped up to it. "I hope Kyra got her job done."
"I'm sure she did," Jennifer replied.
"Well...this is it. This is the end...see you on the other side."
Jack stepped on the dark teleporter.