It was astounding, Mardakk the Magnificent thought, how you could get used to something. How something that was initially distasteful could become tolerable, and then over time become pleasant… and then, eventually, fun.
Of course, the woman impaled on his cock didn’t think so, but her opinion didn’t matter.
Mardakk hadn’t always been a rapist… he had started as a stagehand at a crappy carnival magic show after he ran away from his abusive home to join the circus. He hadn’t been called Mardakk then, of course, but merely Mark Dalton, a dumb 16-year-old convinced that the performer Shaka the Stupendous was a true wizard… a great one who could perform real magic. That bastard had played along with his delusions for years… he called him his apprentice, and told the eager and stupid boy that Mardakk had been that he would teach him some magic if he worked hard enough. He had believed the bastard, working himself to the bone because more than anything he wanted to be a wizard as great as Shaka was.
That illusion lasted until the day that he first saw real magic.
Shaka had been a complete fraud, but that didn’t mean everyone in the carnival was. The most popular attraction the carnival had always been Madam Zosia, the old fortune teller. He had never liked her because she had fainted the first time she had looked at him, and had never wanted to be around Mardakk after that… every time she had seen him from then on, it had come with a dirty look and usually a muttered curse. She was, however, the carnival’s main attraction – people came from far and wide to see her and hear her predictions, get her advice on their love life, and be guided through their futures. She claimed she was reading their palms to read their futures.
He learned that was a lie the night that the Black Witch came into their circus.
They had just finished setting up outside of Kansas City and settling in for the night when the tents had started burning. Circus animals screamed, men and women cried out, and in the chaos of the flame, people began to die. The man who had still been called Mark then had raced back and forth with the others, trying to put out fires with buckets of water, when a woman with skin as black as coal strode through the flames like they were nothing and broke their strongman in half with her bare hands. Shaka had screamed, and when Mark had yelled at him to use his magic the witch had smirked, raised one hand, and ripped his soul right out of his mouth with a single gesture, sending his body dancing to the ground like a hollowed-out shell. “Magic…” she had said, her voice an amused rasp. “That’s not magic, boy.”
She had left him there, paralyzed with fear, as she walked into Madam Zosia’s tent and pulled the old woman screaming from the imagined safety it represented. “This is magic,” she hissed as she reached down and ripped one, and only one, of the many necklaces from the fortune teller’s neck. “And it’s mine! She stole it from me!”
“I’m sorry…” the palm reader had croaked out, and the black-skinned witch had laughed at her.
“No, you’re not… yet. But you will be… forever.” She raised the necklace by the chain, holding it up before the other woman. “Look at it,” she growled, slapping Zosia as she tried to look away. “I said Look At It!” When Zosia’s eyes opened, they locked onto the swaying amulet, its green gemstone catching the firelight. The way she trembled and jerked her body in the witch’s grip told the young boy that she was terrified, but she seemed completely incapable of pulling her eyes away. “That’s right…” she whispered. “You have been starving the demon, you fool… used him for merely a shred of his potential. We will make it right, though… your soul, old and wretched and tired as it is, will be sufficient to nourish him.
Zosia began to scream. She didn’t stop. Not even full minutes after she had died and her body was lying on the ground motionless… Even then Mark could still hear the shrill, pained wailing of the dead woman.
“Now,” the Black Witch had said as she traced a bloody line down his face from his forehead, over one eye, and across to his cheek. “What are we going to do with you?” Everyone was dead by then… the young stagehand was the last member of the circus left alive. “What should happen to you, I wonder?” she mused as she drew a second line in bloody cuts across his face, completing the X she had begun. The Black Witch probably expected him to beg for his life, or to sob, or to struggle. Something that was amusing to her.
She got what she wanted, but not what she expected. He had begged, alright… but not for his life. No, he begged her to teach him magic.
For some reason, this amused the murdering witch. Standing amidst the death of everyone he knew, bleeding from the scars she had given him, he wasn’t afraid. The boy Mark was so unafraid of death, lacking so much of the animal, panic-filled fear that she longed for, that tormenting him wouldn’t have been fun for her. Instead of killing him, she decided to honor his request. Right there, in the ashes of the home he had known, she showed him how to make his first demonic pact… and began the process of unleashing him out onto the world.
And Mark learned, sucking up knowledge like a dry sponge sucked up water. Demonic magic could do far, far more than help him get tiny glimpses into the future the way the weak fortune teller had been doing – it could make him strong, powerful enough that no mortal man would be able to stand against him, that only heroes could pose a threat. The newly-born Mardakk had served loyally… feeding the demon, harvesting souls for him, feeding him. He had served the ancient witch loyally, and she had made him strong in reward.
