Christian Humber Reloaded

This is a review by the wonderful Kriegsaffe, who did this review/analysis of CHR of his own free will. He is truly a soldier of peace and light.

Check out more of his wonderful writings here! Tell him I sentcha.

WHAT IS THIS CRAP?
“Use the Futurama quote.” — Notsuper2k, a good friend of mine, in regards to my review of this story

Crap it is, and quite, for it is Christian Humber Reloaded.  It is a terrible fanfic like many terrible fanfics, but it is different in a key, key fashion: It has the most powerful self-insertion character I’ve ever seen.  I have no doubt that, in time, something new and worse will be offered, but few are so overpowered and at such length as Christian Humber, or shall we say Vash Blade Rarely-Referenced-To-And-Always-Different Last Name.  Further, few have touched so many different fandoms in their Bad Places, to the point where damn near every internet nerd will have a favorite or reviled series of anime or game abused at some point.  Watch as Christian Humber shows up everyone from the Space Marines to the Protoss to the Bionicle to Neo to Sora to Alucard (The One From Hellsing) to random street gangs to dragons to… notably, NOT Street Sharks.  I assume it’s Street Sharks he refers to, because he’s a mutant shark wearing coconut armor, and, despite being gene-spliced to become a mutant shark, is nonetheless mostly cybernetic.  He is the only character Christian Humber respects, seemingly to the point of arousal.  The rest are fodder, an excuse for a new power or artifact or both.

I invite you to join me.  Follow me into the darkness.  Into the maw.  Into the terror.  Into Christian Humber.  The man.  Wait, no.  The wolf-”Sayin”-dragon-demon-CyborgSpiderThing.  The myth.  The horror.

Who Is Vashblade Galt?
Who isn’t he?

No, seriously.  Christian Humber, lonely mystery man, is all things, to all people, simultaneously.  His only persistent trait is his ability to kill anyone and everything he sets his mind to killing, no matter how minor the damning infraction, if there is an infraction at all.  Well, that and his ever-escalating power level.

Did I mention he gets bitten by Alucard The-One-From-Hellsing?  He’s also part vampire, I suppose.

Christian Humber is otherwise as moody and unpredictable as a stereotypical misogynistic parody of womanhood.  At one moment he will purify his soul to overcome his darkness, or play with children, or go to school at the behest of his parents; at the next, he will kill and eat gang members, explode school blocks or cities because he feels like it, or be an orphan whose parents were killed by hunters because he was born a wolf.  Then he will have a bizarre “meet cute” moment with his dragon, who is an autonomous sapient creature (thus not technically being a pet but a slave), an occasionally-pregnant male who later turns out to be his brother.

His history and personality are prone to change at a whim.  His power is additive and eternally in flux, but always, always on an upward climb.  Be prepared to gawp-jaw at the sheer wild inconsistency of everything but his need to annihilate the universe and his sheer ignorance of how the universe actually works.

As a means of quantifying the beast that is Humber, I’ll keep track of the Christian Humber Character Sheet as we go along, adding power and history changes as it goes along.  You will see the make of him then.  You will see the history of horror.  You will embrace it and become blind.  Such is his horror.

Episode One: The Early Years
THE CHRISTIAN HUMBER CHARACTER SHEET
Name: None
Alignment: True Neutral
Background: Wolf with Parents and One Brother
Weaknesses: Mere Mortal
Powers: Wolf stuff
Forms: Just the one
Gear: He’s a wolf, wolves don’t have equipment

“In the beginning was the word.”
-”No; in the beginning was the deed.”

This is, as mentally unstable science fiction author Phillip K. Dick observed, the difference between existential and pragmatic religion.  It is also the most important thing to understand about Christian Humber Reloaded.  There is no word.  Word is a cage, a limit, a limit that Christian Humber is not subject to, has left behind.  Word is bond; Humber is free.

In the beginning was the deed: “My family was killed by hunters when I was at least 2 months old. My brother and I were spared for some damn reason.”

(A brief aside: Having no formal name, I shall refer to Humber’s universe as the Pin.  The Pin is the delicate tip of the great tower on which Sigil, City of Doors, is precariously balanced.  Here, as in Sigil, all worlds meet–but where Sigil is intellectual, the place where the mightiest magic is stripped from each participant and even gods may stand shoulder-to-shoulder with mortals, the Land is a terrible place where all are equally beholden, either from birth or as the thing ages, to Christian Humber.  Who, at the start of this particular exegesis, is nameless.)

Here we discover the Pin’s first queer trait: Science hates wolves.  Whenever wolves are seen, their greatest threat is not the hunter who has gradually worn down the wolfish specie, but the scientist who demands living lupine bodies to extract sheer power from.  In time we shall see this curious desire for hurting wolves badly for Science is not wholly unfounded.

But until then, Christian-Humber-who-is-Nameless finds his brother slain.  At the age of six, a sprightly 49 in human years, his brother is finally killed: “when they killed my brother, that triggered my transformation and in my rage I killed all the scientists in the lab and destroyed it when I was six years old.”

What is this?  What transformation?  Clearly a metaphorical transformation, from a wolf to an engine of destruction.  Scientists aren’t known for their rippling muscles and skill at wolf-wrasslin’; this is a leap of faith, but perhaps not the most absurd thing a fantasy can whip out.

So Humber becomes a wild wolf.  Being a slave to science since puphood, he is immediately incapable of fending for himself and dies.  Or not.  He finds a pack of wolves, but “they didn’t’ let me because they thought I would be a threat. Boy, they were right when some hunters came and killed most of the pack, in anger I transformed and killed all but one hunter, he ran but I caught up ripped his fucking throat out in a bloody mess.”

I’m no wolfologist, but I’d imagine that Christian Humber isn’t a “threat” as the wolfpack thought, e.g. that it would be unruly and corrupt their bloodline, but rather a threat from a human perspective, e.g. a metaphorically-transforming berserker wolf and more of a threat to everything that’s hunter- or scientist-shaped.  Humber is critically wounded, and slinks to a village.  Thankfully, this village doesn’t have any hunters in it, at least none out at the moment that would 1. See a critically-gunshot-wounded wolf and 2. Remember that a bunch of hunters have been killed by something in the woods and 3. Thinking clearly, call animal control to kill it.  When Humber wakes up, he’s found that yes, he found a single-parent household with adorable moppet and supportive attitude.  He is safe, and finally offered sustenance after a month without food.  A month.  A damn month.  Did the hunters sell all the prey animals to science before starting on the wolves?  Perhaps.

Because little girls who think animals are cute are inherently poor at naming and should be shunned, wolves should instead be named after peacenik anime heroes.  The mass-murdering man-eating wolf is thus named Vash, because that is completely appropriate.

Out hunting with the depressingly-unnamed father, “guess what happened I stepped in a bear trap and the trap’s jaws snapped on my leg but the jaw’s iron teeth shattered when they hit my leg.”  Besides the transformation and unusual skill at killing and eating people, this is the first sign that Christian Humber is more powerful than he seems.  After taking obvious revenge, he returns home, sleeps, and wakes up to find the humble peasant village is now completely dead because of raiders.  Why are they raiding?  What year is this?  The answer is Anime.  Anime doesn’t know what the fuck, historically speaking, and so rapacious Mongols storming the gates of infinity are a common sight no matter what the relative tech level of the surrounding setting.  However, the victory of these Mongols is cut short when Christian Humber shows that, like all Disney direct-to-video animal heroes of late, he can talk: “NOOO! WHOEVER DID THIS WILL PAY DEARLY, BECAUSE I LOVED THEM?”  He then goes Super “Sayin.”

Yeah.

A wolf.

Goes Super “Sayin.”

Let’s be open here: things that are part Sayan are able to go Super-Sayan.  It’s a Thing.  But he’s a wolf.  He’s a wolf and his parents were killed by hunters.  You’ll later see that he’s also part demon and dragon.  That means his parents were some unholy mix of Sayan, Wolf, Demon, and Dragon.  Personally, I figure his father is a half-Sayan half-demon (it seems likely that a Sayan mother might strike a deal with an incubus for powerful offspring), and his mother a half-wolf half-dragon (because young dragons are constantly horny and will eagerly hump anything with a moist, penetrable orifice).  It’s not technically bestiality because the dragon half of the wolf delivers human-level intelligence to the wolf, making it rishathra, or interspecies sex.  It is, however, still every bit as squicky as it sounds.

Anyhoo: yes, a Super Sayin wolf.  Picture that.  In your dreams.

He, predictably, kills every last one of the Mongols, then moves on after he buries the little girl, still unnamed, and her father, still unnamed.  Presently he walks right into a cage and is drafted into the wild, wacky, and wooly world of animal-on-animal pit fighting.  Here we see the debut of Christian Humber’s only weakness: being captured.  In this, his weakest state, he can be held by something as simple as a cage, though later it requires paralysis magic (but apparently any kind of paralysis magic totally screws him over, the only thing that can in all the universe aside from a cyborg semi-shark).

He cannot control his Sayanness yet, because even Christian Humber needs time to gather momentum, and so “I use the arena’s walls to my advantage” in his first fight against a German shepherd.  From there his cruel master forces him to fight, which thankfully only serves to enhance Christian Humber’s fighting skills.  Like an idiot, his master sticks his hand in a cage containing an abused wild animal now very used to killing other animals.  The obvious happens, and Humber escapes his captors, again.  This time, he leaps into the cool embrace of the ocean.  Fearing him, the ocean simply batters him around for three weeks(!!) before he washes up on the beach.

There’s no potable water in the ocean–as you know.  Further, Humber has never been anywhere like an ocean.  How would he know what was safe to eat and what was Thrillfrost the Vivid (Unique Demon Fish–Frost Enchanted, Blinding)?  Because that’s his superpower.  That’s one of his superpowers.  He has others.  In fact, as you might imagine, the beach is a flimsy prelude to the next escapade in increasing his power level.  What will he find?  Stay tuned for the next part–or read on for yourself, you poor damned soul.

Name: Vash
Age: 6 (42 wolf years)
Alignment: True Neutral
Background: Orphan wolf-sayan
Weaknesses: Being captured
Powers: Super-”Sayin” transformation
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1
Gear: He’s a wolf, wolves don’t have equipment

Episode Two: Legos and Demons and Bears and That’s About All
To our dismay, Christian Humber wakes up, and discovers another anonymous stranger has saved him.  Of course, with the grace and tact one might expect from a borderline retarded high school student, he inquires, “where am I and who the fuck are you?”  It turns out that Wolfman Jones is now on the Island of Mata Nui, home to the Bionicle.  And now we’ve lost the rest of you.

Admittedly, these are the weakest parts of Christian Humber Reloaded from a slack-jawed horror perspective, as they are Lego robots, and most internet nerds are not particularly well-versed in Bionicle, that we may know how roughshod Humber has run across them.  Fortunately I have done about two minutes of research, and know just enough to confirm that yes, he shows no more respect for the laws of Bionicle than he the laws of Dragonball Z or, for that matter, common English decency.

We may note here that Christian Humber has never heard the Whatever-They’re-Called’s language before, but understands it.  Though he would not know how to spell it, what Humber must be implying is that his author avatar is a polyglot, speaker of all languages, and not just Bad English (which, as we are to see, is his favorite).

Asked his name, Humber responds, “I have no name, but call me Vash.”  It’s ironic, like The Man With No Name, except that he has something that he likes to be called, what plebeians might dare call a Goddamn Name.  Because he has to “understand [himself] and [his] anger”, he is volunteered to see local mystic Toa Gali.  Mental training, it seems, will help Humber understand himself: “After that I did go though a lot of mental training. When I finished that, she wanted to see what I learned in the mental training and I finally found my human form.”

In Humber’s interpretation of English, “understanding himself” means “turning into a human.”  “Understanding” seems to be a recurring thread in horrible, horrible fanfiction; in Sonic in the Search for Love, many characters “come to an understanding” without ever explaining what it is they understand.  CHR’s version of not knowing what understanding is seems to relate to, surprise surprise, new powers.  There’s only so much trouble you can make without an opposable thumb.

From here, Humber trains under assorted Bionicle characters we know nothing about.  Naturally, his power level rises dramatically, going from trying to punch through bare stone with his bare hands to kicking enemies clear through stone, all the way to carrying the Heaviest Metal, which as the comic will remind us is osmium, until it ain’t not a thing.  And, in his own words, “I did this time I went Super Sayin on command and all my wounds healed very quickly. While I was training I learned how to use a sword.”  It was unstated so far, but apparently Humber could only transform under great duress!  And now that weakness is removed, forever.  Before we could even realize that it was even a weakness, and not just a power that activated when he was under duress.  Brilliant.

“After I left Matanui(sic) a portal appeared out of nowhere and shadows snatched me and pulled me in.”

This is the other recurring theme in Christian Humber’s life: portals.  Not puzzle-solving portals that require you to think cleverly.  Portals that open up out of nowhere, lead to inexplicable locations, and otherwise free Humber from ever having to causally link anything.  This is an occupational hazard of living in the Pin.  It is also what lazy video game developers do when they want to do a bunch of levels without having to lead reasonably from one area to the next.  There’s no Half-Lifish “logical progression” here, no.  He’s just up and yanked from Mata Nui and into the waiting tentacles of Chaos.  Yes, Chaos, as embodied in a sword, which forces him to “fight a lot of innocent people and creatures.”  Not kill, just fight.  “The thing that had me I heard it is called Chaos.”

It’s not just a sword that has him–it is Chaos itself.  Not just any Chaos, as we will find out, but the Chaos Gods of Warhammer.  I’m no Warhammernaut, only having Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay to my name, but I understand that the Chaos Gods don’t generally corrupt people by gluing evil swords on their members and making them fight “innocent people and creatures.”  I believe sorcery is often involved, but rarely embodied in swords they happen to have lying at the other end of portals.

So, what happens next?  “I used my will power to fight against it and I succeeded after that I fled which was actually harder than the hardest mineral I’ve punched though.”  Woah, slow the fuck down, Hoss!  What do you mean you “used your will power?”  Did you seriously just make your fucking Will save (or rather initially have your Will defense hit, and then finally rolled a 10 or higher on your save) and wash your hands of the Gods of Chaos?  How did you use your willpower?  And why didn’t you use it earlier?  Text games, motherfucking text games, won’t even let you just type USE (X), because USE is such a vague and all-purpose verb.  It ranks up there with “feeling your thing rise up” in terms of vagueness.  Good Lord.  He USE’d his Willpower, and that was it.

Well, that and going to church and bathing in purifying springs.  And that’s it.  That’s his entire length of servitude to the Gods of Chaos, which forms a good deal of his motivation for murder later on in the story.  Tzeench would not be pleased.  Khorne also.

There’s enough room to continue with the next chapter in this little abortion, but I’ll save that for later, if only because I’m certain to launch off on some rant or the other.  Until then, we have an updated and expanded character sheet for all his new abilities, and I must warn you this sheet might start looking like a HERO character sheet by the end:

Name: He Has No Name, But Call Him “Vash”
Age: 6 (42 wolf years)
Alignment: True Neutral (briefly Chaotic Evil)
Background: Orphan wolf-sayan
Weaknesses: May forget to make his Will save
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; polyglot
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1, human form
Gear: Chaos-infested sword, briefly

Episode Three: Spin, a demon, and Emeralds
After losing the Many in the name of Bionicle, this particular act in Christian Humber’s opaque saga tends to bring the readers back in.  It starts off innocently enough, with Humber raising money by assassinating people.  In his words: “Some of the people wanted me to kill world leaders like, the one who started the Holocaust, that’s right I had to assassinate Hitler, and I got a huge bounty for doing it, after I got the money I killed the person who hired me.”  That is all one sentence, people.  Note that it is rarely 194X in this story; we can only assume that either Hitler is alive on the Pin, or else has been swept here from a(n un)luckier universe, or Humber is unaware that Hitler is dead.  Perhaps, like that one guy, he just knocked the head off of that wax statue of Hitler that was recently decapitated.  Why is Humber interested in killing the man who hired him, anyway–and who hired him, and why?  Surely it’s a man who wants revenge on Hitler for Holocausting so many innocent people, and he even paid Humber in full afterward.  What possible motivation would Humber have to kill an apparently-upstanding man of selectively loose morals?  The answer is obvious: he was 10 XP short of the next level.

The sword is got, and whoops, another portal happens.  Because that’s what portals do: they happen.  He explores, and subsequently gets his ass trapped in a trap “that disables your powers.”  As far as I care it’s a beholder’s center eye on a stick over a pit.  Fortunately he is helped out of the pit by a Sonic recolor who reveals his name as Spin. Humber reveals his name, and Spin scoffs, suggesting a new one: Blade, as in the Blackula slayer of note.  Why?  “because you’re the only wolf I know who can weld a sword like a pro”  Swords aren’t welded.  They’re forged.  Also, to this point all Spin has seen of Humber is him chopping a Badnik in half, a feat whose difficulty is rivaled only by brisk jogs to the front door or underhanded tosses at the garbage can.  Sometimes it’s like Humber ISN’T a colossal Mary Sue, but rather some lucky bastard whose parents were very sexually understanding.  Anyhow!

Humber discovers he’s on “Mobeus”, which is threatened by Dr. Rrrrrrrrobotnik~!, as you know.  Unfortunately, Humber then forever refers to Robotnik as Eggman, because classic Sonic is too good to associate itself with this beyond the existence of the Freedom Fighters.  Humber is denied a place among the Freedom Fighters because he “has to fight,” and being able to press B to swing his sword at a Badnik doesn’t count.  Naturally, the next time the Freedom Fighters mix it up with Robotnik’s robot hordes, Humber blasts the lot of them with generic ki energy and destroys them “with no effort at all”.  This is the precursor to Humber’s newest catchphrase, “with ease.”  You’re going to see that and hell of it.

Sadly, this excursion to the familiar shores of Mobius is brief, and Act Four brings Humber back to Shit Nobody Cares About.  That is for next time.  I lack the energy to actually conquer the next brace of chapters at the moment.  But, know this: what the next part lacks in familiarity it gains in Humber finding his voice and introduces a great many themes that will come to define Christian Humber’s roaring rampage of not-liking-anything-very-much.  It will be, in the parlance, “epochful.”

Name: Vash-Blade the Lucid (Wolf-Sayan Immune Sleep)
Age: 6 (42 wolf years)
Alignment: True Neutral
Background: Orphan wolf-Sayan
Weaknesses: Traps that disable your powers
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; polyglot
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1, human form
Gear: Sword

Episode Four: The Kill of the Wild
Jesus Christ this man has never heard of punctuation: “After I became a freedom fighter, I got transported to a strange city covered with strange webs, I made sure I wouldn’t fall into another trap by keeping my eyes and ears open for any sign of danger, well I did get into some danger, by being spotted by a strange spider-like creature, boy that was a big mistake, the next thing I know I’m dodging their projectiles, I pulled my sword out and with my speed I ran up a wall on a building and swung.”  Yes, another portal opened up and swept him away to the next bucket full of experience points.  Note that he “uses” his speed.  He’s not just fast, he uses his speed the way an adventure game hero CUTs TREE with SWORD.  He rubs his Speed all over the problem like it was another weapon, not an innate quality of his ability to run.  This seems to be a theme with bad fanfiction, where superpowers are always described as being USE’d, e.g. “using Sonic speed” instead of just… running.  At super speed.  Anyway.

Holy shit, his sword breaks in half when he hits the monster with it.  At least the Sorting Algorithm of Evil is keeping up with Humber.  Humber prepares to sustain injury, but to his surprise, no injury doth come, for yet again his is conveniently saved by a setting-appropriate superhuman.  Lucky, that.  But who is his savior?  Who has dared prolong his existence?  “I’m a toa horkeita, half hero half beast”  Whatever the hell that is, it describes itself with its own tag line, which is meta like the mountains in the springtime.

