So yeah, if you didn't already know, this fic is inspired by the backstory behind B.P.R.D.'s infamous "Nuts" wad. If you have no idea what that is, look it up. It's hilarious.
The two Barons of Hell turned their heads when they swore they heard someone coming. The footsteps continued growing closer but nothing materialized. One of them swore he saw a flicker of visible static. "It's just a spectre," he said to the other.
"You're a little late, don't you think?" the other asked. "Everyone was ordered to arrive a day early. You should be there by now!"
They both stepped aside from the teleporter to allow the spectre passage and were stunned when they were hit with a blast from a BFG9000. The one that had taken the direct hit threw up a puddle of green blood as the blast began to liquify his internal organs.
"Steve!" the other Baron shouted to his brother in shock.
They both frantically began hurling green fireballs all over the room, hoping to hit their invisible aggressor. Anywhere they saw a flicker of distortion they aimed a fireball, but unfortunately their accuracy against an invisible target was severely handicapped and they weren't even sure if they ever managed to hit their target. Another blast from the BFG crippled Steve completely and he was finished off with a few blasts from a plasma gun. The aggressor turned the plasma gun onto the second Baron, who saw a glimpse of a marine as his partial invisibility powerup wore off right before he pulled the trigger and fired the kill shot.
The General was awoken that morning to an excited recruit pounding on his door. "Sir! Sir, you have to wake up! We found it!"
He sat upright at the news as "it" could only be one thing. "You found where they're hiding?!"
Taking that as permission to enter, the soldier burst into the room and waved his hands around excitedly. "We just got a load of intel from a really quiet marine. I'm not sure who he was exactly, but it seems legit!"
"Intel? There's intel? Let me look at it!" The General rushed out of bed, got dressed, and ran to check all of the incoming intel. He smiled triumphantly and shouted with a victorious cheer, "We really did find it! Quick, get the men together downstairs! We need to plan immediate action!"
The marines were assembled together in no time, each one wondering if the rumors they'd heard were true and whether or not they really had found a teleporter that would lead them directly to Hell's entire remaining army. They excitedly chattered amongst themselves and further spread more rumors as they waited for the General to arrive.
"I am sure you are all eager to hear about the rumored teleporter to the Hellspawn army!" the General announced upon his arrival. Everyone immediately shut up and listened intently. "Late last night, a lone, silent marine saw several Hellspawn using a teleporter guarded by a pair of demons. He suspected them to be using it to gather at some unknown location, killed the guards, and notified us that it leads to an army located on one of the outer moons of Litrivin IV. We decided to investigate and sent one of our untrained rookies through with a smartphone to see what he could find. We got these images back!"
He turned on a projector which showed an image of a vast army of thousands of demons spread out over a large arena. The image switched to one of the rookie moving in closer behind them to try to get a better shot of some of the demons. Then there was a shot of him running backwards from a horde of charging Hellspawn. The last image was down the barrel of an angry cyberdemon's rocket launcher.
"We haven't heard back from him again though. We're assuming it's just bad reception since he's on Litrivin IV and all."
"What should we do?" one of the marines asked. "Should we plan an assault?"
"Can we really take on an army that big?" another added. "I mean it's huge! And that picture didn't even look like a fraction of them!"
"Of course we can handle an army that big," the General nodded. "In fact, I'm sure it can be taken out by only one person! Who wants to volunteer to go?"
The marines all exchanged looks, no doubt wondering who this "one person" was going to be, when the door slammed open and one of the recruits stumbled in. "Did the meeting start yet?!" he shouted upon entering. "I'm sorry I'm late! There was no hot water in the showers again!"
The General leaned to his aide and whispered, "Who the hell is that guy?"
"That's Carl, sir," the aide replied. "Your favorite marine, remember?"
The General's gaze turned deadly when memories of Carl came flooding back in. "Carl..." he said darkly.
He remembered Carl now. He was the guy who drank all the booze, ate all the snacks, and hit on his wife at his birthday party last year. Carl had apologized profusely and swore it was something that would never happen again, yet the General still hadn't forgiven him for causing drunken chaos at his birthday.
