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Wonder Woman
Hell in
Volume 4
What
has gone before…
Themyscria,
the
Using
a combination of human troops and powerful super-villains, the invaders
instigated a surprise attack and took hostage many civilian visitors to the
Amazons home. Using their lives as leverage, the villains forced the surrender
of many female superheroes on the island at the time, including Princess Diana, better know to many as Wonder Woman.
Since
taking control, the conquerors have initiated a program of sadistic humiliation
and torment against the Amazons and the captive heroines, including Wonder
Woman’s sister Donna Troy, Donna’s
Titans team mate Starfire, the
crime-fighters Black Canary and Huntress, and the JSA member Powergirl. Diana herself has been
ruthlessly tortured for several days, both physically and psychologically, as
she has been forced to see friends and family suffer through Savage’s evil
ministrations.
Meanwhile
Barbara Gordon, who is secretly the
information and cyber guru known as Oracle
and leader of the Birds of Prey, has been coerced by the anguish of her agents
Black Canary and Huntress to try and hack the computers of the Amazons for
valuable secrets. Not knowing if those in charge are aware of her alternate
identity, she has agreed to try while attempting to learn more information on
their captors and how to defeat them.
While
the incredibly strong Powergirl has been rendered helpless by threats to the
prisoners being held and endures torture experiments conducted by Doctor Moon and the Crime Doctor, the heroines Starfire and
Huntress have been removed from their cells by the super villains for yet more
suffering. After having been brutalized by former enemies and Savage himself,
Diana has been forced to watch her Amazon sister Artemis being horribly mutilated by two Demons, not knowing that a spell had been cast on the warrior woman
to prevent her horrific injuries from being fatal. Despite this, Diana refused to give Savage
any information on the thing he has apparently come to Themyscia to exploit as
a weapon, the Amazon purple healing ray.
And
what neither Diana nor any of the captives is yet aware of if that two other figures are secretly
overseeing the entire operation, while using a third agent to inflict gross
psychological suffering on the Amazons. Their true identity and purpose as they
continue to sadistically torture their heroic female captives is yet to be
revealed…
Part I
Diana
When the door to the torture chamber opened at last and she was dragged back in to see what they had done to Artemis, Diana felt a shiver of cold fear run down her spine.
Not fear for herself – not fear that she would suffer the same awful fate as her tempestuous Amazon sister. Fear, rather, of what they had done to the red-haired warrior woman, fear that Diana would be forced to bear witness to her broken, mutilated body, knowing that she had done nothing to prevent this atrocity. Knowing that, given the choice, she would still have allowed this to happen rather than tell Vandal Savage or his allies anything about the Purple Ray.
Diana shuddered. The Purple Ray, despite the name which engendered so much scorn among non-Amazons, was a technological miracle whose energies were capable of repairing almost any injury whose effects had not already been fatal. There was wide-spread discussion among the race of warrior-women and those of the outside world on how such a device might improve quality of life for millions of injury victims, but so far nothing practical had come of such talks. Partly that was due to routine Amazon caution, but only Diana, Artemis, and a few others were aware that it was also because of the theory, so far untested, that the Purple Ray could be adapted into a truly terrifying weapon.
How Savage might have come by such knowledge, Diana did not know. Perhaps by the simple workings of his twisted genius he had spotted the potential. All that mattered, at the moment, was that he learn nothing about adapting the Ray for use in destruction.
Which was why Diana had left Artemis to be tortured to death by demons.
The creature holding her black hair released her, letting her fall to the floor. Grimly the Amazon princess levered herself to her knees, her hands still chained behind her back and the circuit laden tiara on her head still preventing her full powers.
Diana blinked. She had expected [dreaded] seeing Artemis broken body hanging before her, but the space where the red haired warrior had been was instead occupied by a totally different individual, though no less eye-catching than Diana’s feisty companion.