Or so he had thought then.
It was only years later, after years of serving her, years of training and hard work and refinement of his talents, he realized there had been more to it than that. The root of the magic that she knew, that she had taught to Mardakk, was rooted in demonic energy, empowered by the forces of hell. Demons could give power, but there was always a cost… in death, and in souls. This particular demon inside the necklace, the same necklace that Madam Zosia had worn, and that he had been given by the Black Witch, was named Ishagnar, and he had been bound into this amulet by an ancient and very powerful sorcerer named Azar. Azar, however, was long dead… as was the whole order he had built around him to defend reality from the monsters outside of it… and the demon wanted to be free.
The Black Witch did not want him to be free. She wanted him to be fed, to be an unlimited source of power for her to tap. She was using Mardakk as the scapegoat, letting him do all the work and attract all the attention from the heroes. She had never intended to let him actually free the demon, but rather to take back the amulet before Mardakk fell and leave him to his fate.
And that probably would have happened if it weren’t for the fateful night he went after Obsidian Ankh.
The way he had been taught, lots of magic throughout history was done by demonic pact… whether the sorcerer knew it or not. Many old religions had artifacts associated with demons, even if they hadn’t meant them to be, and after years of use they kept their energy. It made them useful tools, but tools only recognizable by a sorcerer of talent – they were like batteries, a stored collection of energy to fuel magic, and when one appeared in the museum in Gotham the Black Witch had sent him to get it. It had gone perfectly… until she showed up.
Black Canary might not have been the most famous heroine but the blonde woman was nothing to take lightly. She had jumped him in the darkness, and if he had been any worse trained then he would have found himself imprisoned and helpless. Instead, he had reacted just in time to shield himself and knock her away from him, and the heroine in her fishnet stocks and leather had bounced off one of the pillars. She had fought back immediately, of course… but by then Mardakk had grown strong. When he wasn’t taken by surprise, one of the world’s premiere martial artists was no more a threat to a man like him than the world’s most dangerous goldfish would have been. She never got within arm’s reach of him, not even once, and he could see it as she grew frustrated. The demon’s whispers in his mind spoke to him, warning him, showing him what was coming, and when she finally opened her mouth and began to breathe in he was ready. A raised arm, a flick of his fingers, and a bit of magical energy, and when she tried to scream she found that, suddenly, she had no mouth… that his magic had sealed her lips, silencing her.
It was darkly amusing the way she panicked then. She tried to scream out her sonic attack several more times before she fell to her knees, eyes wide with fear. Then screams that had nothing to do with her powers and everything to do with her terror and horror came next as Mardakk casually walked up to the horrified woman, raising his hand and unleashing a pillar of force into her stomach and sending her flying across the room and shattered the glass case holding the ankh he was there for. Without a second thought he grabbed it, picked it up off the ground, and brushed it off before he slipped it into a pocket in his cloak.
He almost turned to leave then. He almost walked right out, taking what he wanted and just… leaving. Maybe it was the adrenaline and the surge of victory, his first triumph over a real heroine, that inspired him to do otherwise. Perhaps it was the way the glass case had ripped her coat and fishnets, the way she sprawled on the ground dazed with her legs spread that gave him ideas. Probably it was the demon in his necklace whispering frenzied words into his mind… whispers abruptly empowered by the new energy of the ankh he had claimed. Maybe it was all of the above. It didn’t matter, because he didn’t leave… he walked over to the fallen heroine, kicked her over, and pushed her legs apart.
Then, with the silenced heroine restrained by magic her muscles could never match, he raped the defeated blonde in the shattered remnants of her failure.
Part of him was stunned at this. Mardakk didn’t know what he was doing. He wasn’t like this. He should stop, leave her to her shame but… It was amazing. Everything about it was so much better than any sexual experience he had ever had. Everything from the way her body gripped his cock tighter than any cunt ever had, to the sense of triumphant power he felt over the conquered hero as she cried beneath him, and that was just the start… the demon’s whispers in his mind felt overwhelming, alarmingly so, and yet he couldn’t bring himself to stop… it just felt too good in every single way. And when he came, filling up her pussy and probably knocking her up with a permanent reminder of her disgraceful defeat, Mardakk felt guilty… but he also felt powerful.
It was the demon in the necklace. What had once been whispers, sensations, and impulses had become words… words that he could understand. Words that promised him power, if only he would give it freedom. If only he gave the demon what it needed, he would be the strongest sorcerer in history, a demon in his own right, and a virtual god.