The General suddenly had a horrible, awful idea occur to him. "Carl!" he said more cheerfully this time. "Thank you for volunteering!" There was a wave of relief as everyone in the room felt so much better knowing that they weren't going to Litrivin IV after all.
Carl was the only one still out of the loop. He looked at the General as the confusion continued to set in. "Volunteering? What did I just volunteer for exactly?" he inquired.
"You offered to go and fight an entire army of Hellspawn for us! Such a brave chap! Everyone applaud his bravery!" Everyone simultaneously turned around and started applauding and tossing out random cheers and praises.
Carl was the only one who wasn't visibly happy for his "sacrifice". "Say what?!" he shouted. "I never agreed to that!"
"Sure you did! I heard you say it myself, didn't you guys?" the General asked everyone in the room. They all started nodding and agreeing. "Well, we best get a move on! There's no telling what that army is planning!"
The entire room began cheering once more as the General pushed Carl out of the room, only this time they had spontaneously withdrawn confetti and streamers from hammerspace to throw in celebration. One guy had jumped off the podium and was crowd surfing.
"Seriously sir, shouldn't I have backup?" Carl asked, his voice shaky and terrified.
"Nonsense! Haven't you heard of the marine that took on Hell itself? He didn't have any backup and he single-handedly saved us all from destruction!" the General replied.
"But sir, I'm not that marine!" he protested.
"Now then, all you have to do is step on that teleporter and kill as many demons as humanly possible! Try to teabag a few corpses here and there as you kill them. It really infuriates them when they see you making a game out of it and makes fighting them more interesting!"
Carl fought back as the General pushed him closer to the teleporter. Some marines were standing nearby with mops and Lysol to clean up the mess from the rotting Baron corpses. One of them stopped to take a selfie with the remains and another was covertly stuffing a skull into a gym bag to keep as a souvenir.
"But...but wait! Don't I need a gun?!" he protested.
"What do you need a gun for? Just use your fists!" the General replied. "All you gotta do is run through the crowd, find the biggest demon, preferably a cyberdemon, and then punch it in the balls!"
"But I don't want to punch a cyberdemon in the balls!" Carl whined. "He'll kill me!"
"Oh I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were a pussy..." the General grumbled. He grabbed a pistol out of the holster of another nearby marine and shoved it into Carl's hand. "There, happy? You're good to go!"
"But this is just a pistol! There must be thousands of demons down there..."
"10,617 to be exact! Which means that should do just fine!" he interrupted. "Well, we'll be seeing you!"
"Bye!" one of his fellow marines waved goodbye.
"Try not to die!" another added.
Before he could say another word, they gave him a rough shove onto the teleporter. He felt himself transported through space and time and heard a messy explosion when he reached his location. Realizing that he was now covered in gore, Carl quickly and frantically checked his body over to make sure that all of him had made it through the teleporter. Sometimes when a teleporter covered an incredibly large distance it tended to make certain mistakes and would sever your body parts and leave them in random locations somewhere between the teleporter and the destination. He was relieved to discover that all of him was there. The gore, it seemed, was the remains of a zombie that was unfortunate enough to be standing right where he'd teleported. He quickly collected the zombie's bullets and tried to collect himself as well.
The vertigo he felt was typical of having used a teleporter, though Carl wouldn't doubt if some of it were a result of the intense fear that he felt right now. He realized that he was standing on a large platform overlooking an arena-like area and quietly crept forwards toward the edge. The closer he got to the edge, the more demons became visible.
There were thousands of them spread out over the area. They seemed to have assembled in an orderly fashion according to rank and were evidently waiting for something. What exactly was it that they were waiting for though? He wondered how far out the arena stretched. There appeared to be another area just beyond that he couldn't see from here. How many of them were out in that area?
Clutching the pistol in his shaking hands, Carl tried to come up with the best strategy possible. If he took out the weaker imps in the back first...that would give him just enough time to kill one or two of them before the army converged on him and ripped him apart. That was certainly a winning strategy right there!
Well, here goes nothing. He very well couldn't stand there and pretend he wasn't there. Eventually someone would see him and he'd die anyway. Might as well try to take out one or two of them first. Carl raised the pistol and aimed it at the head of one of the imps. He pulled the trigger and watched as it fell over dead, spraying blood all over its fellow imps that had been standing nearby. The imps spun around and glared at the marine angrily before tossing several fireballs in his direction. Carl dove out of the way and felt his heart pounding as they barely singed his armor.