It dawns on Humber that he has traveled back in time, and, like any good time traveler, proceeds to fuck the hell out of everything by requesting they use precious resources to repair his crappy sword.  His savior promises him that, should there be a forge left intact in this apocalyptic past, then master smith Vakama could spot him for a quick sword-fix.  Hey, genius, what if that forge and steel (or whatever a Great Konoka Disc is) is used on your crappy storebought sword rather than, say, the weapon later used by the Lego Robot who solved whatever robot-related disaster is going on right now?  What if your merest presence just screwed over the timeline, irrevocably changing the future and leaving you as an out-of-place artifact in a shattered universe, forever severed from the context of history?  Note: the tragic saga of an out-of-place person lost forever in time would make a rockin’ band name.

Anyway, so Humber violates causality and helps the master smith re-smith his sword despite having never smithed a Goddamn thing in his life.  He didn’t even have opposable thumbs until he was equivalent-40-some-odd.  Nonetheless, the blade winds up fancy and proper, “…but I had to make a thing that only I could use it I grabbed it and heated the blade up and cut my finger on it and put a drop of blood on it to symbolize only I could use it.”  Note this is only symbolic; he’s hoping his enemies think it’s totally gross that he kind-of-sort-of forged his own blood into the steel.  Would that cause a lot of impurities from the iron and such, or would it just boil away like water?  I don’t know, but I think this is a distraction so Eggman can get away with his evil plan… says Tails.  He dubs the blade Tetsume, which almost certainly doesn’t mean what he thinks it means.

Humber decides the best way to test if the sword is much improved is to piss off five of the little bastards and hope that his new and improved sword doesn’t just split a third of the way down instead of in half against their adamant shells.  Fortunately, after going Super Sayan, he, in a show of supreme irony, cuts them all in half.  We are fortunate his superhuman strength does not shatter his length of sharpened metal.  I mean he.  We’re pretty much screwed, because he’s just found his self-insertion super-sword.  Bought.  Bought his self-insertion super-sword.  Bought and broke and fixed.  Early Humber is not especially inspiring.

But it gets better!  Oh God does it get better.

He and his assorted robot crew decide to make a final attack against the Visorak, and Humber elects to be the bait.  “I insulted them by calling them ugly.”   [1]  “Ugly,” more than any other word, is Christian Humber’s favorite insult, and here we have the second element of Humber’s idiosyncratic style.  He gets blasted by a Visorak’s poorly-described “projectile,” “that didn’t stop me from going psycho and I did.”  Not a few lines hence, and we have the next recurring Humbtheme!  Also, he told his robobuddies to not try “this” at home.  Because they’d totally get the reference.

The Toa wage their war against the… thingey… whom Humber calls an ugly son of a “b****” [2].  Humber sits out the fight, letting the Toa fight their own fight.  Except when more mooks join on the bad guy’s side.  And when they start losing.  And when they need Humber’s help to kill it.  So yeah, he basically finishes the fight.  Not in the epic, inspiring Halo 3 fashion, where the fate of the galaxy is at stake and tragic sacrifices are made.  It’s more like if the last four levels of Halo 3 were the boss fight against 343: “this time I also used my power to help the blast this time it almost killed him so I used Tetsume and killed him.”  In short, Humber[t] kills shit, and all is well.  Woo.

The next chapter is Bionicle stuff none of us care about.  Notable line: “I met a very funny Matorin named Tammu, he taught me a good insult and I still use it.”  What is the insult?  It is a mystery.

Next time: A new gun, another new gun, a new arm, and the sword fucking breaks again, God, just buy a new one.  Jesus.

Name: Vash, Blade
Age: 6 (42 wolf years)
Alignment: True Neutral
Background: Orphan wolf-Sayan time traveler
Weaknesses: The Sorting Algorithm of Evil, briefly
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; polyglot
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1, human form
Gear: Tetsume, the previously-broken sword
UGLY: 2

Episode Five: Armed and Armederous
In a sense, I really like Christian Humber Reloaded.  The sheer gall of making a character this strong fills me with … I don’t know if there’s a word for it.  Let’s call it “Dysentery.”  To coin a phrase.  Word.

While looking for lightstones, whatever those may be, Humber manages to find something even vaguer.  Knowing only that it is something, and it is cool, Humber touches it, and whoops, it fuses to his hand.  Then three bullets appear.  He shows these bullets to the local bulleteer, “this thing you found is very unique, but we have never seen it before”[.]  I think you meant to say “and.”  Say you meant to say “and.”  Tell me or we’re stopping this car right here and dumping you into a magma vent to die in impossible agony.  That’s a girl.

Anyhow, Sidorak–gee, it would be nice to be a Bionicle fan at this point just to understand what in the hells he’s getting at–appears, and…  Huh.  Humber’s thing rises up in him and, because there are no girls to kick in the jaw, he instead enacts an incredibly elaborate ritual out of some queer instinct, because learning is for people who like to waste time not becoming more powerful.  He names the bullets and shoots Atomos, a Final Fantasy summon that likes to suck shit up.  The enemy is thusly sucked, as is a great deal of real estate, and so for wont of killing one enemy Humber has deforested much of Pastra Nui and threatened the lives of every one of his super robot pals.  Good job!

“I went back to where I found it and found a strange belt with the same kind of bullets in it and a shotgun.”  The shotgun is more realistic than it seems, and Humber gets a great deal of use out of it, but not, as you are starting to understand, for any intelligent reason.  As Team Fortress 2 has taught us, a shotgun is a fine all-around side weapon, balanced and effective, for when one’s niche primary weapon is inappropriate.  Like the Pyro before him, and the Soldier before him, and the Heavy before him, and the Engineer doesn’t count, this mysterious gunifactor has left him a sidearm to tell him, as Roast Beef put it, to not play Whac-a-Mole when the rest of the kids are playing chess.  Christian Humber being Christian Humber, he recognizes none of the above references and instead uses guns when it is the stupidest idea in the world to use normal firearms.  As we shall imminently see.

Also, why the hell didn’t he find these earlier?  Did he only roll a 15 on his Search check?

It turns out that Kaze Gunhaver, of Final Fantasy Unlimited, is now the Jimminy Cricket to Humber’s Jeffry Dahmer: mentioned once, and promptly forgotten under a tide of blood and bleach-lobotomized sex zombies.  Kaze was hand-picked by Humber’s father, whom we may guess and honestly ascertain to be a Sayan dogfucker; besides being the first pick of a super-powered ape-man warrior who has sex with dragon-dogs, he also “lodged three purifying bullets in [Humber's] chest”.  When, or how, is never mentioned.  Those would’ve been handy to have back when Humber was possessed by Chaos, and would’ve been even more useful to have later when Humber commits even more jaw-dropping atrocities of his own free and skewed will.

Humber jaws with Kaze regarding how “ugly” [3] his Corrupted Self was in the throes of Chaos.  Before Humber can ask the most pressing question on his mind–the name of the shotgun, on which is engraved a lengthly dedication which he would only need to read once and yet now is forever emblazoned upon the stock–another portal opens and, miraculously, instead spits out something instead of sucking him in.  This Something is his first recurring enemy: his Corrupted Self.  A swordfight ensues, and the fiend is called “ugly” no less than three times, bringing the count up to [6].  Humber “uses his speed” to get behind his Corrupted Self, points his newfangled shotgun at Corrupted’s head, misses, and for all his trouble gets his sword-arm cut off.  Masterstroke.  This is only the first in a long series of firearms-related idiocy.  Humber decides to shoot the Magun (that’s what it’s called) while in Super Sayan mode, and somehow being physically stronger gets him a better roll on the random summon table.  Odin ejaculates from his magic gun and destroys his Corrupted Self.  You know, my parents made fun of the characters from Final Fantasy VIII for summoning monsters to do the fighting for them instead of beating enemies up themselves.  Humber gets no slack in this regard.  Stop cowering behind godlike elemental essences and kick your evil super-powered self’s ass while losing a great deal of blood armed with only your shotgun, with which you missed at point blank range while fully healthy.  Times like this you really wonder how Humber got stronger than God.

Not letting a little thing like disability get in his way, Humber straps a robot arm on and sallies forth.  We can assume he went forward in time, because now he’s testing his robot limb against a gang, and notably not a gang of Mongols.  The first time he and his Enemy Gang tussle, he intimidates the lot by punching right through a wall.  The second time, he “crushes a member’s skull with one hand without even trying,” and for the hat trick, the next time they dare fight him he…  he…

“I tortured all of them by skinning them alive and hung them on a wall still alive. Every gang that came across me ended up skinned or decapitated.”

JESUS ON THE CHRIST RIVER!  NOT COOL.  …JESUS CHRIST!  Holy fucking shit!  He… dude!

Anyhow!  Leaving behind a trail of destroyed bodies, Humber is karmically punished by another portal opening up and chucking something at his head.  Unfortunately, it’s the Shikon Jewel.  He notes that it is white instead of pink; “that makes no fucking sense at all.”  A normal Shikon jewel pummeling him in the head?  Unusual, but utterly sensical, provided you live on the Pin.  And as he examines this artifact, a demon attacks.  This demon is in the shape of his wolfish brother, whose corpse has been possessed by Chaos.  Man, Chaos is a dick.  He loads the Shikon Jewel into the Magun like a handful of silverware down the barrel of a blunderbuss, and, with nary a pause to appreciate the horror of his circumstances or to even listen to a little demonic taunting, nukes his brother back to the hell he crawled out of.  He discards the Shikon Jewel like a spent shotgun casing, noting only that the jewel is now gray and thus useless to him.  Note, however, that he will still consider the Shikon Jewel “his.”

Okay, the sword’s not breaking this update.  But next!  We’re nearing the end of Part One!

Name: Vash, Blade
Age: 6 (42 wolf years)
Alignment: True Neutral
Background: Orphan wolf-Sayan-cyborg time traveler gang-slaughterer
Weaknesses: Genetic inability to know when to use a gun and when to use one of his supernormal powers, you fucking idiot
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; useless guardian spirit
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1, human form
Gear: Tetsume, the Magun, the Shikon Jewel (for about ten seconds), shotgun
UGLY: 6

Epidode Six: Might As Well Pay Him to Do It
Humber is almost as good at killing his recurring enemies as he is at picking swords.  In another tussle with his Corrupted Self, Tetsume breaks against the deadly Slayer of Souls, and Humber goes apeshit from sheer consumer rage.  The Sorting Algorithm of Evil strikes again!  (At this point, his Corrupted Self is rather realistically mightier, given that Humber skinned gangs alive expressly to show that he could and is about to pull a dick move worthy of Iron Age Superman.)  Humber’s buyer’s remorse is canceled only by the intervention of a little Japanese girl out of nowhere, who observes “don’t kill anymore, because, I love you.”  Humber can’t resist little Japanese girls and so delays murdering everybody.  He repairs Tetsume with one of his fangs (groooaaan) and assures the people of the world that no, he’s not normally a killing device (a lie balder than a NASCAR tire possessed by the spirit of Dale Earnheardt and forced to race across the Indy 500 until not so much as a strip of rubber clings to it) and only freaks out when he drops his sword.  So naturally he responds to a bank robbery by dropping his sword and Getting Psycho (Run You Little Bitch, etc.).  The only stress relief he feels is when he beats up the Fucking Emperor of Japan for refusing to let his psycho-killer ass across the border.  He relishes in beating up a ragged old man who can’t realistically fight back.  Man.  And this isn’t even that dick move I warned you about.

Humber claims to live in Japan in peace, despite habitually beating up the Emperor, and the cops harsh his buzz while he’s all trying to conquer the beast within him.  It turns out Soku just plain couldn’t turn down the amount of money the emperor put on him.  To be fair, it would likely be an awesome amount of money.  Humber deigns let himself be captured, because he’s made a promise to Soku to not kill again.  But he does threaten that she would pay dearly for betraying him!

As it turns out, her form of payment is to die.  And for everybody associated with her to die.  Humber claims he’s going to “wipe out her entire gene pool,” which, I would like to note, would be every human on the planet.  Fortunately, Humber is not that motivated, and settles for first killing her friends, then telling her he killed her friends, then killing her, then killing her family, then killing her extended family.  “By doing that I broke my promise to her.”  No shit?

He does it because he is compelled.

Humber decides to lay low on Metra Nui for sixteen years, because good God.  Even he admits that was a dick move.  Superman still hasn’t apologized for marrying Jimmy off to a gorilla.  After sixteen years of pondering the sheer horror of his existence, he learns nothing, and decides to give a message to… actually, not the Japanese police, because that would require making sense.  He instead goes to the Californian police to deliver a message “which was “I’m back!” by breaking down the front door and walking in wearing all black and a hockey mask on, which scared all of them to death, until I said “I’m back!”  Yep…  Naturally, they have no idea who he is–as he’s been vanished for 16 years and almost assuredly proclaimed dead; if not, then they wouldn’t recognize him with a damn hockey mask on.  Humber gives them a stupidly large hint: “the one who destroyed that village 16 years ago and…Hug me!”  His attempt at being lolrandom is taken equally well, and Humber simply gives himself over, because even he knows when a joke has failed utterly.  He wears the mask of shame tonight.

He stays in jail for five years before a jailbreak goes down–likely every prisoner trying to get the hell away from Humber–and he attempts to score Brownie points by recapturing everyone.  Well, he kills most of them.  At least this is (hopefully) a maximum security prison and he’s not wasting any weekend drunks or potheads caught up in a bad situation.  Impressed with his ability to murder people, he joins the Suicide Squad and starts hunting prisoners and terrorists in the most collateral-laden fashion imaginable.  He describes this as “his first fun job.”  We may also notice it’s his second job, period, and his first job differed only in that his first job wasn’t government-subsidized.  Well, he does have the go-ahead to continue being a complete fucking sociopath: “I enjoyed hunting them and infiltrating their strong hold then go on my killing spree blood and guts everywhere I fed upon the guts, or at least bringing down a building after rescuing the hostages.”  To be fair, this can’t be too far off from some mercenary groups’ conduct.

While this is going on, Humber is framed!  Not that he needs to be, but he is nonetheless.  “guess who I found, my corrupted self,”…  Unsurprisingly, because good God.  With Tetsume and Magun in hand, he defeats his old foe and clears his name.  Rather, he clears his name in regards to his extracurricular manslaughter.

Ten years pass.  It seems that Humber has finally worked off his debt to society.  Either that or they just got tired of the evil, evil bastard.  As this new age dawns, we find Humber… playing with children.  Innocuous-like.  Soku, the girl he killed many years ago, shows back up in Unseen Ghost Scent Form, ready to take her much-touted revenge.  Only that revenge never comes, and Humber merely has to point out that some dead girl is trying to take her revenge because he killed the living hell out of her and her entire family about 31 years ago.  “I, umm, killed a lot of people in the past, but I changed[,]” claims Humber.  He is instantly forgiven and Soku’s revenge is kicked in the nads and sent packing.

Humber, shockingly, is still in school–finally getting an education after all this time spent killing people–and while he’s at school, he starts hearing a faint voice begging for help.  One day, when he is “done with school for the rest of my life,” he walks home; on the way, lo, “I saw a strange creature…”

And here ends Part One.  Part Two is blissfully lacking in Lego robots, blissfully packed full of escalating power levels, and will probably make you vomit.  Mentally, at least.

Now, let’s update this damn character sheet!

END OF PART ONE RESULTS:

Name: Vash, Blade
Age: 37(!) (259 wolf years)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil (took him long enough)
Background: Orphan wolf-Sayan-cyborg
Current Occupation: Student
Previous Occupation: Government-sponsored cannibal-holocaust-enabler
Weaknesses: Children
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; useless guardian spirit
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1, human form
Gear: Tetsume, the Magun, shotgun, “serial killer” costume set
UGLY: 6

Episode Seven: Pete’s Dragon: A Christian Humber Joint
The dawn of Part the Second sees an Incounter (sic) of monumental proportions, and I mean that in the most deadhead literal way possible.  Continuing from the last time, it turns out that Humber has found a dragon, one who needs “medical attention.”  Humber helps, surprisingly, and it is revealed that this dragon has the power to control the seasons.  Humber nearly says, and I quote, “the F word.”  The dragon needs a place to stay, you see, and it must be large because the dragon is so very, very large.  In a rare show of intelligence, Humber asks if the dragon can indeed fly, given its girth.  Yes, he can fly, but his wings are smashed all to hell, and so it’s up to Humber to Do the Right Thing: A Spike Lee Joint.  Humber tends the dragon’s wounds and steals 5,000 Imperial pounds of food, “which was tough to get but I got it”.  Afterward, Humber goes house shopping the only way Humber can, which is to say as a vulgar display of power.  He hacks a satellite and finds a cave in the Rockies.  He hitches a ride to the cave–bragging about his l33t computer rig on the way–and takes the cave’s measurements himself.  The dragon is 11 miles long and one-and-seven-tenths of a mile wide (and very good at hiding in bushes), so thankfully the cave is a robust 37 miles “high” (I think he means “deep”) and a paltry three miles wide.  Hope the dragon likes sleeping standing up.  Or… how would that work, exactly?  I’m not sure.

The dragon appreciates Humber’s house-hunting skills and teaches him Instant Transmission, which as you recall is a teleportation power from Dragonball Z.  You know, Season-Bringer (spoiler alert: that’s the dragon’s name, but we don’t find it out for a good, long while), you don’t really need to complain about how shittily your wings are doing when you can teleport anywhere you want to go.  Interestingly, we never hear about Season-Bringer doing anything even vaguely teleportation-themed.  Ever.

To no one’s surprise, somebody espies the 11-mile-long dragon, and it’s up to Humber to put a stop to all that seeing.  “I detected the spy and deleted what the spy saw and transported her home.”  That’s right, he lets her go with all her limbs intact.  But how exactly does he go about deleting what the “spy” saw?  Well, that bit before about Jeffrey Dahmer and bleachbotomy sex zombies comes to mind.  Afterward Humber very casually “cloak[s] the cave from radar, sonar, and satellite,” because he can, dammit.

Meet Cute is the name of the game after that mild misadventure.  Humber wastes no time in calling the still-nameless dragon “my dragon,” because Humber thinks people are things.  The dragon doubles in size, which must make that paltry three-mile width of the cave feel that much more like the dragon’s been packed into an oversized, unusually stone-like pastry tin.  The poor lil’ sucker eats too much, and after yelling “Holy shit!”, he observes that he has said the “S” word because of the dragon’s weight.  He weighs, quote, 900,000,000,000,000,000 tons.  That is 900 quadrillion.  That is a real number.  That is 1/10th of the weight of the planet.  Humber declares Season-Bringer-who-is-still-nameless the heaviest animal to rock the earth since the dinosaurs.  To be more accurate, he’s the heaviest thing on the planet since Nemesis sheared the moon off the earth’s flaming surface (some scientists say), and actually weighs more than all of the dinosaurs ever.  All of the every living thing ever, actually.  It’s time for the dragon to get his ass out of the cave and start working off all that food he’s been eating!  Which, proportionally, must equal that of an extinction event.

It turns out that Season-Bringer-the-still-unnamed is… well, let Humber deliver the news: “shit, your pregnant with about 6,000 eggs.”  The dragon doesn’t know why he’s pregnant, but an agonizing fit reveals that he is now pregnant with 3,000 more eggs and about 60′ of girth.  Humber teleports a team of doctors in, and surprisingly, they are more skeptical about the dragon-man being pregnant than they are about the dragon existing.  It turns out that Season-Bringer-whose-name-has-now-been-hinted-at is the elemental catalyst for the changing seasons, and once he goes, so do the seasons.  Which certainly takes a load off the mind of the doctors.  Wait, shouldn’t he have gotten a team of veterinarians instead of a team of doctors?  Anyway, the doctors do their do, and the world is saved by aborting the dragon’s thousand-upon-thousand offspring.  Hooray!