The Black Witch must have known something went wrong… that her tool had changed. When he returned, his mistress took the ankh, congratulated him… and that night, while he slept, she tried to kill him. Mardakk should have died in his sleep, just one more of the myriad of victims the evil sorceress had claimed in her life, but just before the curse had woven around him completely the necklace – or rather the demon it contained – woke him. He should never have been able to fight through that hex… he never had come close to overpowering his mistress before. Something had changed, though. He was closer to the demon now, had more power even than she did. On another day, with other intent, he never would have been able to do it… but as he looked at the barely-dressed evil witch he felt his cock throbbing in his pants, longing for her with a vicious, desperate need almost like a plant reaching for the sun year after year. He strained against the magical bindings… and they shattered beneath the might of his lust. He broke free… and then he broke her, bending the evil witch queen almost in half beneath him as he drove his cock inside of her, raping her on the bed she meant to kill him on. And it felt even better than the last time… her outrage and fury at him and just how impotent it was to stop him from taking her was a rush like nothing he had ever known.
In a fight, he never would have been able to take her. His magic would never have been able to restrain her. His will would never have been able to match her. He wasn’t strong enough, not normally. But with the desperate need to take her, to hold her down and force himself inside of her and take his pleasure from her unwilling body he was stronger… stronger than her. And he relished it.
He didn’t even realize when his hands closed around her neck at first – when Mardakk’s awareness returned to himself, when he could think about something other than how good it felt to be conquering the whore whom he had lived in terror of for a decade, her eyes were wide and bugged out and she was desperately trying to gasp for air that wouldn’t come. He could have let go then… should have let go then, probably. But he didn’t. And it felt it when she died, when her soul left her body, when it was pulled into the amulet and the demon took possession of her and doomed her to relive this and far worse in his embrace forever. He felt the demon’s utter satisfaction, its power, its lust, as it took the offered sacrifice of his former mentor.
And Mardakk the Magnificent grew stronger still.
The demon’s words were clear now. Ishagnar was no petty demon… he was an incubus lord, and he feasted in lust, and loss, and the conquest of taking. He had tried to conquer the world before. He would have succeeded, too, had not the greatest sorcerer in history stood against him. Azar was gone now, though… and the secrets of how to stand against one such as him had been lost. Not even Lucifer would stand in his way, should the demon wish to act now.
He whispered to him again and again. He existed to claim what did not belong to him, to enslave, to rape, to ravish… it was his highest purpose, his passion, his reason to be, and it made him stronger… stronger than any mere sacrifice would have, strong enough to be free. If Mardakk could free the demon… if he could channel enough souls through himself and into the patron he was becoming a vessel for… then his magic would no longer know any bounds. Mardakk would never need to fear treachery from the demon… the process would bind their souls together tighter than any rope could manage, closer than any bond could force. The fall of one would mean the fall of the other. They could make each other unstoppable… and Mardakk could have all the true magic to reshape the world that he had ever dreamed of.
It wouldn’t take one or two sacrifices, though. It would take hundreds… the purer and closer to perfect, the better. It would take a conquest never before seen in human history to bind his soul closer to his demonic patron than any sorcerer’s ever had been, but the rewards would be beyond mortal imagining.
The idea horrified him. To rape so many… kill so many. It was wrong. It felt wrong… even if his cock still tingled with the memory of his glorious triumph. He couldn’t do it. He found himself, for the first time in more than a decade, thinking of the parents he had left behind. What would they say about him now? Would they even care? Could he do this?
And what choice did he have? He was a thief, a criminal. He had already raped a superheroine, and her friends and allies would hunt him down… and he was strong, but not strong enough. There were mightier heroes than he out there. His mistress had provided protection and training, but she was gone, and he needed to protect himself now. He needed to be stronger than any that would come after him. He needed to be unstoppable.
So in the end, he did it.
