ULTRAKILL

V1 from ULTRAKILL (he / him & it / its)

mobile: navigation link here (contains rules+credit, app, stats, and threads)

a one-of-a-kind prototype v-model; a war machine

knows how to kill with SSStyle and make the Devil cry

voiceless, but is absolutely talking shit in its head

MANKIND IS DEAD. BLOOD IS FUEL. HELL IS FULL.

The machine’s a cat, too? He couldn’t even have peace as a furry little guy? Gabriel narrows his eyes at the red dot, tracking its movement across the ground, and his fluffy tail swishes in a furious effort to keep his composure and not swat at it. Come on. He’s an angel, not some animal— Ah, well.

But he wants to pounce soooooo badly, though. Instead, he jumps at the machine—cat—whatever—with a yowl, trying to swat the pointer out of its grip. Machine…! Stop fooling around and let me sit in this box in peace!!

Whoa there. Not fully expecting the change in target, V1 tries to move its head out of the way, but catches a good scratch along its neck for it as it bears back.      Utilizing the invisible spring built-in to every normal cat, it performs a great vertical leap directly up in the air, before sticking a landing atop a higher concrete ridge. Judges give it a 10 across the board.

It’s rare to see the machine so still. Gabriel starts to walk down the street, past the machine, but at its lack of movement, he stops too. Enough that the Stars would strip him of the Father’s Light and steal him from a dying world. But to bring it here, just to mock him in his uselessness, is cruel. perhaps it’s what he deserves.

“What are you even here for?” he demands. “Hell wasn’t enough for you?”

It’s funny how down here, it’s easier for everything on his mind to slip out. He could have become something else here. Gotten out from under the Council’s thumb. It’s not the most ideal outcome, and a rather cowardly one at that, he’ll admit it; he’d never make right what he had done, but it’s not like it’s the kind of thing you can repent for. It’s an outcome he can live with. The machine, though—it’s a mocking reflection of the Heaven that sneered at its artificial will. It knows what Gabriel had once stood for, and it’s thrown everything he’d believed into question, and he wants—

…

…he can’t hope to match it. Gabriel refuses the urge to reach for his swords again. There’s no satisfaction of getting beaten if there’s no struggle.

The hissing of the shadows around them grows louder as he adds, with a hitch of laughter under his voice, “What, did you miss me that much?”

Miss him? It hasn’t even fired, yet.

     The machine stands there and takes it, finding Gabriel’s attempts at verbal provocation as manageable to withstand as ever. In the last world they shared, it was remarkable how death made mortals even more vulnerable from the change, shaped their souls into things that could bleed and die again. The architect of the dead must also find the suffering of others as entertaining.

     Silence is the only thing it supplies to the angel’s questions, partly in desire to make him feel as pathetic as his words sounded. It was also trying to redirect its hearing for the shadows of the Abyss; a potential threat it might not be prepared to fight takes higher priority.      His artificial wings fan out abruptly, a test to see if the light would bear the dark forces back. The sudden gesture is quickly followed by a turn, and (bang! bang! bang! bang!) multiple Piercer shots, the light and noise forcing something wicked to momentarily retreat from the both of them. Nostalgic.

A one-eyed cat with a couple of extra limbs ambles over to face its target head-on: the other cat from hell.

Is it strange that he likes falling? Seems counterintuitive, for an angel, but being pulled down by a force greater than himself, no way to fight against it—it’s comforting, in a way. Self-determination’s hard. It’s a nice break.

The gray-washed sheen of the Abyss is getting awfully familiar by now, and it only takes him a moment to find @bloodisfuel​ in the disorientation of arrival. Without thinking, he unsheathes a sword with a flourish and points it at the machine, about to fly at it again, until he realizes the sheer absurdity of the action. He’s brought a pair of sticks to a gunfight.

So he tucks WOOD back into his belt, crosses his arms, and (attempting to cover for the initial movement) says, “I know a burger place close by, if you’re into that. Not much else to do around here.”