Season-Bringer-the-nameless recuperates after nearly dying; the hospital nurse gives his recovery period from being stretched like a balloon full of piranha caviar–impregnated piranha caviar–as three years.  This turns out to have been a conservative estimate, for the dragon is healed within an hour, because otherwise he would inconvenience Humber by virtue of making him age.  “Good boy,” Humber says under his breath, for showing appreciation that your friend is alive is weakness.

The two make haste to leave the hospital so that Season-Bringer-the-need-a-dispenser-here doesn’t get caught and thrown in a cage, but because Season-Bringer is now 22 goddamn miles long, they are spotted by a “ringmaster.”  Yes, a ringmaster, presumably in full ringdress, who… who… threatens them with a shotgun.  The worst-case scenario is that a 22-mile-long dragon is seen, and then threatened by a circus ringmaster who wears his full outfit and carries a shotgun in public, conveniently passing by the hospital–or else waiting outside, for hospitals are not known for being 22 miles long.  Let me repeat.  They are threatened–Humber, a Sayan-wolf-cyborg, and Season-Bringer-the-HI-MY-NAME-IS, a 22-mile-long dragon whose weight is 1/10th that of the Earth’s–by a shotgun.

Humber swears at the ringmaster, who is stunned long enough for Hum…

No, Humber doesn’t wipe him out with a generic energy blast.  No, they don’t teleport away.  No, he doesn’t summon some ridiculously overpowered mythical creature to kill the ringmaster in a showy display of power.  No, Season-Bringer-the-guy doesn’t swat the ringmaster away, or hell, just sit there and let him try and shoot his several-feet-thick hide to no effect.  Humber dodges a point-blank shotgun shot, because he’s “too fast for a bullet,” and then maneuvers around the ringmaster and puts a shotgun at his head.  The ringmaster refuses to back down.  Humber shoots and “vaporizes” the ringmaster’s head, before teleporting home to the relative safety of the underground vaults.

It turns out this was unnecessary, as the ringmaster was wanted for capturing mythical creatures.  So… yeah.  The fuck-upped-ness of this situation is left as an explicative exercise to the reader.

Humber reaps a casual bounty of sixty million billion dollars.  He gives 1,000 of it to orphans so they can get a good home.  The orphans’ parents are alcoholics, so he “destroys” the alcohol and citizen’s-arrests the parents.  The kids play with the dragon, who needs some calcium, and so he eats a bunch of bones Humber was about to throw awzzzzzzzz snrt what.  Pardon.  Okay, the Meet Cute bits are pretty uncool, but this is all a prelude to Humber’s next fucked-up little occupational endeavor.  That’s for next time, though.

Name: Vash, Blade
Age: 37(!) (259 wolf years)
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Background: Orphan wolf-Sayan-cyborg
Current Occupation: Dragon-take-care-of-er
Weaknesses: Sticky zero key
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; useless guardian spirit
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, disinformation, house shopping
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1, human form
Gear: Tetsume, the Magun, his much-beloved shotgun, “serial killer” costume set, dragon he helped save and then immediately laid claim to
UGLY: 6

Episode Eight: Dungeons and Dragons and Demons
When we last left Vashblade and Season-Bringer-Named-in-Three-Chapters, the dragon was hella munchin’ on some skeleton bones.  When we rejoin them, we find that Season-Bringer-the-Bonerdagon is hella munchin’ on 90,000,000,000,000 pounds of skeleton bones.  Well, at least that’s only… 45,000,000 tons of bones.  According to a chain of Google links, an average elephant weighing about 11,000 pounds has a skeleton weighing 1,815 pounds, or just 185 pounds short of a ton.  Rounding up to 2 tons, Season-Bringer-the-Eater-of-Worlds has just hella munched on the equivalent skeleton bones of 22,500,000 elephants or so.  To put that in perspective, there are only 80,000 elephants left, almost certainly less, and that’s combining African and Indian elephants.  Remember what I said about how feeding an 11-mile-long dragon would be the equivalent of an extinction-level event?  A 22-mile-long dragon’s diet would probably make the dinosaur-killing meteor turn to alcohol to drown its shame.

Anyhow!  Between wiping out all life on Earth, Christian Humber’s dragon has been forging three magic swords with which Humber may “tame” dragon clans.  Humber, being the upstanding type, instead fuses the three swords into the Virtue sword so that he may instead “capture” dragon clans.  This apparently happens behind the dragon’s back, because said dragon also makes a “device” that will purify rogue dragons so they’ll stop trying to gain combat advantage over their enemies and reap Sneak Attack bonus damage.  Rogue dragons being the social ill they are, and having never been mentioned before, Humber sallies forth to capture him some dragons in a saddening, maddening cross ‘twixt Eragon and Pokemon.  Eragmon.  Pokeagon?

Rogue dragons range from lean and hungry to incredibly fat and also hungry, as one might gather, and their goal is to eat all of mankind–whom they are rebelling against, because dragons are, on the Pin, apparently not unlike voracious fire-breathing House Elves–because they were abused by a gang.  Humber: At this point, you’re only quasi-omnipotent.  Going against a street gang that can emotionally violate dragons to such a degree as to make them hate all men may not be a wise idea.  They’ll pin you on top of a pinball machine and violate you.  You’ll be the main character in a Lifetime Movie of the Week, provided you were instead a woman.  But you’re not, unlike the Rogue* Dragons, and anyhow, he’s got a dragon-catchin’ sword and he’s raring to use it.  Claim a broken she-dragon as yet anther living weapon, Humber!

*The Rouge Dragons being, in the true story this incident is based on, an underground lesbian Society of Creative Anachronism splinter group who used real medieval weapons to wage their deadly, sensuous wars on the streets of Chicago.  It was totally hot.

Humber kicks–seemingly at last–a large degree of dragon ass, eventually pinning down a dragon and beating information about the Chicago gang what made these twilight reptiles rebel against the world of men.  Rather than stay pinned against the wall, the dragon eats Humber whole and immediately regrets it.  Oddly, so does Humber, who cuts his way free from the dragon’s stomach, apparently killing it.  “when I turned back to look at the dragon his belly was wide open I felt awful about what I did.”  Firstly, the Rouge Dragons were a bit reverse-trappish, and secondly, well fucking well, Humber, do you feel any regret about skinning and decapitating all those gangs back in the day?  Spoiler alert: Humber will never feel remorse for his actions ever again, and the only time he feels remorse is in regards to the self-defense killing of a rogue lesbian dragon.  Not even multiple ones!  Just the one!  One he pinned against a wall, momentarily, and I would like to see a diagram as to how that would work.

Humber sinks into a funk and decides he needs to be alone for a while.  Season-Bringer-the-Hang-in-There-Baby, Just-One-More-Chapter-to-Go understands.  What’s a poor depressed mass-murderer to do when he’s lost it in the Deathwoods, crap?  He high-tails it to China, because China is the world’s leading expert on draconology, Communism, and … well.  It has a big wall.  Oddly, he does not seek out Communist medicine, but a priest.  China is officially atheist, as you’re almost certainly wishing to scream at Humber.  But don’t be so hasty!  The Pin’s version of China was officially atheist until they got tired of all the hopping vampires and pissed-off river dragons resting their muddy rigor-mortis-stiffened feet/rending talons on the couch and begrudgingly enacted a Practical Theosophy policy.  The Practical Theosophist believes that all religions contain some aspect of the cosmic Truth; however, there is no reverence or faith to this belief, as it’s not even a belief.  It’s a theory backed up by the hordes of Gaki, demons, zombies, mummies, Voodoo zombies, manitou, and other assorted nasties constantly beating at the gates of civilization.  A Practical Theosophist carries a Bible/pistol in one hand and a Koran/pistol in the other, with a hardback copy of the Hindu vedas/sniper rifle on his back.  He is pissy.

Fortunately for Humber, this Practical Theosophist who goes by the title “Priest” understands Humber’s need to absolve himself of killing exactly one dragon.  The penance for killing exactly one dragon, in contrast for the penance necessary for killing a hyuuuuge number of humans, is for Humber to venture into Hell and kill the demon-dragon Li-Hung-Doe, which is not Chinese, because said dragon has been cursing China for 5,0000 years.  Just sitting there in Hell, making grasping fiendish claw-motions at China and chanting wicked curses.  He is very easily amused with cursing China.  China, having it up to here (indicates) with assorted supernatural nastiness, is damn tired of Li-Hung-Doe’s constant gesticulating, and so shove the ordained blade Shing-Shingo (which also isn’t Chinese) into Humber’s hand and send him off to find Hell.  Because they know the dragon is IN Hell, they just don’t know where it is.  Tricky, that.  They trust Humber’s spirit to lead him to Hell, which may be the subtlest Ice Burn I’ve ever seen.  Humber USEs SPIRIT on HELL and finds it.

The Shing-Shingo is set to Stun, and should put Li-Hung-Doe to sleep for 1,000 years, in which he can only gesticulate inarticulately in tune to dreams of hexing China so.  Humber assumes that this is for B.S. reasons, as opposed to very very good reasons, and so tries to Virtue the hell out of him.  Virtue, by the way, is named after the three “virtues” of Unity, Duty, and Destiny.  Duty and Destiny aren’t virtues.  Li-Hung-Doe isn’t Chinese.  Neither is Shing-Shingo.  Sensing a pattern?  Anyhow!  Virtue doesn’t do a damn thing against Li-Hung-Doe, so Humber fuses the Shing-Shingo with the Virtue sword to create the Tetsaiga (groaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan).  This allows him to kill the ancient demon dragon in one attack.  Now there’s the Mary-Sue we all paid to see! Humber returns to the surface to find “all of China” cheering for him.  Either they packed over a billion Chinamen into a very large, very-hastily-built People’s Amphitheater, or Hong Meiling is there, naked as a jaybird and holding up a GO GO WOLF SUPER MAN sign.  The latter is more believable, so I’m giving my brain a break and believing in Naked China.

The priest is there, and congratulates Humber on knocking out Li-Hung-Doe.  Humber states that no, he hasn’t knocked out Li, he killed him.  “you started a Yin-Yang War and you will fight alone with no weapons.”  Whoops.

Next time: Ignoring the second half of that sentence; Season-Bringer gets a name; Humber collects his last recurring enemy; promotions!

Name: Vash, Blade
Age: 37 (259 wolf years)
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Background: Orphan wolf-Sayan-cyborg
Current Occupation: Dragon slavemast… tamer, China saver
Weaknesses: Forgetting that obscure magical restrictions are there for a God(s?)damn reason
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; useless guardian spirit
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, disinformation, house shopping, dragon taming
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1, human form
Gear: Tetsume, Tetsaiga (sigh), the Magun, shotgun, “serial killer” costume set, genocidal dragon
UGLY: 6

Episode Nine: Christian Humber vs. Ke[i]kanu
Priest tries to relieve Humber of the Shing-Shingo, only to find it is now permanently embedded in Virtue, because Humber refuses to give up even an inch of power.  With one deadly Wind Scar, Humber annihilates “a one-hundred demons” demons and officially names the new fused blade “Tetsiga” (groaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan).  Afterward, he heads back home to inform the dragon that he is indeed gonna be kicking some demon ass, and invites him to fight the oncoming horde of demons, rather against the spirit of that whole “alone with no weapons” thing.  Calls, to what we cannot guess, begin pouring in from countries all over the world, “except China.”  China is man enough to man up against the ensuing Yin-Yang War.  The rest of the planet decides to call that one gang-killing psychopath who started this whole demon-war mess should be the one to clean it up.  Humber implicitly agrees, even with the “psychopath” part: “I smiled my psycho smile my dragon knew I was going to go to war.”  His Psycho-Smile is recurring, as is his “psycho” costume.  Earlier he proudly observed that one random enemy was the reason he was “insane.”  Humber, for being the imminent savior of the planet, is rather proud of his sociopathy.  Despite, as we may recall, him starting this whole… wait a minute.

Okay, quick breather here.  Humber was depressed because he killed a dragon.  One dragon, compared to dozens of humans and an unknown number of dogs and Bionicle whatsits.  He goes to China to repent, because China knows best.  He is told that he can be forgiven if he puts a demon dragon to sleep for a thousand years.  Instead of doing that, he kills the dragon, in order to gain forgiveness for killing another dragon, and inadvertently throws the balance of whatever out of whack, calling down endless demon armies to swarm the planet and consume it whole (before Season-Bringer the Imminently-Named can).  Wow.  Just… wow.  Ha ha.  Oh wow.

So, as I was saying: the dragon immediately changes his mind and decides to help Humber wage the war; Humber says okay, but “if it gets sticky, get the fuck out of there”.  Ten seconds ago, Humber asks the dragon for help, and he refuses, not believing that Humber could’ve failed that badly.  Funny, that.  Before the dragon can call for reinforcements, they are interrupted by the last of Humber’s rogue’s gallery–Kekanu, who I will now refer to as Keikanu, because I am incapable of doing otherwise–shows up.  Keikanu is a demon general who commands Humber to meet him in ten days at “the city” at dusk, that the war may begin.  Humber declines, offering instead to meet at “the wasteland,” because there’s too many people at “the city.”  Keikanu, being a gentlemen, agrees.  And so in ten days the fate of the world will be decided at “the wasteland.”  But first, the second-most-glaring plot hole in the entire story.

Humber’s parents don’t want him to fight.

His parents.

His dead parents.

The parents whose death was the catalyst for Humber’s entire fucking origin.

Humber, perhaps exceptionally high on cocaine snorted off the leathery non-tit-bearing chest of a Rogue Dragon, tells his dead parents that no, he was the one who started the Yin-Yang War, and he’s going to be the one what to finish it, right after leaking half a pint of blood through his nostrils.  After cleaning up the blood by catching it on his shirt, Humber heads to the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, in which, as he reminds the audience who hasn’t seen Dragonball Z, a year lasts only a day.  It is a quickie training device for dedicated ass-kickers to improve their might.  Normally, characters only spend one day in there, as it’s a featureless tiled wasteland with just enough room to sleep and nutrients to keep one’s brain from dying.  Humber, being the hardcore sort that he is, stays in for all ten days, cramming ten years’ worth of training before facing off Keikanu.  And, as he’s there alone, almost assuredly goes buttfuck eat-your-own-body-parts crazy.  Unless the dragon part of his brain helps deaden the highly-social needs of his wolf and Saiyan genes.  Possibly demon, too.  Demons love corrupting mortals, not just because it’s fun, but because they get lonely just like anything else.  Hug a succubus today.  And go no further, because that’s what they want you to do.  Anyhow, Humber finally clocks up from Super-Saiyan 1 to Super-Saiyan 4, which makes us all wonder why he didn’t do that sooner.

Humber emerges from the Time Thing so changed that Season-Bringer-the-Just-A-Few-More-Lines can only recognize his big nasty power level.  He threatens Humber, who responds with the cryptic question “You would hurt a sing-song brother?”  This is apparently what Humber and the dragon are.  Sing-Song Brothers.  Cute.  After correcting “his” dragon’s mistake, Humber declares, “Lets go open a can of whop-ass.”  (snrk)

“Now it is the time to fight we went to the wastelands and there stood Kekanu he said ‘good you have come to fight, well, aren’t we going to start?’”  Humber still doesn’t get the whole “punctuation” thing.  The fight begins: Keikanu summons a horde of demons; Humber pours energy into the Tetsaiga, calls Keikanu an “ugly son of a b****,” [7] then cuts down half the army, just so.  Keikanu sends the other half of his army at Humber–and casts a paralysis spell, which works instantly and screws Humber like a piece of Ikea furniture.  But before Humber can be further inconvenienced, Season-Bringer-the-Just-One-More-Line! whacks Keikanu into a cliff, causing Humber to exclaim, “Season bringer! What happened to you? You look stronger.”  THE DRAGON HAS A NAME!  CONGRATULATIONS, SEASON-BRINGER, YOU ARE THE NAMED THING OF THE WEEK!

Season-Bringer tells Humber he’s been training in the Otherworld, which pisses off Humber for… some reason.  Possibly because the Otherworld is where Silent Hill is, and I have to say, I respect Season-Bringer for not pussyfooting about and grinding goblins or metal slimes for XP.  Nope, he bites his way through a horde of horrible, horrible creatures, masticating experience points from their putrid flesh the way God would have intended if Harry and Heather hadn’t killed her twice.  With his moment of usefulness out of the way, Humber demans Season-Bringer get everybody in the world to lend him some of their energy.  Season-Bringer complies, because he is a 22-mile-long doormat.

Keikanu enters “his demon form,” and Humber ramps up to Super-Saiyan 4.  Their fight shakes the pillars of heaven, and just in time, Season-Bringer convinces six-and-a-half billion people, many of whom have very good reason to hate Humber’s guts but few of whom are willing to let the Earth die just to Ice Burn his ass, to loan a bit of energy to him.  Because that’s what Super-Saiyans in fan-stories tend to do, Humber reaches Super-Saiyan 5 and kicks Keikanu’s kiester with the Wind Scar.  Having saved the world, Humber collapses; Season-Bringer brings him to a hospital for three weeks of sleep followed by a “Hooray, We’re Still Alive” party.

Humber has to stay in the hospital for a year to heal fully, not counting the times he sneaks out to train.  When he heals up all the way, he and Season-Bringer celebrate by hitting the Otherworld and beating the pus (very unpleasantly literally) out of Lying Figures and Insane Cancers.  For a year.  Good times.

After that, Humber and Season-Bringer petition Earth’s Great Guardians to let them in; they’re refused, but offered the booby prize of Holy Warriors.  This prize package comes with a shiny plastic HOLY WARIORS (sic) badge; further, “We were allowed to protect the planet from demons, aliens, space pirates and mainly… Idiots.”  Edgy.  “We got to train for as long as we want.”  Because there is nothing else to do in life but fight, get psyched up to fight, and die.  Humber, the author, doesn’t know that combat is 99% boredom and 1% mortal terror, and believes, like so many Mary-Sues, that training for battle and battle are in and of themselves a satisfying life.  Try asking a shell-shocked, suicidal ex-mercenary about how awesome it is to live to kill.  If he doesn’t kill you and then kill himself first, that is.

Next Time: Area 51, black holes, ZERG RUSH KEKEKE ^_^

Name: Vash, Blade
Age: 49 (343 wolf years)
Alignment: True Neutral
Background: Orphan(?) wolf-Saiyan-cyborg
Current Occupation: HOLY WARIOR(sic), Veteran of the Yin-Yang wars
Weaknesses: Paralyin’ spells
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; Wind Scar technique; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; artifact fusion; useless guardian spirit
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, disinformation, house shopping, dragon taming, cocaine ingestion
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1/2/3/4/5, human form
Gear: Tetsume, Tetsaiga, the Magun, shotgun, “serial killer” costume set
Sidekick: Season-Bringer-the-Named-at-Last
UGLY: 7

Episode Ten: Make Love, Not Starcraft
Humber is doing as good of a job as you’d expect him to do, letting peaceful aliens through to the Earth only when he and Season-Bringer are in a good mood, “(which we weren’t in at all)”.  So yes, aside from letting the Protoss through once, there is no telling how many peaceable offworlders he and Season-Bringer annihilate in the name of near-constant PMS.  In one notable instance, “An enemy alien race called Zerg almost got though but Season Bringer and I destroyed their attack force and set them home with their fucking tails between their legs I then got a transmission from a different planet.”  The different planet winds up being the same planet, which is to say Char, the homeworld of the Zerg.  It turns out the Queen of Blades’s turf is being impugned upon by a growing new Overmind, and (naturally) Kerrigan decides to trust the job of murder to Humber, a noted murderphile.  Humber is having none of it; in fact, it’s Season-Bringer who gets the message, to Humber’s dismay.  It turns out that some time in the past Humber was nearly made the slave of the Queen of Blades, possibly during one of those year- or several-year-long swathes where we find out nothing about what happens.  Those gaps are rather convenient, allowing Humber to shovel in as many new super-buddies as is necessary to amplify his power level.

