Eighty years ago, Berlin - the height of the Nazi regime
Five men in greatcoats with pointed caps and polished boots exited a truck bound for the Fuhrer's residence. They needed to confirm through documentation and certain paperworks that a weapon capable of winning the impending war with the rest of the world actually existed. Two years of searching and meticulous planning brought the five to different corners of the globe, spanning a crusade of knowledge that would have taken a single man most of his natural life. The moment they waited for, the culmination of this knowledge, had finally come. Lumbering through the nightly drizzle in a strict fashion, the quintet made their way into a grandiose library, made in the honor of Adolf Hitler of course - the pretentious fool's portrait hung everywhere, along with the more important symbol of power in the swastika.
"Why do we have to do this?" Gustav blubbered, his fat face comfortable in his insulated cloak. "The Fuhrer will never know if we just hide the information away. This discovery is far too important to be used as a simple weapon,"
"Silence," Otto barked, his heavy jaw bouncing with his long strides. Ahead of the pack, he always managed to make himself the leader. "The Fuhrer will have his weapon and the Reich will spread across the globe, wiping out imperfections as it goes,"
Klaus kept his lips pursed, as he always did, and his slumped posture betrayed the frailty of sleep deprivation and introvertedness.
"But what if the Fuhrer misuses it? Turns it against the Allies and ends up creating more of a mess than he has already gotten Germany into?" Berthold inquired, his thin face and wiry body holding more wisdom in a finger than the zealous Otto possessed in his entire brutish mind.
"I said be quiet," Otto snarled again. "We have come here to put together the pieces to the puzzle. Yet, one of our group has not yet told us what he has found. Kriegsherr, just what did you find in Egypt?"
"Patience, Otto," the most terrifying of the five responded coldly. His face, almost as if his skin were forcibly removed so that his pulsating flesh could replace it, creaked into a devilish smirk. "Not even the Fuhrer's greatest spies know the value of what I uncovered in the pharaohs' crypts, or in the sands where the slaves died as they worked. The secrets of Egypt on this subject are mine, just like the secrets of Scandinavia are yours Otto. We are all here on account of the Reich. We will not fail,"
Before long, they reached a duo of imposing doors inscribed with images of eagles, griffons, and various other winged creatures proclaiming the 'ascension' of the Reich. Battles between mythical and earthly creatures were not uncommon in the baroque artworks of the talented German artisans forced into labor for the Fuhrer, his closest friends, and their families. The library itself had been a gift. Statues, paintings, and various other symbols of elegance imported from France, Bulgaria, and Italy were commonplace. The Fuhrer forgot about it within three weeks of the Reichstag burning. He scheduled an underground bunker to be built beneath its floors and for the rooms themselves to be reinforced in the event of an attack on Berlin. The artistic integrity had been lost in the smoke of an inferno that had yet nine years left to burn to the Fuhrer's beloved capital.
"Gentlemen, hang up your coats. We have a long night ahead of us," the Kriegsherr stated, closing the doors behind him and gesturing to a rack where he then placed his own jacket.
After they became somewhat situated, three of the quintet had taken their seats. Otto and the Kriegsherr remained standing. Otto wanted what the Kriegsherr knew with a fire in his belly.
"Kriegsherr, now is not the time for your frivolous games," Otto growled.
"Your patience is as stunningly broad as your trigger finger, Otto. I see how well you slaughter the untermensch by pressing buttons and throwing levers. I do not fear you because I have seen you fight. You prefer to do it behind closed doors and with your thumb up your ass, m*sturb*ting to the pain you cause," the Kriegsherr taunted.
"You..." Otto murmured, at a loss for words.
"Yes, me. I am the only real soldier in this room. I know how to kill when my enemy is in my face, writhing in his own blood," the Kriegsherr removed his Lugermorph from its holster on his chest.
"Baron Otto, they will call you, master of hounds. Master of others who do the fighting for you. Have you ever held an opponent in those broad arms of yours? Squeezed the life out of his throat?"
Otto began to visibly tremble. Gustav and Klaus were quiet, but Berthold rose to his feet.
"Now now, gentlemen, this is not the night for bloodshed. We have information to share, remember?"
"I've already read your documents, Berthold. You think I am a blundering fool whose only talent is butchering my enemies," the Kriegsherr glared Berthold back down into his chair, then fixed his gaze back on Otto.
"The Fuhrer wants his weapon. Only I found any concrete evidence of its whereabouts," the Kriegsherr twitched his trigger finger three times. Two of the bullets ricocheted off Otto's spinal cord and ripped through his vital organs. With a gout of blood choking his last breaths - most likely curses directed at his killer - Otto slumped to the floor in a cold heap.
Five more bullets sang. Klaus began to cry and covered his head once he saw blood leap from Otto's stomach and onto his face. Berthold tried to react, but his spindly form took one bullet into the eye socket. The brain he grew to be so proud of crumpled as the piece of metal bounced around his skull like a happy child. Gustav, in his estranged way of defying death, tried to lunge forward and wrench the gun away from the Kriegsherr. Faster, stronger, and far more agile than Gustav, the Kriegsherr rewarded the fat man with a swift slap with the back of his hand and a smoking gunshot wound to the temple. Klaus - poor Klaus - tried to surrender.
"P-Please Kriegsherr, I will do anything if you spare my life! Pledge my eternal soul to you if I have to!"
"Perhaps later."
The quintet had dwindled down to a solo act and stayed that way for eighty years. What the Kriegsherr found in Egypt and what he managed to steal from his accomplices in Berlin details of a mystical doomsday device that fell from the sky: "مكعب الكونية" - the "Cosmic Cube."