    It's dissatisfied, and disappointed, and maybe a little bit pissed off, with the way things have unfolded. The angel, at least to its records, had fostered bloodthirst by a dark enlightenment it had unwittingly guided him into. Yet instead of venturing into the Abyss alone by falling in combat, he'd chosen to skip the fun part on behalf of the both of them for... Sight-seeing? What a letdown.

    The war machine idly spins the cord of Whiplash in a circle as it processes its options. It'd be some degree of fun to riddle Gabe's armor with bullet holes, to blast his crude weapons into pieces, but not by much. Not with him as weak as he is.

    Whiplash is retracted, the sound of it snapping in place echoing down the eerie streets of the immediate afterlife. Its sensors relayed similarities to the dark maze hidden before the gates of Hell; something beyond measurement of strength and mortality lived here, only—it was the maze itself, and not the minotaur. It doubted the cobblestone could bleed.

The machine’s chatty. Gabriel glances down to his phone in his free hand at the new messages and scoffs.

The whir of the machine’s processors makes his heart quicken, as does the bite of its arm just by his neck. Steel-on-skin. He shakes his head, pointy chin of his helmet clipping the red metal. “I care about these mortals more than you do.” Not like the machine would bother calculating its moral standing. It’s still an object, after all.

He pulls the machine closer, spreads his wings, and sweeps both of them toward the pit, its depths yawning open under their feet. “Your concern is flattering nevertheless, if unnecessary. Who’s the killjoy now?”

As far as he knows nothing will save either of them from the Abyss below. If he’s going down, it would come down with him.

Is he out of his fucking mind?

    Too used to being the one of the two with tricks up his sleeve, V1's momentary inaction keeps itself still in the other's hold. Being caught off-guard in this situation is a mistake; an error with a worst-case punishment.      In a last-resort move, Whiplash flings its spear out upward, awkwardly firing past its phone in order to grasp at some saving tether. Had it reacted just a moment sooner, it could have accounted for the change in trajectory, perhaps even propelled itself outward and upward with a Knuckleblaster blast, but instead the spearhead hits the lip of the hole and—

Dink!

—then retracts, nothing to show for its effort but empty-handed doom.

     Still connected, even appearing to “float” in the air as they fall, V1 uses its phone to take an unflattering photo of Gabriel’s dying moment. With flash. It’s the least it can do as its systems sputter out.

“I will not,” Gabriel informs the killing machine. “A gun is a coward’s tool.” He refuses to show it with the wooden swords he’s been granted, shifting his weight so they’re positioned behind him. The fact that the machine has a gun at all, along with its three arms, is troubling. If they were to be trapped here together, he wants to at least match it. He’s getting tired of his own incompetence.

Gabriel bridges the distance between the two of them swiftly and grabs the hilt of the revolver, but only to flip the gun’s muzzle to the side, pointing away from them both. He leans in, pressing his helm closer to the machine’s lamp-face. He has dreamed of this hunk of metal, and now it’s here in the flesh. What’s he supposed to say…?

A half-moment of taut silence before he settles on, as though scolding a child: “Listen, if you’re going to kill for sport on this damned island, you might consider prioritizing the people who were brought to it rather than the permanent residents. We get resurrections, at the very least. Your kind have wrought enough destruction. We don’t need mankind to be dead here, too.” He isn’t one to stop it from having fun, but doubts the machine will care who it kills in its seemingly unquenchable bloodlust. Oh well. It’s worth a shot.

    The speed at which Gabriel moves to close the gap is surprising—not just for the apparent eagerness, or that he says "no" and grips the weapon anyway, but also that he decides to do that instead of blinking forward in a blue flash. Pretty funny for a cowardly tool to have been defeated by a coward's tools. Twice.

    Its spotlight of a face shines as always unsparing, the metal without muscle-twitch to indicate thought or emotion even up this close. V1 pulls Piercer further toward its side, wanting the back of Gabriel's hand against the side of its chestplate.      Through the armor, it's likely that the apostate can feel its ever-rumbling motors protected underneath: endless hunger. Would the angel mistake the reverberation for life? Either way, the move is a reciprocation of wanting the other close. It sends its words over to his phone. Bzzz bzzz.

[text]: "We"! Wrong, killjoy. [text]: You don't get to determine my objectives.