Humber reluctantly agrees, and only because he gets new powers out of the deal.  He needs Dark Templar powers in order to kill the Overmind, and as it conveniently happens, Humber has Dark Templar potential and needs training on the planet Sakura in order to actualize his latest tools of murder.  However, he has no slipspace-capable, cold-sleep-enabled ship, and here we discover, with the slightest of chills, that he is familiar with Halo.  Fortunately for us, he does not acquire a suit of +5 MJOLNIR-Mark-XIX Power Armor of the Gilded Birdcage at some point (although he does receive something similar, because Humber).  Anyhow, because Humber needs a ship, and the C.I.A. happens to have one at Area 51, because what the hell else would the C.I.A. keep at Area 51?  He “smiles [his] psycho smile” and heads to Groom Lake to pry a spaceship from the Central Intelligence Agency’s cold, dead hands.

“I asked the army’where is Area 51?’” Right here: http://googlesightseeing.com/maps?p=21&c=&q=groom+lake,nv&ll=37.272835,-115.798731&sll=36.518555,-115.561924&spn=0.060081,0.085402&sspn=0.127029,0.120678&t=k&hl=en  Despite having a pimped-out computer setup, Humber has never heard of Google maps and has to beat information out of some random army puke.  Because Humber is on a mission and the United States wishes to avoid war with Korea, they “blindfold” him and take him to Area 51.  When the blindfold comes off, he beholds him a spaceship, and the first thing he cares about is its blasters, which he likes.  I cannot un-imagine that little alien fighter from Independence Day, and neither can you, and neither can Humber.  Humber needs a copilot and presumably lessons; the ship is small and can only fit one other person, so clearly Season-Bringer is his best pick for copilot.  As for flying lessons?  Hell, Humber’s piloted “mechs, Gundams, huge robots and many others.”  Because he has piloted giant anthropomorphic war machines, the army immediately entrusts him to pilot a ship with a control scheme that cannot be any more dissimilar.  To Infinity and beyond!

Season-Bringer and Humber (S.B.’s name is just too fun to type, I have a thing for title names) reach Sakura in the twinkling of an enter key.  Sakura has a difficult-to-breathe atmosphere, so Humber and Season-Bringer solve the problem by… training in the depths of a black hole for a year.  Does he mean a literal year or a “time slows down while in the bough of a black hole” less-than-a-minute year?  Humber is the kind of wolfsayandragondemonrobotspiderpireborg who celebrates his year-long hospitalization by taking a year-long fightin’ trip to Silent Hill, so yes, I assume they mean train for a non-relativistic year.  When they return, their increased fighting skills naturally confer the ability to breathe alien atmosphere.  Perhaps they sunk all of their skill points into Endurance and picked up the Atmospheric Adaptation feat.  Humber assumes Super “Sayjin” stage 2 and Season-Bringer takes his Extremely Strong Form, which is neither described nor later alluded to.  (SPOILER: Although its vagueness is a coincidental parallel to Humber’s old “transformation” trick.)  They ask for Zeratul, of Starcraft fame, which he spells “Zeritul” because he is a functional illiterate.  “no human cannot enter” invite the gaurds, so Humber USEs SPEED on GATE to threaten the guards with permanent injury.  Let’s allow Humber to bring us out: “And they let us in and I learned how to use my dark templar powers. Now I can finally kill the god damn fucking Overmind.”  It is now known to the Gentry that Humble Humber needs a thesaurus as well as a dictionary.

That was all one chapter.  I’m proudish of Humber.  He’s learning that chapters can be longer than a paragraph.  This prolongs my suffering!

Successful in his endeavor, Humber rings up Kerrigan to tell her the good news and instead gets the Overmind.  It has a big ugly [8] eye.  Whoops!  Perhaps taking a year to train in the depths of a black hole was unwise.  You know, most Astro-Wal-Marts sell atmosphere converters for very reasonable prices.  Humber mourns his inability to save Kerrigan, yet not his inability to manage time properly.  Season-Bringer tries to calm the lad: “it’s all right we didn’t know the Overmind grew that quickly.”  To be fair, a year is a pretty long time to grow something, provided your specie isn’t called the Zerg.  Hey, wait a minute, if Humber is so gung-ho against the Chaos Gods, why isn’t he fighting the Tyranids?  Because they weren’t in Dawn of War.  That is the answer.  Humber and Season-Bringer discuss plans, and the logical assumption is to build up an army to fight the newly-ramplified Zerg.  They initially consider “Predators.”  They’re called Yautja, you snot-nosed punk.  Zeratul volunteers the Dark Templar to help kill the Overmind, on the condition that Humber helps find their leader (long story short: he doesn’t).  Then Humber gets a request all the way from Metra Nui; it seems the Toa are interested in joining his fight, because odds are at least one of them is psychic.  The Protoss breach the Prime Directive (as usual) and teach the Toa how to build their own warp gate; the Toa pile on through, but so, inexplicably, do a few Zerg, who are summarily slaughtered.  Spontaneously-generating Zergs being the universe’s second-worse nightmare (besides the continued existence of Ann Coulter), the surly team are going to need even more backup, and so also-rans the Toa Metru join the team.  Upon a Protoss shuttle they head to Char, that ass may be whupped and wrongs set to right, as is the way of the hero and the Mary-Sue.

The ship lands three miles askance the Overmind.  Humber does his calculations and finds the odds are a paltry two billion to fifty.  For once, Humber’s zero key does not stick, and in fact lifts far too early.  Seriously, just two billion?  Humber goes Super Saiyan 2, because he wants to exert a quantum of solace in regards to Kerrigan, and inexplicably Season-Bringer goes Super-Saiyan.  Asking for an explanation, S.B. reveals that his training during Humber’s cripple downtime action hodown somehow revealed his ability to go Super-Saiyan.  Why not. “okay two Super Sayins against 2 billion Zerg… lets go show the Overmind who’s boss, ready Season bringer?”  They march forth and kill 1,999,999,999 Zerg in half a sentence, and incapacitate Kerrigan two sentences after that.  Season-Bringer hauls Kerrigan out of there; note that she is the only woman Humber ever shows more than fleeting interest in.  With her out of the way, Humber flips out to Super-Saiyan lv. 5 and howls, ““IT’S TIME TO DIE YOU UGLY SON-OF-A-B****!(no endquote [(9)]).  He “combines” his Dark Templar powers with his Super-Saiyanness and performs the Wind Scar “to vaporize the goddamn fucking, piece of shit Overmind.”  Touched a nerve there, did he?

With only the celebates left, whatever the tanj those are, the surprisingly-worthless backup play cleanup and Season-Bringer advises Humber to not kill the source of uncleanliness.  How inappropriately restrained.  And so ends this arc.

Next, in the last act of part two: What, already?, Wait, you’re not seriously…, OH MY GOD.

NOTES: I missed that Humber spent a year abroad before coming to China and returning to S.B.  Wait, if I’m actually updating this very slightly for its new home, why aren’t I correcting my prior math?  Because I don’t trust my ability to do simple mathematics.

Name: Vash, Blade
Age: 51 (357 wolf years)
Alignment: True Neutral
Background: Orphan(?) wolf-Saiyan-cyborg
Current Occupation: HOLY WARIOR(sic), Dark Templar
Weaknesses: Knowing when to hold ‘em
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; Wind Scar technique; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; artifact fusion; useless guardian spirit; Dark Templar powers; alien atmosphere adaptation.
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, disinformation, house shopping, dragon taming, cocaine ingestion, mecha pilot, UFO pilot, intimidation
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1/2/3/4/5, human form
Gear: Tetsume, Tetsaiga, the Magun, shotgun, “serial killer” costume set
Sidekick: Season-Bringer-the-Named-at-Last
UGLY: 9

Episode Eleven: Christian Humber vs. Your Mind
Here we are.  The end of part two of six.  1/3rd of the way through Christian Humber’s action-abortion.  It is a strange and divine event, for we have seen the dawn of a man stronger than God.  I mean a wolfsayandragondemonrobotspiderpireborg stronger than God.  Get your stomachs primed, for this shit is about to get weird.  And I mean that in contrast to what has already happened.  We are no longer men, but shadows of men, cast by the forgotten.  We tread where angels’ ashes lie.  Heavy shit ahead.  Damn, what’s something else vaguely menacing I can say… can’t filibuster for much longer.  Oh crap, I just laid out my hand in text, and there is no sort of device that allows me to somehow… unmake text.  With one I could afford myself an escape.  But no; no such device exists.  I soldier on.  Because wow I’m really wearing out my welcome.

NOW!

We begin the new arc with the conclusion of the last.  “I actually had fun killing the Zerg so did season bringer.”  Well, that’s not too surprising; otherwise Starcraft would’ve never taken off.  The next line has no relation to the first.  The next line is the most ridiculous line in the entire story.  It will inspire riots, horror stories, visions of agony unmatched since 9/11–nay, since the Holocaust.  Christian Humber is the English language’s holocaust.  George Orwell only wishes he could have dreamed such a soul-deadening sentence with aside.  Here it goes.  Take a stiff drink, you’ve earned one.

“I later found out I’m a half-breed (no wonder I could smell a moron a mile away).”

Let that sink in.

Need help?

Look at the first half of the sentence.  He later finds out he’s a half-breed.  Well, he might’ve figured it out earlier, when he, a then-unusual-wolf, went Super-Saiyan, an attribute of the Saiyans.  He might then assume that a Saiyan fucked a wolf, or else a Saiyan was fucked by a wolf, which I find slightly less likely, as Akira Toriyama can only draw one woman and the Saiyans aren’t it.  So, yes, he’s pretty dumb.  He could’ve taken this long to remember that animals that aren’t Saiyans can’t become Super-Saiyans.  But it’s the next line that truly slaughters reason:

“(no wonder I could smell a moron a mile away)”

Parse this.  This is mighty.  This is epic.  This is the stuff epic poems are written of.  It’s not that Humber is being an arrogant asshole; he’s always arrogant and always an asshole.  It’s not especially surprising to hear he can smell the objects of his derision, being as he is a wolf as well as everything else.  But wait.  Wait.  “no wonder.”  No wonder.  No wonder he can smell a moron a mile away.  No wonder?  No wonder?  No wonder?!  No wonder?!  NO WONDER?!

“Oh gee, what do you know!  It seems I can smell a moron a mile away because I am half-wolf!  This is a surprise because I was not previously aware I was a wolf!”

…

…

…

CHRISTIAN HUMBER WAS FUCKING BORN A WOLF.

AND HE IS MORE SURPRISED THAT HE IS A WOLF THAN HE IS A SAYAN.

CHRISTIAN HUMBER, WHO SPENT THE FIRST 42 SCALE YEARS OF HIS LIFE A WOLF, WHO WAS BORN TO WOLVES, HAD A WOLF MOTHER AND WOLF BROTHER, WAS ACKNOWLEDGED AS A WOLF BY A HEDGEHOG (KNOWN TO NATURE AS A MASTER OF SPECIE APPRAISAL), FINDS IT SURPRISING THAT HE IS HALF-WOLF.

ffffffff
UCK!

AAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAA
AAAAA
AAAAA
AAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAA

And now we’re at line 3!  gsgskghdkghdkghk

So Humber goes upon and upon about how fucking awesome it is to be additionally a wolf.  You know, he doesn’t even have being senile as an excuse.  Look at how old he is, yet he remembers all his murder-training.  He would’ve gone senile ages ago if he was going to go at all.  must move on  So he adds “going into a frenzy” at the taste of blood as a plus, because going into a “frenzy” as a wolf is clearly the equal of turning into an incarnate god with the ability to punch through planets.  Humber cannot choose powers worth half a damn.  I mean, later you’ll see him purposefully use shittier, weaker equipment just because.  It’s… horrible.  But you’re expecting that.

sigh.

Humber apparently earned the titles “Angel of Death” and “God of Destruction,” which show up under his name when you highlight him with your mouse cursor.  He earned these for “the amount of kills in 2 months.”  There is a complex reason why it’s measured at exactly two months, but anyway.  Now comes the real clincher, the line that is least-head-destroying, but most dizzying out of context.  Because this is Humber, we can only assume he is telling the truth:

“Not even god and Satin can stop me, which is kind of cool not having to worry about getting punished by god because you can strike back at him.”

Officially.  Those Dark Templar powers were the tipping point.  Christian Humber is now more than omnipotent.  …yay…  And now he goes off on three decreasing relevant tangents, reproduced in whole because holy Christ:

“I just met a demon who petty killed everyone off when I wasn’t alive. Season bringer is still keeping the seasons in balance as always. When I went to the Artic, I felt a lot stronger than normal, like I was one with the ice; I found a secret wolf pack hidden in an extinct volcano while I there.”

…wasn’t alive?  Normal status?  …trip to the arctic?  By… what?  The whole “demon killin’” plot never comes up again.  It never got beyond that one line.  And now Humber is about to discover even more of his backstory, and will meet the next in a line of humble men/lings who try to help and inadvertently give him the keys to a Slaughterola.

Humber feels queasy and breakable in the ice, and a mark appears on his face.  The wolves bow down to him, and they usher him into their lair, proclaiming him the Guardian.  They take him to a chamber filled with an enormous gem, about which Humber is “amazed yet curious.”  They are not contradictory emotions, Humber.  It’s okay to say “and.”  SAY “AND.”

The elder of the pack informs Humber that the gem is the Master Ice Emerald.  It is important to note it isn’t a Chaos Emerald, because boy howdy does Humber hate the forces of Chaos.  Also, yes, he’s building up to what you think he’s building up.  “go ahead touch it” the elder invites.  Humber gets his touch on with his non-cyborg hand, passes out, and wakes up bandaged in bed with a burned hand.  It turns out that Humber was smuggling seven Ice Emeralds in his body, and now that he’s passed them like arcane kidney stones each the size of one of Sonic the Hedgehog’s hugely disproportionate open hands, he can now use them to go Super.  Okay, he might have just earned this.

It seems the boss doesn’t know that Humber already has a super-form.  Humber asks what would happen if he went Super as a Super-Saiyan.  The wolf lord ventures that Humber might go crazy-go-nuts.  Humber says he should try it some time; the wolfmaester freaks out, because this is the thaumic equivalent of jokingly putting one’s finger on the Red Button.  Humber scoffs at the idea; he doesn’t just go SS1, but all the way to 5, and he’s already strong enough to destroy the planet with a casual wave of his hand.  “At that he backed up a few feet from fear I think, or wanting me to show him.”  Wild guess, Humber?  I don’t think he’d appreciate you nuking the planet ‘neath his feet.

Uh oh!  The chapter is titled “Keikanu’s Revenge” and an explosion rocks the cave…cano.  “if you guessed Kekanu your right, the ugly son-of a b**** is back and very pissed off, I would be if that happened to me.”  Lucky [10]!  Humber shows passing empathy and then gets back to a mood for murder.  Keikanu has apparently been summoned by a group of humans, who accompany him, and are thus that many more people Humber must kill.  Humber goes SSJ5 and prepares to murder Keikanu again with the Wind Scar, but “something was holding me back, like an inner demon.”  Inner demons tend to enable wickedness, Humber; I think that’s your inner angel trying to get you to not slaughter innocent humans you can kill with a passing thought.  Humber ignores it, and asks the elder what he should do to facilitate Keikanu’s re-death.  He must USE the MASTER ICE EMERALD on KEIKANU in order to win, but Humber lacks that knowledge.  Until he doesn’t, and realizes he just has to “do it” in front of the gem.  Eew.

The next paragraph is a new part titled “Kekanu’s Defeat and Blade’s Insanity.”  To celebrate his recently-discovered wolfish heritage, Humber taunts Keikanu thusly: “Slow think Kekanu, old-bone and bogfoot!”  The hell?  This pisses or mystifies Keikanu enough to force him to attack, and a brief duel ends with Humber exposed to the Ice Emeralds’ Master and Humber punching Keikanu’s heart out.  Woot.  Humber stacks his transformations for the first time and the results are a color-coordinator’s nightmare: “My hair is pure white and my eyes were bluish- greenish and my aura is silver.”  His excess even draws Season-Bringer from wherever the hell he’s currently chillaxin’ and season-bringin’ in order to check out Humber’s new digs.  Humber drags Keikanu’s heartless corpse into the open and makes with the threats: “Who else wants to die? If you don’t too bad, so sad!”  With that, he wipes out the rest of the extras, and all is briefly right with the world.  Humber’s anti-demon violence and subsequent killing of humans is apparently unusual, and he doesn’t remember what happened to him, despite just recounting what happened to us in selective detail.  Whatever.  What’s worse is that Blade (man, since when have I called him that?) can’t get back into Super Stupid Sexy New Form, and that’s a no-no.  While attempting to regain his super-form, something lands on him.  But who?  And why?  That’s for next time, because I don’t think I can finish this nightmare without a nap and possibly some alcohol.

NEXT: An old acquainted returns; the thread challenged; what-the-fucks spewed at a machine-gun staccato.

Name: Vash, Blade
Age: 51 (357 wolf years)
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Background: Orphan(?) wolf-Saiyan-cyborg who briefly forgets he used to be a wolf
Current Occupation: “Guardian”
Weaknesses: Alzheimer’s
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; Wind Scar technique; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; artifact fusion; useless guardian spirit; three purifying bullets; Dark Templar powers; alien atmosphere adaptation; access to Ice Emeralds.
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, disinformation, house shopping, dragon taming, cocaine ingestion, mecha pilot, UFO pilot, intimidation, arctic survival
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1/2/3/4/5, Super, human form
Gear: Tetsume, Tetsaiga, the Magun, shotgun, Ice Emeralds, “serial killer” costume set
Sidekick: Season-Bringer
UGLY: 10

Episode Twelve: In a Brighter Universe, This Would be the Logical Conclusion
This is it folks, the home stretch; the last half of darkness.  Last half of the first third of darkness.  That’s one sixth.  I think.  Time to die.

A thing falls on Humber.  The thing is Spin.  Spin the Hedgehog.  It seems that Humber’s new transformation ripped a portal under Spin’s dainty hedgehog feet and dropped him into the Pin–an ironic reversal, unless one considers that perhaps this incident, in a rather John-Dies-at-the-End-ish twist, is the cause of all Humber’s portal-related woes.  It seems that time and space both are violated by Humber’s transformation-cock.  Spin asks why Humber knows of the “Time, Space Continuum”, and Humber relates that Tails, known fox, has told him.  Spin curses Tails’s name.  Not like he wouldn’t have found out another way, Spin.  Hell, the fact he knows about the “Time, Space Continuum” doesn’t influence whether or not he can fuck it over.  Any idiot with a time machine or powers that can fuck time can do that, e.g. Humber.

Humber has had it up to here (indicates) with the Chaos Gods, and sets forth to take revenge on them the only way he knows how: by injecting himself with that beef hormone called Training.  Also, presumably teleportation to the Eye of Terror is necessary.  He and Spin, who has more than enough practical emerald-based experience, retire into the Hyperbolic Time Chamber to rock two years there (this time I’ll give him the benefit of a doubt and assume it’s only two realtime days).  Humber not only learns the ins and outs of the Ice Emeralds, he somehow jacks their power up to Super, which lets him go Hyper on cue.  He goes to Super-Saiyan 5 and flips the Hyper switch to ON.  He’s so ridiculously powerful each step leaves a crater.  He’s so even more ridiculously powerful he confesses he can’t teleport in this state, because it might fuck up everything, forever.  Humber makes a joke about giving “overkill” a new meaning, like he’s proud of overshooting his goal so far it may be lost forever.  He also steals Vash the Stampede’s Angel Arm, which he refers to as an “ability.”  It’s not an ability, Humber, it’s a weapon in his arm that he fires.  This is not the last or most blatant mistake he makes in calling so-and-so item or condition a “power.”  Stay tuned.  It’s riveting, in that it is a sensation not unlike being repeatedly punctured with hot iron.