The random fireballs hadn't gone unnoticed by the crowd. More and more, the Hellspawn began to alert to the presence of a non-zombified human and each and every one of them decided to turn around and attack. With all the fireballs flying, rockets firing, and chainguns a-blazin', it was only a matter of time before there was friendly fire.
"Ow! What the hell, man?!" a hell knight said when a revenant's homing rocket hit him from behind.
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" the revenant said moments before his shattered skull was knocked off his shoulders by a green fireball and sent flying into a chaingunner. The chaingunner growled like a rabid jackal and began firing away at the headless corpse, striking everyone within range of the bullets.
A mancubus took several shots to the back and spun around. "Okay, that better have been an accident!" he shouted angrily before setting several nearby chaingunners ablaze at once with his flamethrowers.
Carl peeked over the edge of the precipice and realized that none of the Hellspawn even seemed to realize that he was there anymore. A pair of pinkies were ripping and tearing each other apart and a hell knight was hoisting an arachnotron over his head. Before he could throw it however, several shots to the gut from some chaingunners killed him, causing him to drop his quarry onto the head of an unsuspecting imp and crushing it to death.
"Wow. This mission is easier than I thought it would be!" Carl said while he watched the demons killing each other in an orgy of violence.
Limbs were flying everywhere and the ground was bathed in enough blood and entrails to make it slippery. A mancubus slid on the goo, sending him flying through a crowd of fighting Hellspawn like a demonic bowling ball. He kept on going until he went sliding out into the crowd of cyberdemons and smashed into one.
"What is going on up there?!" one of the cyberdemons asked angrily. Before he had a chance to ask, a stray fireball came flying from somewhere amongst the battlefield and hit him in the face. He stumbled backwards from surprise and fired a random rocket off, hitting another cyberdemon from behind.
"Who did that?!" the other cyberdemon demanded. He fired off several rockets in the direction that he assumed the rocket had come from and hit several of his kin in the crossfire. It wasn't long before they'd erupted into a mosh pit of violence as well. The mancubus scurried to get out of the way and very narrowly avoided being trampled in the chaos.
"Hey Command?" Carl said into his com. "How soon can you pick me up? I think our problem just took care of itself."
The head demon himself finally showed up, expecting to see his army waiting for him, ready to invade and destroy the remnants of human civilization. He was led to the waiting crowd by the Spider Mastermind, who assured him that everything would be to his liking and that they spared only the best and most elite of Hell's troops for the invasion.
"I promise you that this will be our most successful invasion yet, sir!" the Mastermind said. "They'll never see us coming!"
"And you're sure nothing can go wrong?" he asked the Mastermind. His dark, foreboding voice sounded so evil that it chilled the very air surrounding them and killed a random litter of puppies somewhere.
"Nothing can go wrong! I've calculated everything to be absolutely perfect, Mr. Romero sir!" he said proudly.
They both stepped onto a teleporter and arrived atop a tall precipice in front of Hell's massive army, expecting to be greeted with a cacophony of cheers and praises from the waiting demons below. Instead what they found was a bloodbath as angry demons fought their way through the huge crowds. Demon corpses lay everywhere, getting stomped and trampled amidst the chaos, some of them having been thoroughly gibbed by the amount of punishment they'd endured. An arachnotron had been pushed over and was stuck upside down, his spider-like legs flailing about comically and spinning him in circles as he attempted to right himself. Half a mancubus tried to drag himself out of danger, his intestines dragging along the ground behind him and attracting a hungry pinky. A revenant attempted to kill a hell knight, only for his rocket to instead burn him and leave him thoroughly pissed off. He attempted to flee but was surrounded by the hell knight and his friends, who pushed him to the ground and began kicking him while he curled up in the fetal position. Somewhere in the distance an arch-vile was running around resurrecting the dead and then setting them on fire and a crowd of imps were fleeing from a pack of charging cyberdemons.
The Spider Mastermind was silent. When he noticed the head demon slowly turn around to glare at him, he timidly asked, "I'm going to be publicly executed for this, aren't I?"
