The Marauder: Mercenary of the Maleficent

The Marauder: by 美琳

Disclaimer: I have never played modern DOOM so yikes for any inaccuracies. This is also a bit experimental, and I tend to automatically project my philosophy and interpretations into scenes if I'm very unfamiliar with the games lore, so beware! And excuse my rustiness! Enjoy my experiment, feel free to suggest other video game scenes for me to render in writing, and cheers!

(I was going to write a short intro/background on the facility, the Slayer, and include VEGA, but there were too many elements I was unfamiliar with, such as how the Slayer ended up here, the purpose of the company, the lead-up to that point—in short, I haven't played this game.)

Warnings: just doom violence

— The Marauder —

          A foreign sound invaded the air, slicing through the wailing sea of sirens and shrieking people, radiating throughout the room as the source actualized, too radiating as abysmal flames reached out from a point in the air and rapidly extended in the exact pattern of the sound's dispersion. Like an eclipsed sun, a ring of fire encircled a lightless core. Yet unlike an eclipse, this dark point was deep not due to of a lack of light but because it was truly bottomless. The existential ambience crackled and split the air further as the bordering flames reached farther and farther until the core was wide enough for a full-grown man to step through.

          Instead of a man, a heavily armored boot protruded from the nothingness, meeting the floor with a clamorous metal resonance, though that step and the one after that gave the impression of treading with precision and dignity. The humanoid supported by those bulky boots was a monstrous mountain clad with the same pale green armor save for the arms and the chest, where a remnant of tattered material at the waist once guarded the vital organs. Negligence after ages of rot was a possibility, but the creature, an abomination of death, seemed too confident to care and no longer anticipated confrontation. Dark webs of viscous poison creeped over his papery flesh torn ragged by stark scars. The network of veins intersected at a throbbing light. This coalescence of energy within a gem-like capsule pumped a concoction of sorcery and curses throughout. Just as his once perished spirit, just as his once faded will, vitality and brute strength sculpted this once discarded shell and possessed it with new life.

          Cursed life—if it were not already apparent from the subtle stench of death and wrongness, especially that particular horrible wrongness that emanates only from dead humans, two magnificent horns blatantly brandished themselves when the creature fully exited the portal, which then began dispersing at the edges and collapsing into a point of nonexistence. Unapologetically, two dragon-like horns swept out from his skull face and jutted back in great curves, announcing that this was a figure of evil, and at the jaw, two smaller curved along the sunken cheeks as if in spite to proclaim once more that this was a demon. And those burning eyes of red rigid flame, an otherworldly light that shifted within each eye socket to fix sight on the Slayer and his hand gripping the gun, shouted within the minds of every witness that this was a demon, a great-horned, red-eyed, evil demon, and the corpse he wore to traverse hell was human no longer.

          But to the Slayer, this corpse meant more than a former human. His armor, though scratched and scraped by battles and time, was permanently engraved by the insignia of the sentinels. And his gait and his air, the way he still shamelessly carried himself with the same honor as the sentinels into battle, as if he marched serving a purpose, and as if in complete ignorance of the blaspheme he cast upon his former kingdom by his damned appearance alone—as if this entire character were specially designed to boil every last angry bit inside the Slayer. This opponent was the first in a long while that forced the Slayer pause for one moment and reflect on the transmogrifying corruption of hell. But the walking corpse before him once belonged to not a comrade but a traitor of their kingdom and of the very concept of good. For when one allies himself with hell, by contract, one betrays every definition of peace.