    Gabriel's heroic flaw of not knowing when to shut the fuck up had come in handy yet again, since their resurrection was news to it. The fact that the machine hadn't once let itself cease to function in Spirale while Gabriel, ostensibly a newcomer given his words so far, had learned about this...

Well, was it supposed to congratulate the angel on a new job in a relocated afterlife, or had he...?

     Surely all that wasn’t what the angel needed time to think on. The advent of mankind’s extinction here would populate the afterlife he was employed at; really, how would that be anything but a win-win relationship? Unless this wasn’t really what he meant to get at. Time to call his bluff.

   Knuckleblaster raises a claw, tracing a steel tip of a finger up alongside the contour of Gabriel's cuirass, before latching a vice grip against the top edge of it. The red arm was fully operational, even if limited by use. He could detonate its charge right here, right now. And there would be nothing Gabriel could do to escape it. 

[text]: Acting like you pose a threat? Like you suddenly care about mankind? [text]: That could get you hurt. Or worse.

The scent of blood and a familiar zing! and Gabriel’s already turning. A blur of gold ricochets at him: he looks down at the coin turning circles in his chestpiece. His heart stops for a moment. The velocity of the realization leaves him dizzy.

“Machine,” he starts, with no plan for how that sentence might end. The phone provided to him by the Stars buzzes, and he taps it open cautiously, slowly, half his attention still on the machine’s multicolored arms.

The machine can speak? He’ll think about the implications of that later, when he’s had time, but now he’s only a rush of cold adrenaline. Its presence changes everything—

He turns to the question posed to him. Did what hurt? His humiliation before the Council; being cast out; his pride, ever-burning; the horror of looking back and seeing what suffering he had wrought, and having to live with it. Of course it hurt. He can’t bring himself to say it aloud, the old shame of defeat—and twofold, of who he once fought for—cutting through him.

“You know my answer full-well, machine,” he says, quiet. He isn’t in the mood for whining. His helmeted gaze stays fixed on the machine’s optic as he pulls the coin out of his armor and flicks it back toward the deep-blue metal.

Trying to shove the conversation elsewhere, voice slipping back to its usual haughty resonance, he demands, “How come you get a gun?” That was just unfair.

   Surprising no one, the machine is quick to react. The spear glints, but its business-end strike is intentionally without any target, straying off-course.     Instead, Whiplash's cord wraps itself around the coin and pulls it back, the arcade token glittering as it is rolled back and forth across its metal green knuckles. Tick-tick. Tick-tick-tick. Then, like a magician, the coin appears to vanish with a finger-splayed flourish. Not that it expects applause.

   Ah, there it was, that uncommon pensive response the Archangel was lesser-known for delivering. Wow, he could get so serious. V1 reasons, then, that it'll probably get away with discussing updog with him later. What's a matter baby?

The question is responded to with body language mocking surprise, as though it's retrieving its holstered weapon for the first time ever: oh, you mean this?

    The gun is spun around one-handed, the fun showcase of a routine learned through its own will to succor its boredom. Then abruptly, its hand snaps forward to grip it in a peculiar way: the handle is being offered outward, the rest of the firearm being held such that it would be easy for Gabriel to simply fire Piercer toward the war machine's chestplate point-blank.     But there’s a bit of distance between the two of them. It’s partially a test to see if the Stars had given Gabriel his teleportation back, and to generally gauge his threat level. Also, it’d be funny if Gabriel truly thought he could just walk up and take it, especially out of a machine’s hold.

The coin is struck.

It zips forward at blinding speed, a gold laser— —before landing right into Gabriel's chest hole. Ding. 50 points.

    V1's a bit lopsided, with both Knuckleblaster and Whiplash equipped to the same side, and its standard black-and-blue arm on the other. But it proves to be no hinderance, as he's already inserting a cord from Whiplash's wrist into his phone, coordinated deftness resembling that of the way the war machine handles firearms.      Wait, when had it holstered Piercer? Whoa. This much motion going on made for some mesmerizing slight-of-hand to any observer. It points its optic at the angel, unmoving from its spot.

FROM: V1 TO: GABRIEL

[text]: So.