Solving the whole “I made a stupid, stupid mistake” angle, Humber entrusts Spin with gating him to the Eye of Terror and the Casa del Chaos.  He intends to rock alone, but Season-Bringer gives him googly eyes and convinces Humber to haul his enormous ass along.  “I told him to close the portal when I give the order, and his response was ‘Eggs’ I punched him for that.”  …excuse me?

The two step on through, and the gauntlet is thrown.

Humber rides out: “location reached, facing Chaos, battle routine set, Execute!”  Season-Bringer tells him this isn’t Battle Network, the only time we’re to see Humber chided for liking something aimed at the kiddies (except for Roll.exe and her skintight pink jumpsuit).  With jocularity aside, the two resume their struggle for the fate of the universe.  Tetsaiga just isn’t doing it for him tonight, so he tries his trademark hugely-breakable Mallsword and makes an astonishing discovery: it’s even broker, in the sense of a suit of armor in an RPG being broken.  It transforms, because that’s what things do when they enter Humber’s morphic-field-raping paws.  In the words of the man: “I realized Tetsume is the chaos killer, with it I went Super Sayin stage 6, and then I went Hyper, which scared me for I don’t know what’s was going to happen, when I used it, when I did The Eye of Terror wasn’t damaged, I then did my Angel Arm in my ultimate form, the shot was devastating because, I believe it almost destroyed the fucking eye of terror.”  And thusly is the incarnation of death and despair stricken near-dead!

But wait!  While the Imperial Guard…

…the Imperial Guard?

The IMPERIAL GUARD?

The IMPERIAL GUARD are being thrown at the fucking Eye of Terror?

I told you that Humber couldn’t choose the right tool for the job if you put a colorful prize on top of the right answer.

The Imperial Guard shoot their lasguns at the Eye of Terror and out comes Humber’s Corrupted Self, carrying the Slayer of Souls, the sword that Humber himself sealed and threw away so even he wouldn’t be tempted to twink out with it.  The fight begins: “I pulled Tetsume out and fought him in a one on one match to the death; I used the Wind Scar combined with my power to deliver a destructive slash which could destroy the universe.”  The fight ends.  But… wait, what?  “I used Judgment and chose his fate. My decision was to send him to Hell and I did.” …

…Humber shoots the Eye of Terror again “with the energy that was gathered from around the universe and used my energy as well.”  With the ever-quotable battle-cry “THIS IS IT CHAOS, YOUR TIME HAS FINALLY RUN OUT, NOW DIE YOU GOD DAMN, UGLY MOTHER FUCKER, SON-OF-A-B****, PIECE OF SHIT, OH YEA GO TO HELL YOU UGLY B******!” [12]  Humber sticks around to watch the explosion; the others wisely flee to Pluto and ride out the blast.  The Eye explodes.  And…

“after the explosion he lost my signal and screamed ‘NOOOOO!’ and he started crying ‘Blade, why’d you have to die!’”

Five years pass, and Season-Bringer finally admits that yes, Blade (wow, second time I’ve called him that) is probably dead from killing the embodiment of Chaos.  However, given he’s responsible for the 100% reduction in Chaos-related abominations over those five years, Humber has gained quite a fanclub among people who don’t want to be apocalypsed, and so “everyone” comes to his funeral.  By that I assume he means every one of Earth’s billions is either physically present or watching on the television.  Whose life wasn’t touched, likely in a bathing-suit area, by Humber’s merest breath or fit?  Friend or enemy, mourner or reveler, the world holds its breath in memory of Christian Humber, Whose Rage Cleft the Heavens.

And, because it is the nature of the wolfsaiyandragondemonrobotspiderpireborg, he shits up his own funeral.

He asks his ginormous dragon pal whose funeral is happening, and, assuming there is even one life not aware that the Master Ender has been struck down, informs Humber that it is “Blade” who is dead.  “OH REALLY?” blurts Humber, and mocks Season-Bringer’s surprise.  It seems that Humber was snatched away from the blast by an angel, who is present in the audience, and had his wounds tended for five long years.  Further… “I was given the job of the judge in heaven.”

That’s right.

Part two.  Of six.

He was stronger than God.  Then he got magic emeralds that increased his power.  Then he increased the power of those magic emeralds.  Then he learned a new ability.  Then he upgraded the power of the emeralds.  Then his sword upgraded.  Then he learned a new attack capable of destroying the universe.  Then he destroyed Chaos itself.  Now he has been given power over the judgment of souls.  He decides who goes to heaven or hell.  He is more God than even God, and he has the keys to heaven and hell.

In part two.

Out of six.

And he will get stronger.

“Life continued as normal except when I had to do my job, which is both fun and boring, but hey I don’t care as long as I can stay on Earth. I’m allowed to go to Hell and do some sparring with my corrupted side, and do some pranks while I’m there. I sometimes go to where the Eye of Terror once was, and I sit on a planet close to it and remember the fight that made history. I visit the Emperor once in a while to hangout and teach the Space Marines some of my fighting skills. I visit Mata Nui and Metru Nui, when I get there I’m greeted happily by Toa and Matorin alike, they still have the warp gate they built which is still functional. They use it to come to this world when they want to see me or just to have fun.

“I did not know what’s going to happen to me, but I don’t like it…”

Hey, wait.  If an attack can destroy the universe, then why doesn’t it immediately destroy the universe when used?  Given that the universe is defined as “Everything,” I imagine it has to contact some part of Everything on its way out.

With that…

Name: Vash, Blade, God
Age: 58 (406 wolf years)
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Background: Orphan wolf-Saiyan-cyborg
Current Occupation: Judge of all the world
Weaknesses: Bad sense of timing
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; Wind Scar technique; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; artifact fusion; useless guardian spirit; three purifying bullets; Dark Templar powers; alien atmosphere adaptation; access to Ice Emeralds; ice elemental; Angel Arm; judge of the dead.
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, disinformation, house shopping, dragon taming, cocaine ingestion, mecha pilot, UFO pilot, intimidation, arctic survival, faking death
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1/2/3/4/5/6, Hyper, human form
Gear: Super Tetsume, Tetsaiga, the Magun, shotgun, Super Ice Emeralds, “serial killer” costume set
Sidekick: Season-Bringer, the Emperor (from Warhammer 40k)
UGLY: 12

Episode Thirteen: The Downward Threat Scale
When we last left our hero(?), he was stricken with a feeling of grim omen.  Mind, given he’s stronger than God in every way that counts, he probably doesn’t have too much to worry about.  I mean, he just wiped out the Eye of Terror, which is as much a concept as a place.  Either his next foes are going to be even stronger, which will result in mild inconvenience followed by gaining a bunch of levels, or they’re less than Chaos Itself and he wipes the floor with them.  Right?

Christian Humber has two weaknesses.  One is paralysis magic.  The other is the Sorting Algorithm of Evil.

Humber checks back in on Metru Nui, which is apparently the past of Metra Nui.  He “goes back too far” and gets… caught.  And poisoned.  By Visorak.  The same Visorak he cleft in half waaaaaay back in Part One.  Naturally, his cybernetic limb becomes an “icy claw” via the effects of the poison.  How poison 1. Affects a cybernetic limb, and 2. Turns it into a magical ice-enchanted version of itself is not adequately explored.  This seems to free Humber, but because he’s in a cocoon hovering over a pit of some sort, “I sort of freaked out when I was plummeting to my death, but something caught me.”  Of course.

Humber wakes and gets a good look at himself in a pool of water: “I was an ugly mother fucker” [13].  He has become that what he loathes the most: ugleigh.  This story arc is a veritable Ugstorm, by the way.  That counter’s gonna get a workout.

Humber has been saved by another Dude From the Past.  Humber introduces himself: “The name’s Blade, Chaos Hunter Blade” And the beastie backs away, because Humber’s infamy stretches beyond time.  Perhaps because the Great Whatever Disc used to repair his sword was the one destined to be used by, I dunno, Master Thoth, that he may slay Erual Twice-to-the-Wall and prevent the immanentization of the eschaton.  Given the eschaton has been immanentized, and Humber shewed up in the past once before, we may safely guess that Humber is infamous for inadvertently fucking everything up forever.  Humber takes a step closer, the new guy takes a step back, and we can empathize with him in this.  Humber threatens his new pal with death, and his-name-is-Norik reveals his name and the current issues.  It turns out that Humber is now part Horteka, and like infamous bad guy Vakama before, he is likely to skip gaily down the Dark Side and rock the joint.  Humber says “I won’t follow the path of darkness; the path of light is the only path that I will take,” possibly while meditating on all those many, many innocent people he’s killed and will soon kill.

Okay, maybe I’ll try and skip over all but the juiciest bizarro bits from this storyline.  It’s hard to give a crap about the setting when you have to look up everything about it to understand what the hell he’s getting at.  Or just not, and guessing from the context.  Which is what I do, generally, because I cannot be arsed.  Except that one time.  True fact: in Bionicle, persons converted into Horteka lose all their other abilities.  Humber has gone from mightier than God to roughly as strong as any other Horteka.  In theory.  As we are to witness, theory tends to react with Humber the way magnesium reacts with water.

On his way to the Good Guy Hidin’ Spot, Humber is ambushed by a monster called a Rahi.  Before he can whip out Tetsume, “something” on his back activates and frightens the whatsit off.  Yeah, he’s got spinny Lego whatsits growing out of his pores.  Can’t be healthy.  Norik pops up and says something aboutloneliness, and Humber notes, “that’s nothing new to me because I’m always alone; I WAS BORN AS A FUCKING STRAY!”  You were born as a fucking wolf.  Firstly, wolves travel in packs; secondly, you had at least one brother you knew about; third, you spent most of your early years in a laboratory being experimented upon by scientists alongside your brother and only escaped after his death.  On other topics: Wolves aren’t stray.  Wolves are wild.  Strayness is not a Thing for a wolf; a wolf that is non-stray is domesticated, which is the traditional wolfish Thing.  Humber just misses the days when the government paid for his housing and food and… uh, torture.  Where the hell does Humber live when he’s not in prison or being so coked out of his brain he thinks his parents are still alive?  I figured he bunked with Season-Bringer until the stench of death, Season-Bringer’s exponential growth, and lack of amenities wore away his civilization-spoiled brain.  Perhaps he hunkers down in an anarchist squat?  Or a ridiculously ritzy room provided for free out of fear of annihilation?  Or is he, quote unquote, a “stray?”  I dunno, he’s gotta keep all those guns and swords somewhere.

Ahem.  After following some rather literal instructions on how to get to the secret hidin’ zone of the good guys, Humber Meets Cute with the various dudes.  “Matau made a sarcastic remark, which was ‘it’s Keetongu, Not’”  Brutal take-no-prisoners comedy here, folks from Kazakhstan!  Hey, I spelled that right on my first try.  Go me.  This chappy is titled “The Search for Keetongu,” but the search lasts as long as it takes for Matau to make a horrible joke.  From there Humber gets pissy because Keetongu burned down a sacred temple of Metru Nui, and if there’s one thing Humber likes, it’s sacred architecture.  I guess.  The time comes to find the Matorin, whoever they are, and whatever reason they have, and Humber volunteers to go ahead and have some “fun” scouting.  This leads exactly where you think it’s leading.

“I used one of my scout droids” (no, he’s never mentioned them before, but they’re gonna get mentioned a lot since) “to check where the Visorak’s kill zone was, but I found out the fortress was heavily guarded, I didn’t care because I have infiltrated a more heavily guarded place, but instead of infiltrating I decided to enter ‘the more traditional way’ which was blow everything to hell.”  Intimidating a Protoss door guard doesn’t count as infiltration, dude.  What weapons shall he employ to destroy the doors to the Visorak’s coliseum?  Nothing less than Wing-Zero’s beam rifles.  Which is vaguely possible, given that Wing Zero committed Robo-Suicide at the end of Endless Waltz; they could’ve fetched a fair price on eBay Platinum Reserve.  Humber announces, “HEY, BASTERDS, KNOCK-KNOCK” and blasts his way in.  “I calmly stepped into the entrance and turned the music which proves to be my killing spree theme song which is Assault.”  Unless I miss my guess, the song Assault comes from Devil May Cry 2, and is the theme song to that horrible, horrible helicopter boss.  Humber fuels his rage at the worst Devil May Cry through his icy claw and murders a bunch of Lego robots.

But then!

Remember Humber’s possessed brother?  Turns out he’s back and named Kosongto.  Kosongto is possessed the hell out of, still, and so Humber duels with him to free him from the demonic wackness coursing through his dead wolf body.  The two fight claw-to-claw, which sounds nice and personal and wolfish, except half of Humber’s arms are magical robot ice claws.  Humber screams, “THIS IS IT YOU GODDAMN, UGLY MOTHER FUCKER LET MY BROTHER GO!” [14]  He uses the never-before-mentioned-nor-ever-again-used Claw of Exorcism to rip the deviltry right out of Kosongto.  Humber takes his weakened brother to safety; when Kosongto recovers, he observes that Humber is now part Horteka, and wishes that he were one as well.  It seems minmaxing runs in the family, what with his father being (in a revised thesis) a half-dragon Saiyan and his mom being a Devil-Wolf.  Humber tells his brother that no, it kind of sucks being Horteka, then goes to use his Hortekitude to fatally injure Vakama: “HERE I COME VAKAMA, TO SHOW YOU WHAT’S IT LIKE TO BE AN UGLY BEAST!” [15]

A brilliant scuffle ensues.  Humber and Norik combine forces to kill Vakam; Humber is knocked off the “roof” of wherever the hell they’re fighting, but “while I was falling my powers kicked in and I flew back up to the roof”.  Ohhh, so that thing that activated on his back was a spinning … fly-y… thing.  Okay.  After a brief scare wherein Kosongto is nearly killed, he instead is not killed and kills Killy MacKillan, I mean Sidorak.  No relation to Cytorak.  Hooray!

And with that we launch into yet another conflict, this time with the fiendish Rodeeka, “she was very ugly” [16].  Humber’s “spinner” activates.  A spinner, I understand, is a little spinning projectile thing that the Lego robots shoot.  Rodeeka is slightly annoyed by the spinners bonking her in the head, then Humber does what Humber is prone to, “placing six slugs in her ugly face” [17].  The other Horteka good guys gang up on Rodeeka and ejaculate their spinners all over her, defeating her in a gruesome yet oddly-erotic display.  She’s carted off to Girl Robot Hell, leaving behind a black soulstone, Diablo-style.  It’s someone else’s soulstone, actually, some bloke named Makuta.  Humber fucks up the timeline by yelling “WHAT? MAKUTA IS STILL ALIVE?!” before remembering this is something that happens in the future.  He redacts, too late, and has again fucked up the future forever.

Keesongto conveniently undoes the Horteka curse, though Humber, as we can anticipate, keeps his Horteka powers.  Further, Keesongto and Humber “combine powers” to power up Humber’s Magun and shotgun, and make a new magic bullet for the Magun, and also adds a Scroll of Town Portal functionality to said Magun.  They return to the present and watch the present-day Lego Robot Dudes do… something… significant… I guess.  Humber threatens Present-Vakama with death if he ever burns down … things… again.  Then Humber says he’s really got to go, because his parents (his dead, dead parents) are gonna tan his ass if he shows back up late.

Because, despite all logic to the contrary, Humber’s wacky misadventures translated to about a year of realtime.  Despite being able to go back in time to, say, the second after he left, because that’s how time travel works, Humber, darling, sweetie, deathman.  Christian Humber’s dead, dead parents “ground” him for a month, which he begrudgingly obeys, for Humber secretly realizes his need to get off of the coke.

Naturally, Humber lets his “Horteka state” out for a jog now and then, which results in people getting murdered by him and him getting arrested.  Humber, sweetie, pookums, fuckjar, you don’t need a Horteka state.  You’ve got the powers, you’ve got the power to go Super Saiyan VI.  Going Horteka is like using your black powder musket when you have an orbital rail cannon pointed at every single one of your enemies 24/7.  This is really worthy of its own entry, for Humber’s fucktarded power management is a legend unto itself.  Until next time, gents!

NEXT TIME: Super Bowls and the slaughter theirof; startling revelations about the population boom in Miami; Area 51.

Name: Vash, Blade, God
Age: 59 (412 wolf years)
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Background: Orphan wolf-Saiyan-Horteka-cyborg
Current Occupation: Time travelin’ man
Weaknesses: Forgetting what the Sorting Algorithm of Evil is supposed to do
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; Wind Scar technique; Spinner projectile; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; artifact fusion; useless guardian spirit; three purifying bullets in chest; Dark Templar powers; alien atmosphere adaptation; access to Ice Emeralds; ice elemental; Angel Arm; judge of the dead; time travel; Claw of Exorcism; flight; Scroll of Town Portal (via Magun Mark II).
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, disinformation, house shopping, dragon taming, cocaine ingestion, mecha pilot, UFO pilot, intimidation, arctic survival, faking death, Metra Nui history
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1/2/3/4/5/6, Hyper, Horteka, human form
Gear: Super Tetsume, Tetsaiga, the Magun Mark II, +5 shotgun, ice-elemental cyberlimb, Super Ice Emeralds, Wing Zero’s buster rifles, “serial killer” costume set, iPod
Sidekicks: Season-Bringer, Keesongto
UGLY: 17

Episode Fourteen: Did I Mention Humber Was an Asshole?
You may be thinking to yourself, “That’s Christian Humber.  I know him.  I know Humber.”  He’s an asshole, right?  Well, he’s not just an asshole, he’s a colossal asshole.  You might have noticed that back when he killed a little Japanese girl (how little is unknown) for the horrendous sin of pointing the Japanese police in the direction of the wolfsayan who beat up the Emperor.  We know he’s part wolf and part Sayan and now part Horteka, but what else is he?  Aside from an asshole.  See, in my haste to get through Bionicle: The Last Part, I skimmed over a vital bit of text that stealthily introduces another of Christian Humber’s storied gene-lines: that of a demon’s.

“I made sure that I was prepared to go insane, by having my demon and Horteka sides’ combine to become too dangerous in that state[...]“  Yes, Humber’s combat tactic is to lose control of his actions and … combining sides.  One of which is a demon.  How he got this is never explained, so I attribute it to his parents’ horrible, horrible lineage.  This shows that Humber is super-subtle at pouring fuel into the fire that is his power level, but more importantly, shows that he understands even less about genetics than we gave him credit for.  He has “sides,” in short lines of decent from various supernal beings, but he combines them the way an indulgent chef might assemble a turducken-esque fleshfest, “uniting” or “combining” sides for extra power.  See, Humber, if I could combine my “sides,” I could choose to be Spanish for super napping and slacking off, oder ich kann mein Deutschlanderstadt gewandet to speak better German, or unite them to do both at the same time.  But no, this is the real world, and I am a Spanish/Mexican and German mix.  I have traits from both.  I’m not one or the other.  Humber seems to be wolf most of the time, Sayan when he whips up his Super-Sayan ranks, and anything else when it’s convenient.  Only, none of his other forms are convenient in the least.  He only goes wolf for stealth(ish) purposes later in the story; his demon and Horteka sides make him even more homicidal than usual, and his later-revealed dragon form is too damn big a target.  Yet, by “uniting” his sides (and staying humanoid due to the Dungeons and Dragons crossbreedin’ rules–this is the Pin, under Sigil, as you know Bob), he washes over everything that could make his various sides unique and adds more and more to his power level.  Good for you!

Today we shall see the make of a wolfsayandemonHorteka.  Today we shall see Humber pull off what may be his biggest asshole move to date.  Sit back and put a dollop of lube on your anus, because this is going to take a while.