The girl beneath him now was pretty, though not as pretty as she had been when they started. Her hair was responsible for that. Once it had been long, golden blonde, and model-beautiful, but one of the first things Mardakk had done was braid it before he cut it off and used it as a rope to bind her in place. That was important – it was one of many tricks he had learned to make his victims better sacrifices for Ishagnar. They worked best the more pure they were. Sometimes, that meant virgins. Sometimes, it meant that they did good things – helped the homeless, or were good cops, or were religious leaders. Sometimes, it meant that they were kind, or could be made to worry more about the fates of others than themselves. Sometimes, it simply meant that they were beautiful, or rich… the more they had of value helped. Over the last five hundred victims, he had refined his methods. He hunted across the country for the best women, the prettiest, the smartest, and kidnapped them… five or ten at a time. He would let them fight, so he could overcome them. He would make them watch what he did with the others, so they would fear and hate and beg. One of the biggest things he could do to reduce their potential, he learned, was to add something new of his own to them… using ropes or cuffs or magic to restrain them would greatly reduce the energy he got from them. His solution, after a few trials, was that he used their own clothing or, more often, their own hair, to bind them. Police officers could be chained in their cuffs. The violinist he had recently finished with had been tied up with her violin’s strings. He would add nothing of his own to the girl to reduce their potential. He would let them be what they were.
So without her hair this lovely little thing wasn’t quite as pretty anymore as she could have been… but she was a better sacrifice, and the frantic, sobbing tears running down her face only made her prettier to Mardakk. She fought, too… It didn’t help, but she fought. Of course she did… she was the last one. She had seen what he did to the others.
Mardakk simply held her down, thrusting in and out of the sobbing girl as she squirmed beneath him as if trying to wriggle away. She wouldn’t manage… he had her pinned down to the altar by his cock almost like a butterfly to a cork board, hopelessly skewered as he took his pleasure from her, putting the terrified virgin to use for the first – and last – time of her life before introducing her soul to an eternity of the same torments.
And it was a pleasure. So much more so than it had been the first few times. When he had begun this, it had been out of necessity… he had felt guilty, he had felt pathetic. He had been weak. Those paltry feelings, however, couldn’t hold up to the way it felt to take a woman against her will. To pit his strength against hers and overcome it, to claim her utterly and defile her… it was the single greatest pleasure he had ever known, and that had only been the beginning. With each rape, with each death, Ishagnar could speak with him more clearly. His sexual appetite grew as the Incubus Lord moved closer to the surface, and his performance increased at the same rate – he could pound a girl for hours now and cum only when he was satisfied, breaking her will and spirit completely with the hammer of his cock on the anvil of his limitless lust. He could smell a virgin, could taste the way her lips would from across the street, and if he wished it he could make even a virgin nun cum against her will as he was taken.
It had taken him 15 months to find, capture, and claim all 500 of the victims he needed. 15 months where the missing woman had begun to be noticed, 15 months where he was being hunted. 15 months for people to begin putting together the stories of Black Canary and the witness reports of the last man seen with enough of the missing women. 15 months of him doing everything he could to stay ahead of heroes hunting him as he used every bit of magic and ingenuity he had to hide and keep hunting his victims. When he began, the sorcerer was still wracked by guilt and doubt, rather half-hearted in his efforts. By the end of those 15 months, Mardakk doubted he would ever be satisfied with a willing woman ever again.
Mardakk was accelerating now, fucking her harder and faster, and it didn’t matter how virginal and innocent the girl beneath him was… she knew what that meant. She had watched what happened to the violinist, the swimmer, the Christian singer, and the charity drive organizer whom she had been bound up with. Her gaze flitted over to the cum-stained bodies of his earlier victims, panicked and terrified, and she began struggling harder, trying to beg around the panties shoved into her mouth, begging for him to stop, begging for her life. Once, that would have bothered him. Now it just drew Ishagnar closer to the surface and made Mardakk horny.
Slowly, he closed his hands around her neck, and began to squeeze. And squeeze. And squeeze. He rode her for through the last minutes of her life, timing it carefully with the skill of five hundred repetitions, and in the end, after five hundred minutes of rape exactly, his cock swelled and spasmed inside her and he came at the same moment she transitioned from dying to dead. The last thing she felt was his cum inside her, showing her the worth of her existence, and then she was gone, just one more soul for Ishagnar.
Except it wasn’t just one more soul. It was the climax.
The amulet glowed, glowing so brightly that he could see through his victim’s skin and into her bones. It blinded him but he couldn’t close his eyes, basking in the magnificent, fell light of the demonic amulet, and then he began to scream. It felt like he was burning alive but unable to be consumed, like his soul itself was having a branding iron driven into it.
Then when the pain was gone Ishagnar stood before him.