The creature standing in front of her was tall and statuesque, her lines unquestionably female and her origins undeniably demonic. Her face was broad and had a flat nose above a generous mouth, with all green eyes beneath two bony ridges that ended in vestigial horns. Long brown hair was tied with a leather thong that let it spill in a long ponytail down as far as her lower back, very much like the style that Artemis herself favoured. She had a hard, lean body whose curves were hugged by a kind of hide armour edged in razor sharp gold plates, which clung to her like a second skin over her legs, forearms, thighs, lower body and breasts. These last were teasingly revealed by the outfits plunging cleavage shaped like the gaping maw of a serpent, the jaws on either side framing her ample chest. It was an act of insolence and mockery more than of eroticism. In fact, every aspect of this being radiated contempt, and a desire to humiliate and belittle those around her, teasing them with sights she would never allow them to sample.
It took Diana a moment to recognize the beautiful yet sinister being before her. ‘You were in hell…,’ she said slowly.
The woman creature smiled. ‘You remember,’ said, taking a slow step forward. Then her boot lashed out like a cobra strike, driving into Diana’s face and sending her sprawling.
The demoness smiled wider. ‘I’m touched.’
Diana shook her head to clear it, tasting blood in her mouth and spitting it out as she rose. ‘You’re Belyllioth, Artemis’ ally. Lord Hades made you one of the thirteen rulers of Hell when you both tricked him into thinking you were she.’
‘For which Hades has made me a guest of his torture chambers for nigh on five of your Earthly years,’ Belyllioth said, lifting her chin. She actually seemed proud of the fact that she had spent half a decade being made to suffer unspeakable acts of cruelty.
Diana looked at the woman standing before her. Nothing in her posture spoke of submission or defeat. Her courage in the face of what she must have endured would have been admirable, if she had not been standing over the chained Amazon with Diana’s blood on her boot. ‘Artemis told me that you volunteered for that fate, so that the insurrection you fostered after your Lord Dakkrig-Hath betrayed you could continue.’
At the naming of her former master Belyllioth stiffened visibly. Diana knew that she had been the demon lords’ general and one of his many concubines, a post that Artemis herself had also occupied during her tenure in the Underworld. Diana had never judged Artemis for whatever compromises she had made during her stint in the afterlife, in no small part because when she had travelled there to rescue her fallen sister she had been captured herself by Dalkrigg-Hath’s demon soldiers. The Amazon princess would surely have been killed, had Artemis not defied her masters commands and helped them, Belyllioth included, to escape.
‘That’s right,’ Belyllioth said, standing tall before the chained superhero. ‘I turned on Dalkrigg-Hath after he had me dressed in rags and tied to the torture stake in his courtyard, to be whipped bloody by his chief torturer. You tried to save me, Amazon – do you remember?’
‘Yes,’ Diana said. ‘It is not my way to let any being suffer such a fate, not even a demon.’
‘Noble,’ Belyllioth sneered. ‘Up until that time I had been high in Hath’s favour, but he had little tolerance for failure. And do you remember how I failed him, that led me to be flogged in front of his drooling scum he called warriors.’
Diana felt a cold knot forming in her belly, but pushed the sensation aside. ‘You failed to capture me when Artemis intervened on my behalf.’
‘Just so. For which I lost all that I had earned after centuries in that vile pigs service. And then you had the effrontery to take pity on me, as if I were one of these mewling human cattle you spend your time herding about. They cut me down and tied you in my place and beat you half to death, while I was made to watch from the dirt at the punishment I was not even considered worthy to suffer.’ Belyllioth’s emerald eyes grew coldly dangerous. ‘I owe you much, little princess.’
The scene was emblazoned onto Diana’s memory with letters of blood and pain. She and Artemis staring down from a high window in the demon lord’s fortress to see Belyllioth draped in scanty rags and tied to the post of punishment, her face set in defiant lines until the first stroke of the whip ripped open the yellow skin over her belly and she howled in pain. And the then the whistle and crack of the lash and the demoness screaming as the monsters flayed her slowly, stripping her first of her clothes and then of all dignity as they plied the barbed leather against her legs and arms and breasts. When they had targeted the disgraced general’s hairless female slit between her legs so that the female hellion screamed loud enough to spit blood, Diana had snapped, vaulting through the window despite Artemis’ pleas and seizing the whip to stop the sadistic proceedings.