It starts with Humber visiting the past of Metra Nui and killin’ the last of the Visorak, whom, in an ironic fallout from his fucking with the past, have finally dwindled to nothing.  But in the middle of the fight against the last few, Humber is, naturally, transported from Metra Nui–

–into the middle, as Humber says, of a football game.  In Miami.  He’s interrupted the Superbowl, him and his Lego robot buddies.  There seems to be a microphone on the field, perhaps left after an Aerosmith musical adventure, and over it Humber mutters “umm, hi?” because, as he is in his “Horteka” state, something the world at large may not necessarily be exposed to save via tabloid newspapers reporting that the thing who saved the universe is again getting arrested for murder, this time while looking like a robot spider.  Incidentally, it’s spelled “Hordika,” not “Horteka.”  So it goes.

The football game grinds to an understandable halt, and the Miami cops attack, because it’s Humber (a known loose cannon) and a bunch of weirdo robot people from that one island (didn’t we go to war with them for their Legos?).  Chaos is down for now, but who knows what freaky sorcerer or portal storm will bring next.  Humber suggests, for the first time in his life, to fight as though they were fighting dragons and just leave ‘em alive.  Until Humber is shot, and he immediately redacts, requesting the bastards be slain for the sin of defending a heavily-populated city from monsters that appeared out of nowhere.  “lets show these people what its like to face six Horteka and one very pissed demon-Horteka, ready?”  Lordy are they.  Humber tunes his iPod to the proper “Battle” theme and lets loose: “I fired my spinner at the crowd, killing at least 15 people.”  Yep, fifteen people killed with a spinning plastic disc thing.  Or possibly metal.  Are these metal or is Lego plastic really gar in this dimension?  Anyway.

“3 hours later everyone who was there was killed, I think it was called The Super Bowl XXXXXIII Massacre because all 6,000,000 people were killed, including the cops.”  Is that so, Humber?  1. It’s “Superbowl LIII,” which should be coming in a decade or so, which means that Humber’s stories take place in the near-future as opposed to Now. 2. Miami only had a population of 400,000-some-odd in 2000; it’s unlikely to have a more-than-tenfold increase in population in ten years.  Though, to his credit, the major Miami urbanized zone is around 4,900,000 in population.  Wouldn’t the population be thinner, though, given all the Mongol/demon/robot/Humber attacks, though?  3. Dolphin Stadium has a maximum occupancy of 76,500 for American Football.  Humber, you just fumbled the ball so badly you’re sucking the entire opposing teams’ dicks.  This is possibly my first direct homoerotic insinuation thus far!  More will ejaculate.  I mean come.  I mean bear hunting.  I mean arrive.

So!  Humber and co. ride out, being shot at by the remnants of the police force.  Given they’ve just depopulated the entire Miami urbanized zone, it must be a pretty easy run.  Humber volunteers his services: “keep dodging, I’ll fall back and take out the bogies.”  Why not just say “pigs” like you mean it, Hum?  He freezes the pigs with his ice claw, silencing the last of the opposition.  After a leisurely 10-hour jog/loot, they escape Miami.  Humber uses a Scroll of Town Portal to head back to Metra Nui, that they will avoid being captured by Area 51.  However, the last cop in Miami gets through before Humber can shut the portal, so, in an act of sublime mercy, he feeds the guy to the Visorak.  But, and I find it hilariously appropriate they take his orders, he says, “don’t turn him into Horteka, turn him into a freak of nature.”  They obey the Spider Lord, and Humber tosses the poor Brundlefucked bastard through the portal, where he is taken in by the FBI as they investigate the depopulated city.  Man, Humber, you are a total dick.

To conclude this episode, Humber muses on the fate of the man he’s just purposefully mutilated: “I don’t know how he is, and I don’t want to know ether.”

Period, space.

“3 months later, I went back to area 51 to check up on the freak of nature, when I saw him I laughed and the scientists found out I made the cop a freak”

Picture this.  You’re a cop.  You have a wife and kids.  You’re doing guard duty at the biggest football game ever hosted on American soil.  Things are going well.  The crowd is rowdy but proud and cheering on their favorite teams.  Suddenly, a portal storm wracks the arena, and seven creatures appear in the middle of the field.  One of them looks like Christian Vash Blade Humber–that guy who killed Chaos and all those innocent people.  He’s even freakier than normal, gussied up like some kind of robot spider.  After a banal quip directed at the crowd, control rushes in and plugs the bastard.  But that’s pissed him off, and he fires something into the crowd–a spinning metal disc that scythes through several of the six million attendees like a sword through grass.  From there it gets worse and worse.  Your eyes dart to your wife and daughters’ section–only to see it erupt into spectral flame hurled from Humber’s hands.  You try to help whoever you can, but you’re dead inside.  In a slow battle of attrition, Humber and the robot freaks alongside him burn through every single civilian and cop in the city.  You watch him kill your friends, kill strangers who’ve never hurt anybody, seek out and burn away children, women, old people.  It’s genocide.

You follow them.  You’ve lost everything–your love, your children, your friends, your city, a good part of your state.  You follow the big metal bastards as they joke and brag amongst themselves.  You try to follow them home after Humber spits a portal out of that freaky gun-arm he’s got.  On the other side is a horde of robotic spiders.  Humber grabs you by the collar, holds you out to them, and commands them to turn you into a “freak of nature.”

They descend upon you with venom-dripping steel fangs.

When you regain consciousness, you’re in a healing tank in the depths of Area 51.  Worried scientists study your mutilated form, trying to guess what happened to you.  Metra Nui is a no man’s land, sectioned off and left for the monsters and mutants.  Medical science has never seen your new form before.  It’s agonizing, no matter how many drugs they pump into the solution; your nervous system just doesn’t react to human drugs anymore.  Your steel and plastic limbs twitch out of your control.  You’ll never walk.  You’ll never be able to hold your children or your wife again–even if you could, they’d cut themselves on your sharpened, spike-laden extremities.  You float in this vat alone.

One day, not too long after (but every moment is an eternity of inescapable reality), the thing that fed you to those spiders shows up.  And he laughs at you.  And brags about what a mess he’s made of you.

“so I had to escape and I almost did when I got tranquilized.”

So many tranq darts hit his neck he looks like he’s got colorful plumage.  He turns around, keeps turning around, does a little jig, then collapses, unconscious.

A little smile breaks on what’s left of your lips.

Sometimes, God is kind.

NEXT TIME: A conspiracy of dunces, even more power, Keikanu plays it cool.

Name: Chaos Hunter Vash-Blade God
Age: 59 (412 wolf years)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Background: Orphan wolf-Saiyan-Horteka-demon-cyborg
Current Occupation: Genocider
Weaknesses: Remembering why he tries to avoid Area 51
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; Wind Scar technique; Spinner projectile; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; artifact fusion; useless guardian spirit; three purifying bullets in chest; Dark Templar powers; alien atmosphere adaptation; access to Ice Emeralds; ice elemental; Angel Arm; judge of the dead; time travel; Claw of Exorcism; flight; Scroll of Town Portal (via Magun Mark II); Uniting of Sides.
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, disinformation, house shopping, dragon taming, cocaine ingestion, mecha pilot, UFO pilot, intimidation, arctic survival, faking death, Metra Nui history, population demographics
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1/2/3/4/5/6, Hyper, Horteka, Demon-Horteka unision, human form
Gear: Super Tetsume, Tetsaiga, the Magun Mark II, +5 shotgun, ice-elemental cyberlimb, Super Ice Emeralds, Wing Zero’s buster rifles, “serial killer” costume set, iPod, severed head of a Miami Dolphin
Sidekicks: Season-Bringer, Keesongto
UGLY: 17

Episode Fifteen: The Rogues Gallery Comeback Tour
When we last left the Beast of the Apocalypse, he had been chained in the depths of Area 51 for the betterment of all mankind, that he may be converted from a self-proclaimed “psycho” to an efficient and brutal weapon of peace and democracy and flipping the bird to every non-American anything.  Humber rouses enough to utter “Deja vu” and As You Know Bob his life story to the scientists of Dreamland.  The discovery of Humber’s life story must be invaluable–like being there as Hitler dictates Mein Kampf, except he then goes Super-Saiyan and unites his Wolf, Aryan, and Sayan sides to kill Shylock.  Anyhow, Humber needs to get out of Area 51, so what convoluted and explosive plan does he enact in order to escape from the most supernally-hardened institution on legally-recognized American soil?  “I then remembered scientists killed my brother and I broke out and escaped.”  Heart-stopping action, True Believers!

Humber, if I may conjecture, pauses to brush Area 51 dust off his jacket, and heads back to the extinct volcano home of his wolfen brethren.  Kosongto is gathering herbs in the most plant-inhospitable part of the world, so perhaps this is in some indoor garden kept by the lupines.  Humber, being an established Vulcanologist and a botani-man in hobby, tells his brah to not pick the three-leaf’d plant, because it is poison ivy and the only poisonous plant Humber would know how to identify.  I mean because it’s poisonous.  Kosongto thanks his brother again for snatching him from the maw of Chaos, falling right into Humber’s trap.  Another wolf informs Humber and Brah that the elder wishes to see them.  It seems the Elder has swords readied for the two.  It also seems that Kosongto has a human form, or at least a form that can use swords, or he’s just a swordy sort of wolf.  Wait, what IS his story?  Was his possession by Chaos enough to give him a human form?  Are all wolves possessed of a human alternate shape?  Fill us in, Humber.  Do fill us in.  Any time now.  I’m wait–

Humber grabs his sword, and finds that it’s an exact copy of Tetsume.  Naturally the swords fuse and become Hecka Mightier as the blade True Tetsume.  Has Humber subconsciously created the sword of his destiny using only a storebought sharpstick and one of his own fangs?  No, the Elder just modeled the sword after Humber’s, knowing that he was just gonna end up fusing it some way or the other.

Before Kosongto gets to examine his sword and discover its beauty and wonder, Keikanu returns, blowing his way back into the volcano along with his newest human assistants/cultists.  Being the pragmatic devil he is, Keikanu sets his sights on Kosongto first, killing him “with ease.”  Humber, who has just lost his brother again, having barely saved him from eternal servitude to Chaos, reacts as we expect him to: by noting that he’s dead, gettin’ pissed, and trying to fight.  He shows more anguish over a walk-on cameo’s death in a later chapter.  The fight begins!

Humber attacks Keikanu, and Tetsume can’t even scratch him.  Wow, it looks like Keikanu’s done some hardcore leveling in death.  It looks vaguely hopeless–doesn’t Humber have eighty hojillion different attacks, anyway?–when Kosongto’s sword and an apparent third blade fly into Humber’s artefact and create a new Super-Superer Sharpstick.  The other swords are named Wolfclaw and Tetkume.  I hope that Tetkume was Kosongto’s and Wolfclaw a general symbolic blade, or else the Elder is even more aware that Kosongto was never going to be recognized for his ambitions and needs.  It seems the weapons are incarnations of those three Virtues–Tetsume being Destiny (obviously), Tetkume being Duty (well, somebody needed to protect the volcano when Humber was busy killin’ shit), and Wolfclaw being Unity (hey, this would be a good symbolic weapon of the cohesion of the pack!).  It seems my guess was three-for-three, and it’s been a while since I read this part.  Good for me!

Humber has an LSD flashback upon realizing he only has one of the “virtues” in his heart: “then the Toa Nuva, metru and Horteka appeared and the toa and I held Tetsume and yelled ‘UNITY, DUTY AND DESTANY!’”  This gives him enough moral fortitude to destroy Keikanu completely, or at least for a few minutes while Humber assumes his Ultimate Form and kills his new cultist pals.  When Keikanu manages to pull himself together, it’s in time to see that the death of rationality is stronger than God not just once over, but over and over and over again, fractally.  As Humber notes, “the look on his face was classic because all my sides were united, wolf, Sayin, demon and Horteka, which means your extremely screwed.”

Keikanu, in yet another recurring theme, backs up, “ether” because Humber is The End Of All Your Dreams or because his aura is an unpleasant “gold-silver” color.  “bring on, ugly” [18] he sneers.  Keikanu can’t let this monster live.  He attacks–but even in Keikanu’s demonic form, Humber is “too damn fast” to even touch.  In seconds, Humber’s gone from a plague-bearing insect to the incarnation of the futility of life in the face of death, and as the Elder sees, Humber is skyrocketing still.  He has gone past Ultimate and into “Mega”: “my eyes are pure white; my hair is a gold-blue-white color and there is a hell lot more electricity flashing around me.”  Season-Bringer shows up to see what all these arctic shenanigans are, and once again Humber has become so powerful his best friend doesn’t recognize him.  How can he be satisfied with being so protean not even the people he trusts can know who he is?  Keikanu makes another shot at one of Humber’s loved ones, managing to knock Season-Bringer down (likely cracking off a chunk of arctic shelf, because good God is Season-Bringer a huge huge draco-fuck).  Humber gets so pissed that his friend got knocked over that he tears Keikanu apart piece by piece, starting with his heart.  Humber sends him to heaven, “where it’s hell for demons.”  So far from his family and everything he knows?  In the court of what used to be his greatest enemies, but what is now a celestial bureaucracy toiling under the mastery of an insane and destructive living death?  Yeah, it sounds pretty hell-esque for most kinds of living thing.

Humber is the Devil.  He is empowered by the suffering of others, thrives off it, is made stronger by it.  Every time we overturn a new chapter in his saga, we find some new horrible thing he is ready to do in the name of amusement, escape, or, most especially, power.  Last time he murdered or helped murder six million innocents.  Let’s see what he does THIS time in the name of power!

Just in time, Christian Humber’s other greatest menace descends from the heavens, having supped on a god’s bounty of suffering, to vex the world.  Ever get the feeling the Corrupted Self is the real Christian Humber, and the Christian Humber we know is just its umbilicus, sucking nutrition from the womb of the world to feed the growing incarnum of wickedness?  Need I remind you that Humber has, in the last incident alone, killed as many people as there were Jews killed in the Holocaust?  That’s not counting all the other people he’s slaughtered indiscriminately.  He is already the equivalent of, at the bone-wicked least, one Himmler, and that’s just from one incident about three months ago.  The Corrupted Self is a well-fed spirit of damnation.

Speaking of which, the Elder reveals that Chaos Blade (because that’s one of his names, remember?) is Humber’s shadow.  He must mean whatsisname’s Shadow archetype, of course, which only helps cement this theory.  Hey, if I got the swords right… anyhow, Humber learns that Corrupted Self needs to absorb solid bodies to stay here permanently instead of just showing up when Humber performs yet another holocaust.

The translucent Chaos Blade speeds to a city; “I followed and saw him shoot out these tentacles and suck a civilian into his body, in about three hours he absorbed everyone in the city.”  Humber follows Corrupted Self as he eats two more cities; when Corrupted Self finishes eating a third city, Humber has watched it long enough to learn how to absorb targets.  It takes him about two hours to master, then he finds Chaos Blade (who’s presumably run off to mostly eat a fourth city!) to find he is now nearly opaque.

Humber kills “the demon in him”, presumably speaking of Corrupted Self’s new physical body, and then absorbs the immaterial essence of his fiendish foe/true self.  “in doing so I was a hell lot stronger[.]“  Already.  Then he is punched in the gut–almost certainly by yet another Humber Widow/er, for daring to let his evil self kill that many people just so he can learn a new fancy karate gimick.  Humber pukes up his Corrupted Self, then he uses “the merge skill” to become one with the severed essence.  Yep, a wholly new superpower based off of the new superpower he just got.  The new superpower which took two hours to master after nine hours to study.  It takes all of a few seconds of thought to make into a distinctly new skill.  Woo!

Well, that’s Keikanu down, that’s Corrupted Self down… what else is Humber missing in his Trifecta of Recurring Foes?  If you said Chaos, then you’re luring me into quoting Christian Humber, and that’s evil, evil, evil.  After a leisurely hack into Area 51, Humber discovers something unpleasant: “it was that Area 51 was using humans as food for Chaos in order to bring The Eye of Terror back.”  That’s right, the men of Area 51 are chaos cultists.  He plots and plans with Season-Bringer, who “backed away” when he hears what Humber’s done for his latest bid fo’ power.  That’s right, even his best friend thinks he’s an evil bastard for that one.  Humber says that he’s killed the demon part of the Corrupted Self, so all should be hunky-dory until Humber is big enough of a bastard again to bring the Corrupted Self back.  Humber swears to keep the scientists (always the scientists, Hum…) from powering back up the Eye of Terror, and seals his deal thusly: “I marked on a map of the United States where it is.”  It’s at 115 degrees 49′00″W / 37 degrees 14′00″N, by the way.  And so Humber recapsulates his entire first part in several coterminous misadventures.  Look on the bright side, this chapter rounds out with an even more ridiculous conclusion, although for rather different reasons than part two’s.

Next Time: Puttin’ the axe to chaos cults, even more proof that Humber is an irredeemable blight, and ominous foreshadowing.

Name: Chaos Hunter Vash-Blade God
Age: 59 (412 wolf years)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Background: Orphan wolf-Saiyan-Horteka-demon-cyborg
Current Occupation: Genocider
Weaknesses: Remembering why he tries to avoid Area 51
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; Wind Scar technique; Spinner projectile; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; artifact fusion; useless guardian spirit; three purifying bullets in chest; Dark Templar powers; alien atmosphere adaptation; access to Ice Emeralds; ice elemental; Angel Arm; judge of the dead; time travel; Claw of Exorcism; flight; Scroll of Town Portal (via Magun Mark II); Uniting of Sides; Absorption; Merging.
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, disinformation, house shopping, dragon taming, cocaine ingestion, mecha pilot, UFO pilot, intimidation, arctic survival, faking death, Metra Nui history, population demographics, volcanology, botany, in-field power study
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1/2/3/4/5/6, Hyper, Horteka, side unison, human form
Form Combos: Ultimate (Super Saiyan 6 + Hyper), Mega (Ultimate + Side Unison)
Gear: Virtue Tetsume, Tetsaiga, the Magun Mark II, +5 shotgun, ice-elemental cyberlimb, Super Ice Emeralds, Wing Zero’s buster rifles, “serial killer” costume set, iPod, severed head of a Miami Dolphin
Sidekicks: Season-Bringer
UGLY: 18

Episode Sixteen: Area 51 2: The Totally Unofficial Sequel to Either the Arcade Light-Gun Game or Maybe that PS2/Xbox Game Starring David Duchovny, That One Nobody Remembers: Christian Humber Gets Laid
So!  The first thing one needs in the infiltration of Area 51 is to locate it, which Humber hath done; the second is to tell a buddy, so if the government disappears you he can live the rest of his life an insane conspiracy theorist in your memory; the third is to distract the people standing guard so you can sneak in.  Season-Bringer brings the distraction, by virtue of existing, and while the guards marvel over thither or not he makes a damn lick of sense (and fantasize about the Rouge Dragons, while they’re on the subject), Humber sneakwaltzes into Dreamland’s security center, just so, and “disables the Gattling cannons.”  Gattling guns are heck of basically outdated, as I recall, but whatever.  Area 51 gets fucked by the budget a lot.  “You’ve got alien guns, use ‘em!”  -”But sir, we don’t know how to use the alien guns!”  “Tough it out, sissy!”  -”Oh God the radiation is turning my testicles into grapefruit!  I want to die!  I want to di-i-i-ie!”  Sigh, poor Area 51.  He (Humber) also turns off the cameras, so that S.B. and the Toa (itching as they are for more murder, thanks to Humber’s corrupting touch) can raid the base without being photographically identified, despite being the most indiscrete creatures around.