---
Planet Maus - present day
Seven years of consecutive tournaments referred-to as the "King of the Vine" passed slowly and arbitrarily for Warsman, known in a past life as the Kriegsherr who went missing in action following the Battle of Berlin. He intentionally waited for the tournament to become such a widely-acclaimed event that the instigators and collective hosts of the gladiatorial event would be greater technological masterminds than anything the human race had seen or will see for quite some time. That time had come, and the Symaarian Imperium - should he win - would theoretically be able to construct or at least gather the necessary tools for Warsman's very own Cosmic Cube.
However, he never realized how...colorful...a galaxy-spanning military superpower could be, especially in regards to choices in arenas.
After the pre-battle preparations, the combatants were gifted with a free ride to Planet Maus, though Warsman wished he had a decisive voice in where he could properly fight his opponent. The incessant roar of ticket machines, the clacking of greasy hands on outdated arcade booths, and the pitiful whining of spoiled children drove a spike through his ears and twisted his heart into a vengeful rage. Whosoever finalized this location would have his head forcibly removed and put on a spike for all to see, so swore the tyrannical skull-faced menace.
Slapping a woman out of his way, he kicked over a group of children gathered around a basketball game. Hearing them cry gave him some manner of satisfaction. Hearing the silence after a fatal explosion of grenade shrapnel curled his lips into an even more malicious smile. One of the more annoying aspects of this planet did not exist in its almost entirely academically miniscule population, but in the workforce employed to keep it from crumbling into anarchy rather than the structured chaos that it thrived on. The mascot, for example, gave Warsman a dead stare from its felt eyes. With arms akimbo as if in disappointment, it pulled out a cartoonish blunderbuss from a strap on its back. Warsman grinned. Perhaps this would be fun after all.
---
The children screamed and ran in all directions of the endless playhouse. Their hero - Mocky Maus - struggled in pitched battle against a monstrous skull-faced man who had just recently caught his first and last whiff of cardboard pizza and unwashed bathrooms and decided to do something about it. Stabbing into the plush nightmare with his two hands, squeezing the blood out of the man's torso, Warsman's eye twitched in a primal insanity and lust for violence. Tearing out the innards of the infernal costumed clown, the Red Terror had grabbed two handfuls of tickets as if they were the entrails of a giant pinata. Satisfied with his work, Warsman departed from the scene of the carnage.
Slamming the tickets onto the desk, he startled the cigarette out of the mouth of a woman in a purple and yellow uniform who obviously had more than enough time on her hands to think about past mistakes. She quickly recovered, looking at the tickets - splashed with the crimson life fluid of her co worker - and then back at the deformed visage of her customer.
"Give me the best firearm you are capable of mustering for me,"
Frightened and confused, the woman answered Warsman with a quaking pair of hands darting for the Mocky's Special - an all purpose gun designed for anything that the wielder could come into aggression with. Warsman's lips curled with sadistic thoughts as he took the gun from the woman behind the counter.
"Also, where is my opponent?"
She pointed behind him. Turning, he set the Mocky's Special to standard fire considering the pudgy nature of his so-called 'enemy.' The words he spouted fell on deaf ears. Warsman kept quiet, focusing instead on trying to pull the massive trigger to the Mocky's Special. The mascot wielded it with such ease, why could he not? Finding another dial on the firearm, he noticed the trigger pull weight at over 100,000 tons. He rectified this and instead set it at four pounds. Now fully operational, he had only a second to understand the blabbering of his foe to end in a confident "HaDOken!" before the energy blast collided with his chest, sending him back and through an old copy of Street Fighter. How appropriate.
Swiping the embers away from his greatcoat, he once more brought the Mocky's Special to bear - but with a shield in mind. Aiming above his head and pulling the trigger, Warsman became enshrouded in an impenetrable cloud of...petrified pizza crust. Perhaps the most durable thing on Planet Maus, the pizza crust protected Warsman from the otherwise painful plastic shrapnel at the price of pilfering his precious nasal cavities - Mein Gott, the smell!
Finding a curious doorknob on the shield, Warsman twisted it and pushed only to discover a relatively easy way of finding his way back to the obnoxiously colorful and decedent mental institute that his superiors decided on making his tournament round with Montgomery more 'child-friendly.' Damn them all.
Quite suddenly, he remembered a quite fat and hairy man with Nazi memorabilia tattooed from his head to his feet having stood right in front of him prior to the shell of moldy crust having taken form. The conclusion of where he scampered off to ended as abruptly as the mystery began: the ball pit. The clever bastard.
Setting the Mocky's Special to 'well done,' Warsman aimed it down at the devilish depression of despair filled to the brim with multi-colored pellets. With a short spasm of flame vomited through the nozzle, Warsman sent the ball pit up into a sky-high column of fire and devastation. Surprised beyond any reckoning, he fell on his back and rolled for about twenty feet, disrupting lines and crowds of children and their overworked and underpaid parents. Shock very quickly melted away into anger and the people melted into screaming effigies of fire.
"I did not agree to this tournament to play games! Though I admire the craftsmanship on some of these weapons and brainwashing tools. If you yet live, then know this!"
Casting down the embers of his greatcoat, revealing the third-degree burns simmering on his opened flesh, Warsman slapped the molten meat and skin, tearing some of it off and chomping it in a show of fearlessness.
"I am Warsman! I do not fear you just like a lion does not fear rats!" He swallowed, the taste of his own blood a familiar sensation.
"Come out and fight me or this entire planet of untermensch children and the Neanderthalic loins that spawned them will join you in the afterlife."
To make his point more valid, Warsman switched Mocky's Special to 'spicy meatball' and started hurling grenades into clusters of civilians.
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