scorebroker

[scorebroker]

Scorebroker

Chapter 2: Deicide

Written by antienjoys

With characters by coolguy80101

1000 Years after the Revolution of Tharallis-Crune

Scorebroker walked down the hallways of Nephagon's palace, through the ruins of Shirvon and into Nephagon's throne room.

This was the palace where heaven met earth, where the sinners looked up at the saved and the saved down at the sinners. The palace of Nephagon and his sons was also the palace where the final stand for liberty took place, where the tribes united against a feudal warlord. Wherein worlds collided, wherein the fates of several prominent heroes were decided by the twisting of a dial, wherein a sigil was implanted on the forearm of a hero that permanently sealed the fates of many kingdom, wherein the pearl that gave life to the world–the one affixed to the altar of Thabahun–was shattered and everything descended into chaos.

Nephagon had his guards flanking the doors to his throne room, so when Scorebroker walked in, he was immediately attacked. These were virile monsters with the stamina of a cheetah, reminiscent of the lurkers with gnarled eyes that haunted Scorebroker's dreams. These were the beasts with veiny, bloodshot eyelids that hinged up towards the edges, the ones that purged souls of their sins to carry out further sin. Their nails were withered and chipped by their own crooked fangs, with growths piercing the skin and horrible growths extant from it; these were the perturberances of transgression.

Nephagon's guards were quickly disarmed, with two punches aimed at the back of each one's head and a swift, single kick to put them down like dogs.

"Your resistance is futile, puny being," said Nephagon, drawing his sword and pointing it to Scorebroker.

Still, Scorebroker had that mousetail forged into a whip; he drew it and thrashed the marble below his heels before returning the flailing end to his other hand. He lucidly remembered grabbing a mouse woman by the tail and rending the tail from the rest of her person, then clamping down on the mouse woman's face with his snake-like fingers and dealing a fatal blow with his forehead. Vividly did he recall the trophy for his work while it was still ripe with rat blood.

"Bazakar expected you to die from the poisons all those years ago," Nephagon continued, rising from his throne, "You were damned to die long ago."

"In the name of Dynokan, I lived after drinking from that chalice," Scorebroker said. "The Weed-Whiffers your thug Pyro sent did not, unfortunately. I handled them."

"The Weed-Whiffers do not matter to me," said Nephagon, running a closed fist along his blade, stroking it back and forth gently, "because I already hired a new gang to replace Pyro's. My willingness to do business with Pyro disintegrated like the fine powder I grounded your boss into. Remember him?" Then Nephagon pinched his fingers together, as if to crumble salt or erode stone–it was a vile gesture, intended to draw Scorebroker's rage out from the deepest, darkest pits of his soul and turn him into the ogre Nephagon believed Scorebroker could become. "I scrambled–violently so–your boss."

"Utterly ruthless and scurrilous bastard you are," said Scorebroker. "When I heard the sounds of his painful death, I could smell your odious stench as you drove the stake through his heart. You revolt me, oppressive lovechild."

Nephagon's blade sliced through the air like cheese, Scorebroker's whip coiled up like a snail curling into its shell, and Nephagon's sword struck first. Gods boomed in from the skies–their prismic faces marked against the stormy skies with amorphous impressions, stenciled out by the furious arms of lightning–outstretching their astronomically-scaled fingers towards the Earth and setting the bowl-ish sky ablaze; they dispersed when the one true god, Ayorin, blasted into the cosmos and struck one of the lesser gods, Dynokan, rupturing Maradi's rib cage aborting Dynokan's inanimate, unfinished prototype of an inheritor to the throne.

Scorebroker let out an unpleasant, terrified scream as he watched the deity he devoted his soul and life to fall from the heavens, crashing to the earth enclosed in spherical province of cosmic dust and debris. The flowers and fruits lining his meteoric casket against the earth were he ones he was revered for blooming, just as the promptly aborted extrusion of his flesh bloomed before its pre-emptive dissemination into his golden bloodstream.

Scorebroker charged Nephagon with his deicidal crimes and Nephagon's own sword (which he plied from Nephagon's hands), pledging to himself that he would be the one to extinguish the life of a life-taker, to bear in womb the fertile bliss of revenge, take to term the suffering and weeping, and give birth: to revenge incarnate, and igominy for the igominy of the divine. Blood for blood, carnage for carnage–conquest of those with iniquitous and nefarious intent who brought down the mighty from their thrones, so perhaps the thrones are gifted to one more deserving of the prospects of hegemony. Scorebroker's uncontrollable charge to bring retribution was the retribution gods cast upon him for failing.

Scorebroker's attack was well-parried, and Nephagon soon won his own blade back. They dueled down across the carpet to the throne, until Scorebroker won and arrested Nephagon.

---

"Treason," shouted Tifany. Nemor followed closely behind, as they hurried through the palace of Mahira-hora, into the handmaiden's quarters and discovered the butler's dead body–he had a dagger boring deep into his side. "The mark of the infidel is embossed into the blade! It's the mark of Dynokan–this evinces what was thought to be impossible, that the end times are near, and a great calamity is at hand!"