The demon was a creature of duality… or perhaps, two different creatures, superimposed over one another. Out of one eye, Mardakk saw him as a handsome, suave man in a business suite. The sorcerer would have said he was as beautiful as a model, except the sorcerer had never seen a model as beautiful as the demon was. It was the kind of beauty that could inspire poets, ruin kingdoms, and drive women into insanity, sharp as a knife as just as dangerous. Out of his other eye, however…
Out of his other eye, Ishagnar was a monster. He was huge, fat, and swollen with muscle. His skin was covered in boils and spikes and thrashing tentacles covered his form. He was hideously ugly and asymmetrical, and it hurt to look at him… but Mardakk was his, and Ishagnar Mardakk’s, and both knew it.
They both began to laugh. Slowly at first, then faster, stronger. Amid the lust-soaked ruins and the remains of the last set of poor victims he had needed to free his partner in crime, they laughed and began to make plans for how they would conquer. When Ishagnar had been bound by Azar, he had had an army waiting in hell, ready to invade. That had been more than a thousand years ago, but what was a thousand years to a demon? That army would still be there… but it was one thing to rip open a small, temporary hole between the physical world and hell. Invading would require a sustained portal, an open gate, and that would require truly unimaginable amounts of power. Incubi like Ishagnar – and now, for all intents and purposes, Mardakk – could use sex as a ready energy source for their magic, but it wouldn’t be nearly enough. It would take the sexual energy of millions or billions of people to rip a hole large enough that it would be self-sustaining. When Ishagnar had been prepared to invade earlier he had needed to spend decades preparing to open that gate, bringing relics together. Today, though, there were too many heroes, too many opportunities to stop him. They didn’t have decades to work.
And it was in this that Mardakk proved his worth as a partner immediately. For Ishagnar, who didn’t understand the mortal world nearly well enough, this would have been a nearly insurmountable problem. Mardakk the Magnificent, defiler of the world, however… he knew just what to do. And smiling, he began to make plans with his eternal partner for their domination.
Two weeks later, the world went to hell.
The presence of an Incubus Lord here on Earth had some strong effects on it… normal reality, as a human was prone to understand, was warped by his very existence like he was some deep gravity in space. Instead of light bending around him, however, lust did instead… twisting and warping into new and dangerous shapes. For weeks the sexual proclivities of those nearby him had been increasing… their lust inspired by his nearness. A few more women were raped. A few more husbands beat their wives. A few more pimps took out their anger on their whores. Nothing anyone noticed… until suddenly, it was.
On Thursday the 22nd, something far more dramatic happened. It started in a local high school where the senior cheerleading team was performing their routine in front of their coach when the local football team, without warning, stormed into the gym and started raping them. There was no preceding incident, no cause… more than one of the cheerleaders were dating people on that team. It made no difference… not one of them showed the girls any mercy, and it didn’t stop until one of the cheerleaders found a phone and managed to call the cops.
The football players were all arrested, but they hadn’t been in jail for more than ten minutes before the policewoman who was watching the prison was pistol-whipped by the Captain and raped on top of her desk while the players cheered. When he was finished, he went outside, hunting for new girls… but not before he opened the prison doors.
It spread from there. As Ishagnar’s influence intensified, spreading far and wide from the incubus, the situation continued to devolve. A group of convention-goers turned their attention to some of the cute girls there shopping for comics and posters, and soon the first of them was having her virginity raped away while the others were chased down, dragged down, and assaulted in the among the booths and shelves. That one was widely seen enough that people got it on camera, and soon the news was covering it… but that went even worse when one of the local news anchors started raping his cohost live on air.
And throughout it all, Ishagnar didn’t even bother to hide.
The demon was completely exposed, both symbolically and literally, standing in the center of town. Sooner or later a hero worth the name would figure out where the epicenter of the expanding wave of lust was and come looking for him… and he would be there, waiting. That’s what he needed. A famous heroine. He wasn’t too concerned about one of the men showing up… that wouldn’t end well for other people. The energy he wrapped around him now would catch any male hero in the web of aggressive lust and need that settled over the city like a cloak. Then the heroes would have a second supernatural rapist to deal with. No, it had to be a woman… and he was sure one would come.
He just needed to wait for her to arrive.
Around him, the chaos continued to build. Roaming packs of men hunted down women in the streets like rabid dogs. Buildings burned and no one cared. In the sky above, a helicopter for the news would have gotten fantastic footage of a thousand rapes if the pilot hadn’t happened to be a woman. The helicopter had crashed as the cameramen on board jumped her, heedless of the danger. That fire burned still, sending a plume of smoke rising high in the air, and still Ishagnar waited. He felt it as cameras began to find him, the solitary point of calm in a world gone mad, and he worked to keep those men from being taken by the tide of lust… to keep them recording him, streaming him live onto the internet in a hundred different places.
