"Carnage in Hell: Earth's Last Stand"

The night sky over the blood-soaked wastes of Hell erupted in artificial daylight as the first bombardments from the Protectorate tankmech rained down, thunder cracking through the haze. On the scorched red sands below, a writhing carpet of imps—chittering, screeching, snapping at each other’s heels—surged forward with more enthusiasm than sense.

On the line opposite, the United Earth Protectorate stood in a tight phalanx, gleaming in powered armor. Their 49 marines, armored head to boot, leveled guns so advanced the metal itself looked angry. The sand-shaking, hunched bulk of the tankmech trailed acrid steam and the stink of ozone. Flanking their gleaming mechanical titan were the three Guardians, towering, shielded by radiant void energy—humanity’s ace in the infernal hole.

“Hey, shitwads!” barked one of the marines, voice boosted through her helmet coms, “You hellspawn look like a clown orgy exploded!” Her squad howled with laughter, raising rifles as the imps howled back.

“EARTH MEAT! FUCK YOU!” spat a heap of imps, waving rusty shivs the way a dog would swing a stick.

Behind the imps, hellhounds bayed—a furry line of hate-muscled monsters, red eyes blazing. Among them stalked the elite hellhound commando, snouts flecked with molten drool. The true commanders, the goatia, stood high on the ridge; skull-faced, regal, clutching hell-warped staves. They bellowed orders, horned faces locked in mockery.

“Go home, piss-bucket robots!” shrieked a goatia officer, voice rattling the cracked wastes. “We’ll use your bones to pick burnt people out our teeth!”

The Protectorate marines advanced, rifles humming. The first Guardian leapt wide over a geyser of hellfire, an arc blade singing in one armored hand. Bullets and plasma screamed overhead as he landed among the imps, a living lightning strike, severing limbs like a butcher at a cheap deli. Gore splattered. An imp’s head exploded under his gauntlet—not with a clean pop, but a squelching, foul confetti spray.

A pack of hellhounds burst through the smoke and glared with sulphuric eyes at the tankmech. The crew inside laughed as cannon fire reduced a squad of hounds to a liquid, steaming paste—bones and fur sprayed across the sand with a meaty *pop*.

“You Earth fuckers brought a tank?” screamed a goatia captain, his voice breaking as the wraith tank—a shambling, clattering mound of steel, spikes, and pentagrams—lurched into view. Its crude cannon belched, vaporizing a Protectorate marine and turning his armor to molten slag.

Guardian Two vaulted ahead, void-panoply shimmering, shotgun roaring as she tore through imps like so many rotten tomatoes. “Come on then! You want my skull for a trophy, you goat-faced cocksocket?” she bellowed, splatting a goatia under her glowing boot.

Blood splashed everywhere. Imps slipped in the guts and doggedly stabbed at Guardian Three, who laughed, shattering them with a swipe of his solar blade. “That the best you’ve got, you crusty little cockroaches?”

Ash and smoke thickened; insults flew with every magazine spent, every curse matching the carnage. The wraith tank dueled the Earth tankmech, screeching, grinding metal on metal, sparks and charred viscera raining around the clashing machines. Neither side gave quarter. For every imp crushed, another scurried up from hellish tunnels, only to be atomized. For every marine lost, a Guardian thundered forward, leaving a trail of smoking demon parts.

Hell’s armies screamed and cursed, their dying words vulgar, spitting red froth at their conquerors.

The sky above, cracking with gunfire and fireballs, echoed with humanity’s answer: “Eat shit, assholes—Earth is closed for business!”

And in the guts and gory rain, neither side could claim the ground, but both sure as hell could paint it red.

This story was generated by user zachrose with assistance by one of OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model; prompts used to help generate the story are shown below.

Images were generated with OpenAI's AI system, DALL·E 2, or uploaded by the user.

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