Humber gets back to sneaking around the ventilation ducts (obviously) and spiders out of one long enough to slit an officer’s throat and hide him in said duct.  Season-Bringer strikes up a conversation, asking Blade (wow, been a long time since I called him that) how he knew the layout of Area 51.  Humber compares it to the ol’ lab where he spent his puppy days getting tortured to near-death for some… to… because.  It seems this is a telepathic exchange, as Season-Bringer asks, “how did you become telepath?”  If I looking for a frog, him name experiments on Humber while detained at Area 51 (several minutes being a nice long time for sensitive psychic surgery).  Then, whoops, an Area 51sman walks in on Humber while he’s busy doing Humberstuff!  Humber hops in a chair facing away from the door.  He exchanges chit-chat with whoever it is that answers, then spins the chair around to reveal himself.  “OH, SHIT, IT’S BLADE!” screams the poor guy moments before being slain in one stroke.  It’s actually set up pretty horrifically, like something you’d see in an action-horror movie, when it is revealed your co-worker is dead and in his place is a murderer stronger than God.

Without fail or hesitation, Humber kills the man and adds him to the Dead Guy Puddle in the air vent.  Area 51 must smell like hot dead at this point.  Humber straps on the dead guy’s outfit, notes that a Chaos Portal boils and froths in Section 10, and thusly armed with wisdom and clothing, sets forth to kill some Chaos.  Humber overhears that sacrifices for the Warp are in Section 20; Humber, more interested in denying Chaos its Chaos Kibble, finds that Section 20 is a bunch of prisoners, presumably chosen because they won’t be missed.  Or they’re only metaphorical prisoners rounded up by Vile Means.  Humber promises to save them; still in disguise, he leads them to the Chaos Portal where a fistful of scientists (obviously adorned with blood and the Chaosphere sigil, all the hot scientists babes gettin’ it on with otherworldly types, etc.) lay in ecstatic reverie to the hungry dark.  The sacrifices begin, and then immediately end when Humber shoves a hitherto-unmentioned Metal Climbing Claw through his chest.  He doffs his blood-stained costume, goes “insane” when he’s fired upon, and gets to murdering every glasses-wearing smartie in the building.  Just in time, the Toa show up to impale the scientists out of the reach of Humber’s injury-sticks.  A random Bionicle antagonist steps out of the portal, and Humber kicks him back in.  Theoretically.  Sidorak, not to be confused with Cytorak, tricks Humber into being drawn into the portal by a bunch of grasping, clammy tentacles.  The surviving scientists cheer, for karma finally returns to Humber in time to rape him of his senses.  Chaos comes through at last!  …Right?

It seems Chaos finds Humber’s orifices as horrible as they must surely be in real life, for Humber is ejected out of the portal.  Then, in a move Humber calls “unexpected,” “the portal closed and formed a key hole, then Tetkume became a huge key that I identified as a Keyblade. I stuck it into the key hole and turned it until I heard a click and pulled it out and the key hole disappeared.”  You’ll be glad to know that this is the closest Humber ever comes to being lain in The Odyssey.  Wait… I correct myself.  This is the closest Humber comes to having physically-possible sex.  It’s about to get a lot worse and in an incredibly homoerotic way, as evidenced by Kingdom Hearts’s’s’s’s’s’s’s’s’s’s Sora popping in out of nowhere in particular.  With his characteristic intellect, Sora asks “why is there so much blood and bodies everywhere?”  Humber tells gives ‘em the usual rigmarole about Chaos and people trying to reintegrate Chaos and what not.  Then Humber has sex with Sora.

“Then Sora’s Keyblade and mine glowed and fused so did Sora and I[.]”

Humber likes to fuse his weapons together.  He really really likes to fuse his weapons together.  Shouldn’t Tetkume be part of the Virtue Tetsume, by the way?  Let’s just assume Humber disjoined Tetkume from Virtue Tetsume, but that its power is still added to VTetsume because Christian Humber is Christian Humber.  Anyhow, it should be no surprise this weird and vaguely homoerotic activity leads to a much much more coherently homoerotic activity, as Humber becomes one, body and soul, with teenage boy Sora.  Hey, if Greek god Hermes found the oil-slickened thighs of a boy superior to the “moist cave” of a woman, surely it’s good enough for Humber!  I think I killed my sex drive with a rusty screwdriver.  Yep.

Humber takes a good look at his strapping young self in the mirror (I would like to mention that Humber is almost sixty and has just “fused” with a teenage boy) and notes he has Sora’s hair and personality.  Well, his personality, until: “Then I went Super Sayin and killed the scientists and told the toa to get out of the facility because I was going to destroy Area 51 and it was easy to do.”  Well, there’s all that volatile Elerium laying around.  Humber nukes the facility and basks in the afterglow with Sora: “Then Sora and I separated and we knew we were unstoppable when we were fused.”  Cigarettes and coffee and crying into one’s pillow ensue.  At least Sora was not literally caressed by the Humb-Member.

Humber takes Sora back home to the extinct volcano, because he is the unquestionable alpha wolf and cannot be sued or arrested by any … what do the Earth’s Sacred Guardians think of this?  Is Humber like one of those creepy-ass corrupt army higher-ups who get away with fusing with kids to increase their power that they may defeat Morzak the Iron-Toothed (Demon Enhanced Damage) because they have such seniority/omnipotence?  Has he been ejected because of that whole Miami incident?  I’m willing to bet the Sacred Guardians are discussing Humber amongst themselves, wondering if that little plastic star has set him up to ruin the universe by giving Humber even the slightest iota of official authority.

Sora complains about the cold, Humber says he doesn’t mind because he was born here.  This is fascinatingly semi-false!  He escorts Sora into the base, I mean volcano, and proclaims that he was born here, in this very volcano.  This one is utterfalse.  Also, Humber, being born in the home of a wolfish society means you were definitely not born a stray.  Beeeeeitch.

The other wolves threaten Sora with death, because he’s a pure-bred human and not a super-mongrel, but Humber shows again that, if nothing else, he is a reasonably gracious host, and orders them to not kill and eat Sora.  Following that, Blue Sora reveals he Needs Food Badly, “so I caught him something and I cooked it for him, and he ate it.”  It’s probably lichen.  Enjoy your lichen, Sora.  Enjoy it.

:bzzt!: Season-Bringer seems to have picked up something on his Somethingdar, and sends a “transmission” to Humber that some weirdo monsters are amblin’ out of a portal somewhere.  Sora confirms they’re Heartless.  “I said in my ‘lets go kick some ass’ voice.” says Humber, and, surprise surprise, he doesn’t actually say anything before or after saying he said something in his sayin’-stuff voice.  It seems this portal is located in the old laboratory where Humber was raised as a test subject for inexplicable reasons.  Yes, we are completely recapitulating the first series.  Except it’s lower-key, despite the escalating power levels, and it’s even more the ‘diculous.  You will see why.  Oh yes.  You will.

NEXT TIME: A flashlight is not taped to a gun.

…wait, what happened to those prisoners?

Name: Chaos Hunter Vash-Blade God
Age: 59 (412 wolf years)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Background: Orphan wolf-Saiyan-Horteka-demon-cyborg
Current Occupation: Science Stopper
Weaknesses: Love of teenage boys
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; Wind Scar technique; Spinner projectile; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; artifact fusion; useless guardian spirit; three purifying bullets in chest; Dark Templar powers; alien atmosphere adaptation; access to Ice Emeralds; ice elemental; Angel Arm; judge of the dead; time travel; Claw of Exorcism; flight; Scroll of Town Portal (via Magun Mark II); Uniting of Sides; Absorption; Merging.
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, disinformation, house shopping, dragon taming, cocaine ingestion, mecha pilot, UFO pilot, intimidation, arctic survival, faking death, Metra Nui history, population demographics, volcanology, botany, in-field power study, disguise, lichen hunting
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1/2/3/4/5/6, Hyper, Horteka, side unison, fusion, human form
Form Combos: Ultimate (Super Saiyan 6 + Hyper), Mega (Ultimate + Side Unison), Sora fusion
Gear: Virtue Tetsume, Tetsaiga, Tetkume keyblade, the Magun Mark II, +5 shotgun, ice-elemental cyberlimb, Super Ice Emeralds, Wing Zero’s buster rifles, “serial killer” costume set, iPod, severed head of a Miami Dolphin, bloodstained guard uniform
Sidekicks: Season-Bringer, Sora from Kingdom Hearts
UGLY: 18

Episode Seventeen: Through the Valley of the Fire and the Firestorm
Dananananananananananana danananananananananan naaaa naaaaaa danananananananananana DA danananananana DA DA DA DA DA!  DA DE DA DE DA DA DA DE DA DE DA DA DA DE DA DE DA DA DA DE DA DE DA DA DA DE DA DA DA DA DA DE DA DE DA DA DA DA DA A DA DA DAAAA DEEEEE ON A COLD WINTER MORNIN’ IN THE TIME BEFORE THE NIGHT!  And so on.  Strap on your manly shirts, yents, for Christian Humber rides out with his life partner Sora are going to man themselves through Doom, the Matrix, AND Kingdom Hearts, in a concluding arc I thusly dub

KingDoom HearTrix

which I eschewed as the title above because I felt like it.  Woo!

So!  When we last left Humber and Sora, Sora was quietly weeping over the genericized animal slain and cooked for him, for he has been violated soul-deeply, Humber discovered that his childhood laboratory was the sight of Heartless shenanigans.  What else can he do but rid the place of its lingering wickedness?  He and Sora go to inspect the place, which is exactly as decrepit and dead-scientistful as he left it, yet considerably more Heartless-filled.  Deep within its innards is the portal to Heartless-Land.  “but before we entered the ruined lab I brought some weapons with me, just in case things got real ugly.”

Now, close your ey–wait, no.  Eyes, no.  You won’t be able to read.  Just metaphorically close your eyes and I’ll kiss you, tomorrow I’ll miss you, and remember I’ll always be true~  Dammit, one more time.  Okay.  Imagine there’s no heav… damn you, the Beatles!  Okay!  Think hard on the subject of Humber and weapons.  What magical weaponry shall he drag into the depths of the dungeon?  What of his vast panoply of magic swords, of killer artefacts?

The answer is none.

He’s bringin’ some guns.

Not his +5 shotgun and Magun Mark II.  Normal guns.  Normal, normal guns.  He gives Sora a plain assault rifle, and brings for himself “the Minigun with tons, and tons of ammo, for Trigger happiness,” which Sora disdains for its wastefulness.  So, in response, Humber gives him a second assault rifle and he “showed him how to weald dual weapons.”  You know, like Sora already knew how to do.  Humber explains he’s ripped these guns from a military base, then shows off even more firearms.  Okay, so at least he brings Kaze’s +5 shotgun along, as well as a “Castor Shotgun.”  Humber’s only weakness thus far was his refusal to learn magic, and now he has a gun that shoots spell DnD-style spell scrolls.  Don’t worry, he doesn’t use it that much, so chalk this up to yet another power application he doesn’t know what to do with.

Anyhow, the ensemble is soon complete, inevitable as death and taxes: “I gave Sora a black trench coat, sunglasses and sub-machineguns with a lot of holsters and ammo. I was wearing a black trench coat, sunglasses, leather gloves and I also had sub- machineguns with lots of holsters and lots of ammo.”  Because Humber also has to own at outfittin’: “When I looked at Sora, he had the sunglasses upside down so I fixed it, and we went in.”  Sora does not come from pre-sunglasses!  He’s seen normal glasses, at least!  He’s seen Auron wear sunglasses!  This is not a difficult concept!  Oh, well.

Normal folk seem to be scrounging the ruins for Humberic artifacts. Humber says they should leave, then says they should leave by aiming a shotgun at the head adventurer’s head.  The guy orders his pals attack Humber, which works as well as you’d imagine it would; Humber kills them all using his newly-minted “metal climbing claws to rip hearts out.”  He means metal climbing claws, like, strapped over his existing ones, right?  Because he DOES have claws, and it’d be–well, you’re about to learn how bad Humber gets at power management.

In the depths of the lab, Humber finds more scientists.  They proclaim their inno–actually, wait.  They say “were innocent.”  That is, they were once innocent, but have been forced by outside hands to perform the most vile of deeds.  Humber responds, “really, you are experimenting on wolves again, so you die.”  With no other evidence (not even experimented-upon wolves), Humber slaughters the lot of them, admittedly “in cold blood.”  Poor bastards.

And now Humber performs his most notable direct-plagiarism-from-an-extant-source.  The first floor of the dungeon (there seems to be a very extensive dungeon network under the surface).  Remember that scene in The Matrix where Neo walks through the metal detectors, and they go off, and the guy says “please remove all metal items” and then Neo opens his jacket and holy shit he’s heavily armed and POW POW POW and BULLET TIME BULLET TIME BULLET TIME and I DON’T CARE WHAT ANYONE ELSE THINKS, I LIKED THE SEQUELS, THOUGH THEY WERE OF COURSE NOT AS GOOD AS THE FIRST.  Yeah, just imagine that, but with Humber instead of Neo, Sora instead of Trinity, and awkward symbolic yaoi instead of awkward techno sex.  Humber plucks a couple of full-auto shotguns ’cause he’s out of SMG ammo; end scene.

Hum and Sore take to the elevators.  Humber, showing his trademark restraint, sets a “nuke charge” to level the joint if worse comes to worse.  He hears an officer several floors below say “real nasty company” is on the way.  How can Humber hear what an officer several floors down is saying?  “I knew it because my hearing told me”  Good show, chap.  Humber tells Sora to stay out of the way of the doors and holy shit that is actual sound tactical advice.  The majority of SWAT team casualties come from the poor bastards who have to open the door on a room full of armed and dangerous men.  In a scene straight out of Bizarro World, Humber actually uses strategy, throwing grenades into a crowd of armed men rather than stand in the doorway and theoretically get slaughtered except he’s stronger than God.  It’s … refreshing.  And all too brief, because after throwing in the grenades, they strap on gas masks and march out into battle with dual assault rifles, and then shoot out the lights so they won’t be discovered.  And when they’re discovered midway through shooting the first light, they kill the guard and continue shooting out lights.  And Sora straps on some night-vision goggles, and because Humber has darkvision, he just pops on some infravision goggles.  Wow.  Just… wow.

The next floor has pulsating veins coverin’ the walls, so Humber initially suspects Chaos.  But, in a surprise twist I gave away with the title of this arc, a guard runs into them, screaming, while being chased by… a demon!  Not a Chaos demon, just a regular ol’ demon.  An imp, let’s say.  From Doom.  Doom I.  Or II.  Doom I/II.  Not III.  The Doom I/II imps were cooler.  According to Humber, “I identified it as hell was becoming reality”, which means that until now hell was a mere metaphor.  Or he doesn’t know the word “immanentize.”  Humber pistolizes the demon and asks the guard what the eff is goin’ on.  The guard is too frightened; Humber shakes some sense into him, and the guard reveals everything except where the demons came from.  So naturally Humber threatens him with being eaten by a plant demon ’til he confesses, then ties him up by the demon anyway, then kills the demon because it’s in the way of the next level.  I wish I knew under whom Humber studied Logic and Reasoning, because that teacher needs a punch to the gut hard-style.  Sora and Humber convert the guard into an automap and march through the halls killing demons.  This gameplay is startlingly accurate to the original Dooms!

Then they reach a room full of demons.  “Then all the demons in the room spotted us and began to rush.”  As Cherry Venus and Brooks Cracktackle before them, they stare down the Demon Rush and shoot the demons with shotguns until they die.  Humber USEs SPEED on PISTOL-HAVE ZOMBIE so he can shoot it in the back of the head and steal its gun.  He yells “I’m getting awfully sick and tired of all these fucking demons and zombies, so duck and cover!”  He whips out his Caster Shotgun and shoots a level 20 Meteor Swarm, evaporating every enemy on the floor.  After using up all the rest of his ammo in the act of killing them one by one.

After exploding enough demons to fill an Eric Harris Doom .wad, Humber and company (Sora) have finally run out of ammo.  In this we learn that is better to use 20 plasma ammo to clear a room with one shot of the BFG instead of 40 shotgun shells, 200 minigun rounds, and six rockets.  Speaking of BFGs, Sora and Humber backtrack six levels to raid the armory (man, don’t you hate cheapass time-extending tricks like backtracking?).  The door is locked; Humber likes what he sees, an important-looking door, hopefully mutters “Knock knock, who’s there?” and punches off the lock screaming “ME!  Me me me me!  Me me me me me me Cyberdemon?  Big deal, he’s Slim Pickins, famed character actor whose breakout role was riding a nuke in Doctor Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Set Up Us the Bomb.”  Whilst reciting this screed, Sora indulges in actually stocking on ammo.  Humber lays claim to the Samurai, “a beam weapon, that is lethal when fired.”  An important distinction, giving the Samurai MOUNTing Assault INductive Directed Energy Weapon (aka the Samurai MOUNTAIN DEW) is a nonlethal force projector used by skate punks to achieve illegal speeds and is as harmful as a gloved slap to the face.  Sora takes a grenade launcher specifically because “it can blow down doors in one shot.”  Humber takes a second firearm, what he calls the M.O.G., the Mother of all Guns.  It’s basically a BFG, but with a Final Fantasy pseudo-acronym.  Sora protests to Humber using a weapon that can destroy the goddamn building they’re standing in as well as triggering that much-touted “nuke charge,” which is a bit excessive even for Humber, who at least usually saves cosmic levels of damage for cosmic levels of antagonist.  But Humber refuses to surrender his surrogate penis, and he is become “nodded with my insane-serious smile.”  Why so serious?  As a wise man once said, Hum, don’t get even, get mad!  As in insane.  There was a song.  It was pretty awesome.  Almost as awesome as Sora’s newfound glory, the Thundaga -437- Hellfragger rocket launcher.  Humber says no, because it’s Humber’s playground and if he gets up and takes the ball with him, he will shoot a blast that can destroy the universe “if it hits” and, by definition, hit something immediately.  On top of that, they reload all their crappy mundane weapons, go back down six levels, realize they forgot to arm the fucking nuke, go all the way back to the armory, type in 6580334, and finally head back to the bottom floor, where action and excitement finally await.  They have their big guns all ready and such when Humber says “no, not yet” and tells Sora to put away the awesome huge gun that he finally has for himself, because Humber must have the biggest dick available at any time.  So, Sora settles for an AIMS 20, which Humber reminds the audience he also has, and presumably uses at the same time as his minigun, just to rub it in.  The two storm the gates of Infinity and fight, as has been predicted, Heartless.

“the look on the heartless’s faces were Classic [Heartless do not have faces capable of appreciable emotion. -Ed.] when they saw two people, in black trench coats, sunglasses, and some very good guns in hand, they were pretty much screwed and we both open fired”.  With that horrible helicopter’s theme song blaring, he discards the AIMS and whips out another minigun, then activates his, big surprise, previously-unmentioned magical Blade-Zero armor, which can only be worn by wolves or those of wolfish descent.  Must be hell on his currently-non-digitigrade-and-much-larger legs.  Humber fires.  Red red red.  “the amount of ammo spent probably set a world record” says Humber, and I would like to point out that most conflicts have more than two miniguns present.  When he finally runs out of ammo, he goes hand-to-hand, because he doesn’t have any ammo for all those loaded guns he looted or all those guns he reloaded at the armory.fnord

The army, a SWAT team, and the F.B.I. show up, and say Humber is under arrest for killing 300 scientists and guards.  Humber does not care until someone dings his armor.  Then the Heartless start attacking the meaty, easier targets, then demons start showing up, and it all dege… it’s more of a regeneration into a three-way Monkey Fracas.  It’s been hecka dull ’til now.  Sora gets injured, and Humber drags his ass to a medical bay that has somehow not been murdered or filled with demons.  Humber threatens the survivors with death, so they help Sora out by rubbing him against a health dispenser.  Humber then notices that he’s somehow hurt himself, so he “used my powers to heal my wound.”  Wait, WHAT?