When it came, it came without warning. One moment, he was sitting cross-legged in the open, merely meditating and letting his lustful energy roam the streets, feeling the ravishment committed in his honor. In the next moment something hit him. It was like he was struck by a falling comet – the demon was smashed through the side of a nearby building hard enough that stones crumbled. An explosion of rocks sprayed forth, and wreckage rained down on the streets around him, covering the incubus lord in a layer of fallen building as it crumpled down onto him. All he caught was a flash of blue, red, and gold.
For a long moment, nothing moved… And then out of the dust a woman rose. A young goddess of a woman with long, golden blonde hair. The cameras that had been focused on Ishagnar captured every inch as the gorgeous woman stood, all bright clothing and long bare legs and crimson boots. Her tight, long-sleeved, blue top and short skirt clung to her perfect breasts and even in the dust the sun seemed to shine off of her flawless, radiant, suntanned thighs.
She stood there, the perfect woman… seemingly untouched by the grime and the dust and the smoke all around her. A bright red cape hung heroically over her shoulders as she set her feet in a fighting stance, red booted feet planted apart and bracing against the cement, ready to use the vast strength her body allowed her. The great S emblazoned upon her chest caught the light, shining like a beacon in the chaos all around them.
The cameras caught it all… and the world watched as, in their hour of need, Supergirl arrived to save them.
From deep within the collapsed rubble, Ishagnar chuckled. Perfect.
Kara Zor El’s eyes blazed as blue as the summer sky as she scanned the surroundings, looking for the source of the laugh. She didn’t see any trace of the strange, handsome man… but he was still here, somewhere. His body had resisted her, no matter how fragile he looked. She clenched her fists tightly, “I know you are still there,” she taunted, but even as she did she kept her gaze looking around. The situation here was serious… they didn’t dare send a man into this chaos after seeing what became of every man who stepped into the storm of lust and magic, and no one was going to send Dinah into a situation like this after… after what had happened, so she was on her own for the moment. Diana and Zatanna were coming as quickly as they could, but they weren’t even on Earth at the moment… this was really up to her. “Come out and face me, coward. Or are you too afraid?”
From the middle of the thick cloud of dust from the collapsed building the… thing… she had hit laughed again. She caught a glimpse of two crimson eyes peering at her out of the darkness, and given the level of violence erupting all around her Kara was not inclined to hold back. A moment of effort, a concentration of her will, and red laser beams of heat came flying from her eyes and into the smoke, striking with a detonation and a roar of displaced air. Unfortunately, it was also met with a roar of laughter. “Pretty little flower,” a smooth voice answered back. “Why don’t you kneel down and close your eyes… it will make this whole thing much easier on you. It’s probably the only thing you can do to save yourself and the world both.”
Supergirl sneered at the dust. “Overconfident aren’t we? You cannot defeat me, monster… and I’m not going to let you keep hurting others. I’m going to beat you unconscious and lock you in a cell far away from everyone else until we understand how the hell you do this… then we’re going to stop it, once and for all.”
Slowly, a form appeared out of the dusk and smoke… but it wasn’t the handsome man who had been sitting there. Instead, it was a muscle-bound, hideous titan; swarming with tentacles and diseased-looking boils, hideous and threatening that loomed over her. No, that wasn’t quite right… she could still see the man, just barely, if she tilted her head just right. It was like he was an illusion inside of the big monster, or the big monster was one inside of him. It looked like a horror, something unbelievable conjured out of a nightmare. “You will try,” he said, giving her a smile that showed a mouth full of yellow, pointed teeth. “I gave you your chance, mortal meat-puppet. Now your defeat will ensure this world’s doom.”
Supergirl didn’t hesitate. She blasted the demonic shape with the heat laser beams from her eyes again. She wasn’t expecting them to do the job, however… The moment she fired she flew directly at him as quickly as she could, the ground cracking beneath her feet as she kicked off into a power flight. The ray hit his upraised forward, deflected away with only a hint of burning smell, but she was already launching into a powerful right hook directly at his face.
It never connected. The swing went right through where he had been a second ago… he was so fast. The miss knocked her off balance briefly, but Kara recovered quickly… her face followed him as he dodged and she rotated her hips to swing her left leg around to swipe at his head again.