[scorebroker]

Scorebroker

Chapter 1: Pilot

Written by antienjoys

With characters by coolguy80101

1000 years after the Revolution of Tharallis-Crune

He was a deific figure with a bold stature, an elusive shadow, and a heightened frame. His name was Scorebroker, and he was one of a few survivors of the Revolution of Tharallis-Crune–a man with a looming presence in a world with looming presences, with enough punk and swagger to make a Gyran rock band quiver in their boots. He often met at the Church of Dynokan's Apostles to preach about times long forgotten, memories shattered, and aid others in mourning the insurmountable loss of the heroes who–in a time of devious peril, when diabolical forces rose from the underground to swallow the world whole–gave their lives to save the lives of others. Scorebroker, as cynical as he was about the present, still had hope for the future, and reverence for the past.

Dynokan have mercy on our souls, and let us repent!

"It was precisely one eon ago when, inside this temple, our ancestors fought to free us from the tyrannies of the Titani devils," said Scorebroker. "It was precisely one eon ago when, upon that hill"–he pointed to a stained glass mural depicting a jagged hill bursting with flames, with an archangel fallen upon his lance and two princes bucketing down the field–"that our ancestors, our forefathers, gave their lives!"

He was met with a handful of claps from a somber, dejected crowd. There was nothing too out-of-the-ordinary about this–it was yet another sermon that was ineffective at inspiring resistance.

And in his pocket, he still had the feather of the archangel who perished, and the tail (fashioned into a whip) of the mouse woman who gave her life to save bystanders.

As Scorebroker understood it: one eon ago, many valiant heroes gave their lives to hold back a demonic plague, a viral infection that was sweeping the streets of Thagalah and quickly claiming the lives of entire civilian-populated cities. Scientists working day and night in labs couldn't come up with antidotes quickly enough–they too were consumed by hellfire. Potions claiming to be "potent vaccines" were quickly withdrawn from the shelves after scientists discovered it only worsened the symptoms of the demonic infection, and mass-purges of children occured in a final, vile attempt by corrupt nurses and doctors–breaking their Hippocratic oath to do no harm–to eradicate the disease. Unfortunately for the medical workers, devils feast and thrive on the blood of the innocent child.

Slanders occured as a result of this, and many factions were blamed. In the Thagalah High Court, it was found that one Dr. Whitmer Valisten was responsible for ordering the mass-euthanization of demonically-possessed, and he was tried and executed. By the time they discovered his innocence (he too was infected by a devil), it was too late; his body lay still on the electric chair used to end his life to this day, and the demonic screeches of his executioners can be heard as leeches inched their way into eardrums and gnawed away at filthy, murderous brains.

Their intestines, liver and other organs unfurled on the ground–except for their hearts, for they had none.

These are not sins sentient life is capable of–only thoughtless monsters have the heartless minds and the thoughtless, cold hearts to carry out atrocities such as these. Dr. Whitmer Valisten was a victim of a bedeviled human named Bazakar.

Bazakar was pure evil, a man deemed so irredeemable that even the gracious and forgiving royal family of Thagalah despised his very name, and cast him off to the dungeons of Exabon. He was tried many times, found guilty many times, but never was he executed. His life was as long-spanning as his malign, bloodthirsty deeds, and he seeded his own wife with a demon child that would grow in his wife's womb–until it caused the child to inflate to such a size as to cause the woman to implode. Bazakar was the son of Theba, a serial killer in the town of South Exabon, an exiled community of islanders detached from the mainland Exabon.

Bazakar was a man and a demon king. Expediting the growth of his wife's seed was not his only crime; he painted his shoes in bloody streets, and painted roads red with his razor-sharp nails. He left claw marks on the doorsteps of families whose children's souls he made off with, and left an imprint of his menacing, wild face on the foggy windows of the homes of sinners on the holiday of Dynokan-Ovena. Bazakar was–truly, and according to his own family–the worst man to ever roam the face of the earth.

---

Scorebroker removed his mousetail whip as he left the chapel, wandering by a group of drug dealers from a gang known as Pyro's Weed-Whiffers. These gangly, grungy men–with a lighthearted demeanor and boots that bolstered them high off the ground, and coats that gleamed with a sparkling champagne-white that disgusted Scorebroker–all took turns on a line of a well-known drug: bybakis. This vomit-inducing, carcinogenic hallucinogen sent each of the men into a trance, arousing from their lips continual praise of the Lord Dynokan.

Scorebroker made his way through them and, one by one, he cleaved through their limbs, separating bone from flesh, and twaining blood and flesh.

---

"Do you think anyone is safe from Scorebroker?" Tifany asked, taking a sip of black coffee while looking into the dilapidated, lopsided skyline of Mahira-hora. "I appreciate well-meaning vigilantism when I see it, but it seems he's losing control of his own mind."

"I mean, do you have any better ideas?" asked Tifany's father, Nemor. "We're going out of business. He's our best chance at outliving these horrible times."

Tifany turned to her father and asked, "Did you ever get used to these apocalyptic times we're living in?"

He did not give a direct answer to that question, for any answer he could give would only lead to furthering her daughter's distrust in humanity, feeding her cynicism and condemning her to self-isolation.