The rest of the memory was not so clear, largely due to the terrible beating she had received as she found herself facing half a hundred of Dalkrig Hath’s personal demon guard. Despite her own power and warrior skill Diana had only managed only to incapacitate a dozen for the brutes before they brought her down by sheer savagery and weight on numbers, pinning her under their bulk and pummelling her mercilessly until her armour was little more than shredded tinfoil and her body a mass of bleeding cuts and throbbing bruises. Barely conscious they had hoisted her like a trophy and carried her to the torture stake where, at Hath’s order, she replace Belyllioth as the object of his cruel pleasure.
How long they had whipped her as she hung, arms raised, at the stake, Diana could not say. If the demons felt any reservation about flogging a woman barely conscious they did not show it, applying themselves to the task of peeling her smooth skin off sliver by sliver with unbridled enthusiasm.
Every stroke had torn at Diana’s flesh, her armour offering little protection and soon none at all as the whip shredded it as efficiently as it did the woman within. Unable to move, to protect herself, to do anything more than feel, Diana had been taken to the very edge of death under the sadistic lash. Behind her eyes she remembered hearing the sounds of the demons gibbering with unholy glee at the sight her near naked body being destroyed inch by inch, tear by blood tear across her breasts and abdomen, each swish of the whip the prelude to yet another explosion of pain somewhere on her body. They flog beat her to death, kill her by the slowest and cruellest means they could think of, and the last thing she felt in life would be the indescribable agony of her skin hanging off her like bloody rags as the meat beneath was shredded from the bone.
By the time Artemis had made up her mind to rescue her Diana’s whole body from neck to knees was a mass of terrible wounds, red blood flowing down over her battered curves. With the demons victim barely alive in a nightmare of throbbing pain up and down her tortured physique, the red head had been forced to carry Diana from the stake and out of hell over her shoulder with the entire demon army pursuing them, clamouring and howling for their female flesh.
Bringing her mind back to the present, the black haired prisoner tried to wrap her mind around the hell-bitch’s logic, knowing that it was irreparably warped by her demonic nature. To this woman an act of kindness was a greater insult that being tied and beaten to a red pulp. ‘A simple thank you will suffice,’ Diana quipped, meeting the demon woman’s stare without flinching.
‘Oh no,’ Belyllioth smiled, showing her fang-like canines. ‘What I have in mind is quite intricate, you may be assured.’
Two massive demons, all muscle and claws and fangs in huge humanoid bodies, lumbered forward and seized the chains binding Diana, using them to drag her roughly across the floor towards a rough wooden post just behind where Belyllioth was standing. They could easily have lifted and carried her, but seemed to enjoy the act of hauling her naked form over the uneven stonework. Diana endured the rough handling silently, her face a mask of determination.
The post was round and studded with sharp branches up and down its length, two feet wide and rising almost up to the stone ceiling. It was a chilling replica of the torture stake that both the demoness and Diana had been bound to five years ago, complete with rawhide thongs at the top and bottom which the monsters used to tie Diana to the post. The beast tied her legs so they were spread to either side and bent back just enough to prevent her taking her weight on anything but her toes. They looped the top cords through the links of her chains to avoid having to loose her hands while they secured her.
Belyllioth paced forward languidly to stand in front of her captive during this procedure, the women equally tall due to the Amazon’s slight crouch and letting them look each other in the eyes. With her arms pulled up above her Diana’s shoulders were elevated on either side of her face, her breasts riding high with the nipples pointed directly at the chest of the demon woman. Belyllioth regarded those impressive cups of flesh with relish, then let her amber gaze wander down to the flat stomach and the space between the long athletic legs, where the trimmed v of sable hair sat above the thin dark slit of the Amazon’s womanhood.
The princes of hell snapped her long nailed fingers and one of the demons presented her with a low stand on which a bowl of red hot coals was set. Within the bowl, several long pokers whose metal ends were shaped in the forms of hooks and blades were heating to a bright cherry red. Diana looked at the implements with disdain as the other woman turned one slowly, making tiny sparks dance amid the embers. Then she smiled pitilessly and slowly lifted the glowing barbed head towards her victim.
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