That kick practically broke the sound barrier and had enough force behind it to shatter steel. The demon simply caught her heel as it neared striking him and stopped it dead. Three tentacles came up to wrap around it as well, from his waist, his back, and his shoulder, and he squeezed. Then, a second later, he grasped her like a bat and swung the superheroine around with all his strength. Kara barely had time to flinch in shock that her attack had been so countered as her ankle was caught, and then she was swinging through the air, smashing into the building like a sledgehammer. She came free of his grip, breaking through the exterior wall and two of the interior ones quick as lightning, smash smash smash.
Supergirl shoved aside the pile of rubble that had collapsed back down on her, pushing herself back up… a little wild around the eyes, gasping. He was so strong… She had seen monsters that could hit harder, seen things that were faster, seen villains more invulnerable, but she wasn’t sure she had ever fought something quite like this, everything put together. How could she hurt him?
She pushed the rest of the rubble aside, noticing a pair of men cowering in the collapsed building. They looked at her with wild eyes, filled with panic. “Get out of here!” she commanded, turning her gaze away from them and back towards the hole in the wall. “Get to safety… make it to the road and go straight unt-”
A hand landed on one of her breasts as one of the men grabbed her from behind, and Kara was momentarily so stunned she went rigid. She looked down, eyes wide in surprise as the man squeezed and then tugged backwards on her like he was trying to haul her away. “Get over here you slut,” he growled in her ear,” seemingly unaware of how she effortlessly held her place against the taller and larger man. “You’re mine now.”
It was hard to push him away softly enough that she didn’t break him. Instead, she flung him into his fellow, sending her would-be rapist sprawling. Still shocked, Kara stared at him, horror growing. What was she supposed to do about the people around here, when they would be attempting to do… that… to her? She could feel the energy pulsing against her skin, feeling it as it washed over her and splashed against them… but also she felt more of it, radiating off of her.
Abruptly, she realized that that was the truth of his power… how he was so strong, so fast. This around him… it was the source of his strength. The fear that surrounded them… the wild lust… the pain… the destructive desires… They were fuel for that monster, making him stronger. Here, in the nexus of this sexual insanity, he was impossibly strong… and he was going to keep getting stronger. She needed to get him away from the men he was using as his tools and the women he was abusing, as quickly as possible. Otherwise he would grow too strong for her to hope to stop.
Taking a moment to gather her strength, Kara Zor El clenched her fists. Then she burst out of it and up into the air to hover a good twenty feet above where the monster stood on the street below. He smiled up at her and even had the gall to beckon her back down to fight him by motioning her with a wave of his hand. “What are you waiting for, little girl?” he taunted her, his voice bubbling through the air like he was speaking underwater. “Going to run away?”
She wasn’t. Enraged, Kara went from dead stopped to the speed of a runaway train in an instant as she flung herself down at him and through him. She smashed into the in an explosion of concrete and dirt, raised a fist, and slammed it down at him, intending to push his skull through the bedrock if she could. Dark, solid, and frozen-cold fingers suddenly wrapped around her wrist, gripping her arm tightly and arresting it before that punch could connect. She strained against his strength – she had very rarely found anything stronger than the daughter of Krypton – but he held onto her, the conserved momentum dragging both of them across the ground a little. The monster smiled up at her… then he tightened his grip, and Kara screamed in unbelievable and uncomprehending pain.
It wasn’t his strength that made her scream. He was strong enough to threaten to break even her bones, and while that did hurt it was nothing compared to the lustful energy he radiated. It had been uncomfortable from across the street, but the sheer power radiating outward from the monster was agonizing at this range. She stared in wide-eyed shock as the mutable flesh of his hand seemed to writhe almost like a liquid. Her costume’s sleeve burned away beneath the wave of cruel, lustful energy radiating off of him, and she could feel flesh burn, her muscles strain, and her bones threaten to crumble under his vice-like grip. He released her, and she stumbled backward to then fell to her knees before him, grasping her arm.
She stared, blue eyes wide, at the scorched black handprint that had been burned onto her forearm through her shirt in utter disbelief. Nothing but kryptonite had ever done anything like this to her before, but whatever this monster was, it wasn’t kryptonite… it was something else, something alien, something unknown. She raised her head from her wounded arm just in time to the monster’s punch coming, but not quickly enough even for even Kara to block it.
It caught her square in the face. If she had been any more fragile than the Kryptonian woman was, then her nose would have been turned to dust. As it was, it momentarily flattened, blood splattering as she was knocked onto her back. She blinked the stars out of her eyes as she scrambled backward, coughing and shaking her head as the blood ran from her nose, but she didn’t get anywhere before he mounted her, straddling her, kneeling over her abdomen. Her vision cleared just in time to see him reaching down, grabbing a full hand of her long blonde hair in one meaty fist, and using it to lift her limp head up.
She raised her uninjured arm to attempt to block what was coming, but something she had never encountered before slowed her defense – panic. She was slow, too slow to fend out the quick succession of punches as they smashed into her face, one at a time. Pain like she’d never felt before came next. She heard something crunch in her cheek… she felt a tooth come loose and tasted blood in her mouth. Then the next punch caught her on the right temple and her world spun, a sharp ringing exploding through the dazed superheroine’s head.
Clenching his fist tightly, the monster slammed his fist down again. Kara raised her hand to intercept it, but the blow didn’t land on her face… instead, his strength drove it like a hammer into the meat of her right breast. Supergirl’s mouth opened in a silent howl but nothing escaped but the rush of breath from her lungs, her whole body tightening up in agony. With great delight, the hideous monster leaned in close and grasped her head in both his hands, his slavering mouth dropping open. A tongue, long and black and more like a snake than a human organ poured forth and he took the opportunity to push it into her agape mouth, slithering inside, tasting the blood on her breath as it drove to the back of her throat and writhed around hungrily.
Kara’s whole body shook with horror and disgust, struggling beneath him as horrible choking sounds escaped the batter superheroine. Her hands landed on his shoulders, and she grabbed on and pushed even though the touch burned her. With all the strength in her body she forced him back, but it felt like she was moving a mountain… he was almost as irresistible as the tide, and as his tongue came free he grinned down at her as Kara coughed and spat foul black slime from her mouth.
“Little sunflower,” he purred. “You will scream for me. You will scream and the world will hear you.” His whispers were a hungry, savage thing, and his eyes glowed with lust as he looked at her.
Absolute fury crystalized inside Kara. That anger and determination burned away the groggy fog that had swallowed her, and she glared up at him in defiant rage. “No…” she growled breathlessly in stubborn anger. Then her eyes glowed like shimmering points of light for a moment and crimson beams of deadly energy burst from them.
The rays struck the demon in his chest and he roared in pain and rage, backing off, raising an arm to interpose between his body and those deadly lances of energy. Kara didn’t let up – Supergirl rolled onto her side and pushed one arm beneath her, slowly forcing herself up, growling in pain and stubborn anger as she did. Her long, bloodstained blonde hair hung down past her face as she pushed herself up, bits of it smoking away as it brushed against her heat vision. Slowly she forced herself to her feet and stalked forward on wobbly limbs, trying to reach him, to end this. Where the scarlet beams touched the monster, skin boiled instantly into thick, acrid black smoke that tickled her lungs.
Inch by inch she drove him back, pressing forward, chasing him down… keeping her eyes locked on the demon… until he abruptly vanished to the chorus of women’s screams from across the block. Their agony was still vibrating through the air by the time the dazed Superwoman realized what had happened, frantically looking around to see where the monster had disappeared. This was bad. He had been too cocky for a second, and she had had him at a disadvantage… but he was still feeding on all of the violent assaults going on all around, still drawing power, and now he had gotten away.
The monster abruptly appeared behind her, emerging from the smoke of burning buildings, the dust of rubble, and the thick, stinking surge of lust and hate all around her. She spun, lifting her head, startled by his sudden appearance, and began to call up her heat vision again… just in time for him to punch her clean in the jaw, flinging her backward to land heavily on top of a pile of rubble. At the same time, tentacles slithered across her body, grabbing her legs and arms, shoving her down as she kicked and thrashed and squirmed. Forcefully gagging on his left hand across her mouth, Kara bit down, and his skin felt like iron… what blood she got was like acid and burned her tongue. He jammed his hand in further, slamming her head down and pinning it back, keeping her gaze away from him so that as she finished calling up her heat vision it lanced harmlessly into the sky.
“Now you’re mine, little hero,” he growled, bringing his other hand to her bare abdomen at the base of her top. The tight-fitting fabric clung to her skin, tightly enough that the knife-like point of his claw parted the fabric and cut straight up towards the collar, directly through the emblem over the center of her chest. Kara squirmed violently in dismay and humiliation, but the scream was lost almost completely into his gagging hand as he ripped her top open, exposing her bare breasts to the open air and his greedy eyes. They wobbled with exertion as she struggled, bruised flesh bouncing as she shook her shoulders from side to side in her attempt to escape him. “The world you defend will be mine… Its inhabitants will spend the rest of their days worshiping the might of Ishagnar and suffering in my name…”
The demon leaned down and licked the side of her face. “And you will be the first,” Ishagnar promised.
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