He never mentions this again.  You’re not surprised.dronf

Humber gets the most out of his Cure Critical Wounds power while it lasts.  Humber re-opens Sora’s wound and sticks his filthy paws in there, prompting a surprisingly realistic response from Sora.  He USEs ICE POWERS on WOUND and what do you know, it’s doing swell.  Humber collapses from exhaustion, but orders himself thrown in a freezer for medicinal purposes.  Fortunately they have a Humber-sized freezer onhand, jam him into it, and a cool two hours later Humber strides out good as new.  Sora, in fact, is better than new, because some of Humber’s germs got in that wound, and because even Humber’s germs can knock grown men into orbit, Sora gets a Mary Sue contact high and starts punching walls for the sake of putting holes in ‘em.

What now?  You know, now that Sora got a few free character levels from Humber rustlin’ in his guts?

Well, they watch some TV and see that the demons wound up winnin’ the three-way Monkey Fracas.  Humber and Sora clean up with their new stupidly-unnecessary handguns and call it a day.  “he didn’t learn how to use them, so I taught him,” the end.

…Not of CHR, oh no.

We are now halfway through.

Halfway through–imagine that!

This is the end of part three.  At the midpoint, it seems Humber has suddenly nose-dived into a lower power level.  Do not make this mistake!  He has not decreased in power, he simply does not know how to use it in any appreciable manner.  Either that or he was so bored of winning fights WITH EASE he just wanted to unwind and shoot shit clearly beneath his power level.  That’s a possibility.

The next part continues the trend of remarkable escalations in power level and downright plagiarism.  It also introduces the only character to consistently remain stronger than Humber no matter what he does, the baddest-ass of the bad ass.  Trust me, you will be disappointed, yet oddly elated.

And now you’re asking, “But what about the nuke?”

What about the nuke, punk?

END OF PART THREE RESULTS:
Name: Chaos Hunter Vash-Blade God
Age: 59 (412 wolf years)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Background: Orphan wolf-Saiyan-Horteka-demon-cyborg
Current Occupation: King of Limbooooooo
Weaknesses: Tends to forget about life-threatening injuries
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; Wind Scar technique; Spinner projectile; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; artifact fusion; useless guardian spirit; three purifying bullets in chest; Dark Templar powers; alien atmosphere adaptation; access to Ice Emeralds; ice elemental; Angel Arm; judge of the dead; time travel; Claw of Exorcism; flight; Scroll of Town Portal (via Magun Mark II); Uniting of Sides; Absorption; Merging; healing powers used once and then promptly forgotten about.
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, disinformation, house shopping, dragon taming, cocaine ingestion, mecha pilot, UFO pilot, intimidation, arctic survival, faking death, Metra Nui history, population demographics, volcanology, botany, in-field power study, disguise, lichen hunting, grenade throwing, weapons appraisal, nuclear weapon operation
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1/2/3/4/5/6, Hyper, Horteka, side unison, fusion, human form
Form Combos: Ultimate (Super Saiyan 6 + Hyper), Mega (Ultimate + Side Unison), Sora fusion
Gear: Virtue Tetsume, Tetsaiga, Tetkume keyblade, climbing claws, the Magun Mark II, +5 shotgun, Samurai pulse rifle, a shitton of normal guns, ice-elemental cyberlimb, Super Ice Emeralds, Wing Zero’s buster rifles, “serial killer” costume set, “My First One” Kid’s Large Neo Halloween costume, iPod, severed head of a Miami Dolphin, bloodstained guard uniform, copy of John Romero’s “Daikatana” still stained with the great man’s blood
Sidekicks: Season-Bringer, Keesongto, Sora from Kingdom Hearts
UGLY: 18

Melodramatic Fiction Break 1: Feel Free To Skip This
Blue sky over Normandy; Hell tilted on its axis, the sun passed by overhead.  The beaches surged.  The fight began again, the dead fighting the dead, innocent and sinful alike.  More reflex than need.  More exercise than punishment.  It was safe here, in a sense.  Their problems were over.  Liveside is inevitable, unpredictable death, despair, and worry; in Hell, one knows his worth and is assured in his continued existence.  Deathside had security, peace, a certain pleasant tenor to the endless cycles.  Liveside had Humber.  No sane thing would choose Him over here.

Kuzeksto loomed over the railing of the balcony, perched so near the edge he seemed frozen in his first second of falling.  He was in his human-mock form, that of a handsome older man clad in the fineries of a refined noble sorcerer.  He watched Normandy play out again.  New tactics this time.  Gone, after many years of play, was any sense of animosity or fear.  The supposed agony and horror of constant death and reanimation had dulled, from exposure, to a jolt and a start on the next round of fighting. Even the sanctified whom Humber had idly sent to Hell for whatever sleight he found damning soon acclimated to the game.

Humber.  Christian Humber, Whose Rage Cleft the Heavens.  Devil-Drinker.  Chaos-Killer.  Slaughter’s Son.  A frothing stew of genetics, cybernetics, and boundless, impossible power.  The thing that murdered his sons.

It is the nature of demons to look up–toward the barrier between the Real and Hell, into the higher ranks of the demon hierarchy, into the black heart of Chaos in Hell’s night sky.  Keikanu looked up and did not see the sky, or the next demon in line, or Chaos.  He saw the truth.  His name meant Who Can Only Reach For Perfection; in the fashion of his brethren and his father, it was meant to be a sad truth.  It was more true than Kuzeksto could ever hope and fear.  Keikanu was the most noble and pure demon he’d ever known, slow to anger, swift to forgive, puissant in the oldest of magics, self-sacrificing, honest, a gentleman, better to women than Kuzeksto knew he’d ever been.  The demons beneath Keikanu saw him not as a general or a king, but as a father-figure, an inspiration.  He could have been the new Satan, lead Hell to an age of glory.

When Humber slew Leheung-Do, the Satan of five thousand years, the Balance nearly snapped, for though Humber had demonic blood, he barely even registered the weight of his actions.  Without a Satan, Hell was a headless dragon, hemorrhaging and dying swiftly.  Keikanu staked his army and led them to battle against Humber.  He kissed his poor, weak-hearted mother’s hand before leaving, promising he would take the throne of Hell and lead his people to greatness again.

Humber killed him.

He returned to hell in a storm of brimstone, fatally wounded.  As the maids nursed him to health, he studied the darker magics long into the night, only resting at his mother’s insistence.  He would destroy Humber before he destroyed all things worth saving.  Isuzekta, his poor mother, wished he would not risk himself so; brave Kuvecto and little Inanbia agreed.  But Kosungto and Kithaungo urged him on, joined him.  Together they would kill Humber and save the universe.

Humber would not die.  Keikanu led a cult of human followers to Humber’s newfound home–he refused to risk more of his people in such a gamble–and again Humber destroyed him.  Already he was mightier than God, the equal of ancient Lehung-Do.  Kosungto, a master of the possession of corpses, sacrificed his immortality to try and kill Humber in the past.  Taking control of one of Humber’s brother’s corpses, one already discarded by Chaos, he tried to slay Humber in a form he could not raise arms against.  No change echoed in the time stream.  When Keikanu was well enough to war against Humber again, he found Kosungto still occupied the corpse of Humber’s brother.  Humber thought nothing of performing the Claw of Exorcism on his own brother.  Kosungto, stripped of everything that made him a real person, stumbled around in that wolf’s corpse, pretending to be Humber’s brother.  He still called himself Kosungto, though Humber’s brother’s name was Erukdis.  Humber didn’t seem to remember… or care.

Keikanu, unlike Humber, had mercy.  He sacrificed the first and most vital strike to send his brother to a peaceful, eternal rest.  Losing the initiative, he lost the battle.  Humber, mightier than God and growing ever-stronger, slew Keikanu anew.

After measuring his options, Humber sent Keikanu’s soul to Heaven.  Heaven, the eternal engine of the afterlife.  Kind to the kind, just to the just, and cruel to the cruel.  Their torture chambers are the nightmares of earthbound tyrants.  All demons, of course, are the enemy.  For his valor, for his courage, for his mercy, Keikanu was eternally damned.

“Not for his mercy, Pere.”

Kuzeksto looked behind him.  Kithaungo.

“He was punished because Humber thought it would be funny.”  Kithaungo found emotion a distraction from the truth.  Emotion had his mother weeping in the hallways day after day after day.  Emotion had stripped away Kuvecto’s potency and Inabia’s courage.  By locking his heart in a little lead box, Kithaungo could properly destroy Humber, get revenge for his brother.  When the job was done, he’d break the lock and weep until the last of the sadness poured out.  Until then, there was only the Plan.

“Did you hear of the Cyber-Demon’s armies?” said Kithaungo.  “They fled Hell through a teleportation experiment Liveside.  Humber was there, hunting Heartless for sport, and slew them all, from the lowliest Imp to the Cyberdemon itself.  With guns, Pere.  Like a hunter on vacation.  Every hour sees the night bear closer and the dawn recede.  In time there will only be night, only Chaos and an endless feast of souls courtesy of Christian Humber.”

Nothing.

Silence.

“Do you expect me to deny you?” Kuzeksto asked.  “Do you expect me to lie?”

“There is one more chance, Pere.”

“For the sake of Hell, I pray you are right.  But…”  Kuzeksto cast his gaze back upon mock-Normandy.  “Your brothers have died in the attempt, died forever.  Neither can I sense your soul, Kithaungo.  On what have you staked it?”

“I am immune, Pere.”

“From?”

“Everything.”  The slightest hint of a smile; the slight glisten of tears in his eyes.  “I have named one weapon in all the universe to be my bane.  Humber does not have it.”

“You have been leaving Hell.  For what?”

“Gathering support, Pere.  Humber has one true weakness, one even he is oblivious to, one we’ve never paid special attention toward.  In retrospect… it’s almost insultingly easy.”

Somewhere in the depths of the Haunt, Isuzekta wept.

“I trust you.”  Kuzeksto turned to his son and grasped his hand.  Kithango: in the demon’s tongue, “To Know The Sum Of One’s Days Without Illusion.”

“Pere…”

“For us, son.  For all of us.  For the sons and daughters you’ll never see.  For the memory of the Balance.”

“I promise, dad.”

“I love you, Kithaungo.”  He embraced his son.  It was to Kithaungo’s credit he only wept a few moments.  Below, the Allies surged onto the beach and the assault began in earnest.

Kithaungo left the Haunt, left Hell.

In the depths, Kuzeksto left the balcony to find his wife.  The war marched on, unobserved.

Episode Eighteen: The Wolfsaiyanhortekademoncyborg Rejected
Look below.  Beyond, in the mists clouding the mountain, are vast and indistinct shapes.  Is that a shark-man?  It may very well be.  Hold me now; I’m six feet from the edge and I’m thinkin’, maybe three stories ain’t so far down.

It helps that Humber–raise your glasses and cheer–gets the shit beaten out of him this day.  Clap your hands, uh huh clap your hands, for he’s getting it heck of.  Time for revenge.  Pic at left unrelated, but I’m pretty sure Kithaungo looks a bit like Roland of Gilead.  He’s an awesome dude.

When this day begins, Humber is hangin’ out with his good friends, who are such good friends he neither names them nor cares to explain how he got so many friends so soon after again killing so, so many people.  Perhaps among his pals are Charlie Manson, whom, following “Batman Begins” villain evolution rules, must be a kitsune/kraken/hydra (instead of tails, he has tentacles! and his tentacles have nine heads apiece!) with two lightsabers that are also Colt revolvers, a rocket launcher boot, and space to seat four passengers comfortably.  Given most of his “friends” show up alive and well later, he–wait, does he consider Season-Bringer a friend or a pet?  And what of Sora and the rest of his Sidekick Krewe?  They’re all pretty alive, but perhaps Humber doesn’t think of them as people.  Perhaps all he sees is fusions and/or firepower.  His friends are the moral degenerates and mutants and horrors that think him the knees of bees.

Which makes Kithaungo’s next actions that much more justified.

Our WolfdsayandragondemonHorteka Humber smells a familiar scent and challenges the offender: “Keikanu?  I killed you three years ago”  Kithaungo-Who-is-Not-Yet-Named calls out Humber and threatens to kill his loved ones.  Humber says “you wouldn’t dare to do that”.  Possibly because it would be hilariously fruitless, as Humber is an island on which other people are, at best, visitors, and at worst ammunition to be used and left for forensics to sweat over.

Kithaungo-the-Yes,-I-First-Used-This-Joke-in-Regards-to-Season-Bringer, Ain’t-It-Fun-to-See-Again? whips out the one thing Humber cannot resist (soon to be two): a paralysis spell.  It works like a charm, as it is known to.  It works so well that Kithaungo Thought-This-Through has time to magically disguise as Humber, kill all his friends (who must be sublimely unsurprised at this, perhaps even relieved, or perhaps they volunteered to be Humber’s friends because they were tired of living), then kill a bunch of cities.  Humber shakes off the spell, goes hunting for our hero and gets shot down over a city as all the people run and hide futilely from his inevitable wrath.  Huber estimates 60,000 guns are pointed at him.  I don’t have the willpower to research how many average guns are in an army chunk large enough to make Huber pause for a few seconds, but at least I can say that generals don’t generally march up to certain death just to announce that Christian Humber is under arrest for the killin’ of ten cities.  Humber claims innocence, the cops, I mean army know better and laugh it off, and I must say I have to laugh along with them.  But that’s in its time.  In its hilarious, terrible time.

Humber, remembering back when his Corrupted Self tried to implicate him in murders he didn’t commit, figures that finding the impostor will make everything better immediately and flies off to locate The Man With The Plan.

The next two… man, I’ve really locked myself into some specific terminology… let’s call them Action Chunks.  The next two Action Chunks are the shortest A.C.s of Christian Humber, and they are doozies.

One: Humber follows a trail of destruction to find Kithaungo-Who-Dared.

Two: They fight.  Humber…

…loses…

…badly?

Oh my God.  Humber is … losing!  The two fight “for a long time”, and Humber gets knocked into a cave.  He climbs out, gets knocked in again, and… loses.

“before I could strike back, a priestess shot an arrow, hitting me in the shoulder and pinning me up against a stalagmite”

Holy shit!  Humber is losing!  We’ve got him on the ropes!  Who’s this “we”?  Oh, who cares.  We’re doing it, America!  Kithaungo, The Demon Who Won, has, through a pact with a priestess concerned with the safety of the world, managed to stick Humber to a stalagmite!  But wait.

Who is this priestess?

“I said ‘Ki…Kikyo’ before passing out.”

Dammit, Humber, you’ve shit things up again.  Even in death you can’t–oh.  I suppose he’s not dead, because the next Action Chunk is titled “Sealed for 20 Years,” but hot shit, Humber’s lost!  He’s actually lost!  Kithaungo and (sigh) Kikyo have done it!  Given this doesn’t happen in the past, we can only assume that Kikyo is a completely unrelated priestess.  Possibly a cyborg.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.  Cyborg with a modern-style super bow.  She’s a smoker, and I mean that her hardware is outdated and smokes when overexerted, like when shooting an arrow that punches right through Christian Humber.  Also a stalagmite, but if it’s going to hurt Christian Humber, you should be glad it didn’t just evaporate the rock.

Kithaungo and Kikyo presumably congratulate each other on a job well done; Kithaungo rides out to Hell to report his victory over Humber, and Kikyo retires the priestess vestments and, perhaps, considers having a daughter.  She’s got her eggs frozen in a bank somewhere just in case her internal biological clock started ticking again (kind of hard to bear children when your lower half is a mighty metal chassis), and after saving the universe from inevitable ravishing by Humber, well, she’s feeling rather nurturing.

Twenty years pass.

Twenty years.

Twenty years of No Humber.  Can you imagine?

It won’t be a cakewalk, of course.  There were many ills Humber defeated in his time: Chaos, beloved and departed Keikanu.  Other people, certainly.  But mostly other heroes’ villains, those they could have overcome on their own.  Humber has of course started his own fair share of troubles.  Corrupting the Metra Nui timeline.  Being possessed by Chaos.  Creating, by virtue of existing, the Corrupted Self.  Killing Soku and her extended family.  Supplying a 22-mile dragon with enough food to keep it alive, a dragon 1/10th the weight of the Earth, the necessity of feeding almost certainly ending countless species.  Appropriating government materials for personal reasons.  Killing Keikanu’s helpless human cults.  Corrupting the Metra Nui timeline, again.  Destroying Union Aerospace Corporation’s teleportation experiments.  Slaughtering six million innocent civilians attending a football game, plus the cops who tried to protect them.  Okay, Humber was the end of civilization.  Look at me, saying “was” like he’s not alive or coming back.

Chaos may return.  Demons are slacking in number, if only because of internal disputes; as Humber sleeps and is not dead, Kithaungo cannot become the Satan of the empty throne of Hell, and must do what he can to keep deadside in one piece.  Season-Bringer must be super bored or hungry, but they never gave back the spaceship, so who knows, meb’d he’s hanging out on Tarrasque Planet, yukkin’ it up with the Tarrasques.  Metra Nui is free of paradox.  The world turns.

Okay, so it’s much, much easier than when Humber was awake.

Twenty years… a generation grows up knowing no Humber.  His equipment is gingerly looted from him, his body made an exhibit.  Twenty years.  Long enough for the new children to forget his influence, take it for granted.  Long enough for Kikyo to have a daughter–an unassuming human daughter.  Long enough for his severed head of a Miami dolphin to decompose into a Skull of a Miami Dolphin.  Long enough for only the truly mighty to tremble at his name.  For all his fury, even Chaos regrows day by day.  Humber’s influence on history was almost superficial.  No one warrior, it seems, could alter history all that terribly, not even the mightiest being in all the universe.

Such a comforting lie.

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty years of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking stone,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards the Pin to be born?

CHRISTIAN HUMBER STATS
:MISSING:

Episode The Dark Tower: The Kagone Super Show feat. Humber the Wacky Wolf
Humber has slept for twenty years, and though his time comes to be born again, our impotent God again smiles upon the poor and maligned Pin.  In such a way as He allowed Humber a necklace of tranq darts, He has at last given the world its best weapon against the scourge of Humber.  Who is this weapon, this unstoppable force?

Her name is Kagone, and she knows the score.

Drop of a hat: Christian Humber’s life has become a tourist attraction, and in the midst of what we can only assume to be a tour of the Final Battle wherein Humber and an unknown assailant (some tour guides say “hero,” others “attacker,” depending on their opinion of the wolfsayandragondemonHorteka) fought ’til Humber was at last subdued.  Kagone is lost from the group and tumbles down to the mysterious cave wherein Humber lays still, impaled upon that mighty cursed arrow.  “She played with my hair for a bit”, enthralled with the very idea of the thing.  She is quickly taken back to the village (Welcome to Peasant Village 333: Home of the Body of Christian Humber!), for to tamper with the Humbcorpus is to threaten doom.

However, despite Kithaungo’s best attempts, Hell is still succumbing to entropy.  It will take all his might to steer Hell out of its death spiral–but might alone isn’t enough.  A demon, vague as it is aggressive, attacks the village, and Kagone winds up in the cave again, pursued by the hellbound fiend.  Humber wakes and utters the awkwardly-written line, “the
scent of the one who killed me… it’s drawing closer”  Clunky?  Vague?  Melodramatic?  It can only be a direct quotation from Inu-Yasha.  This entire sequence is a direct rip from the opening episode of Inu-Yasha, everything, as it is said, save the commemorative plastic cup and game piece.  Kagone is given to us as much by virtue of Humber’s inability to spell as she is God’s formal apology for Humber’s sheer existence.  Anyhow, she’s attacked by the demon and “wrapped,” how or why not being explained, because it is the centipede whatsit from that episode of Inu-Yasha, okay?!  Kagone cannot fight it because, unlike Humber, she is only human, and Humber takes advantage of this situation by bribing her with her life.  Conveniently-appearing elder–the out-of-date cyborg who is Kagone’s mother, I can only assume, for there is no hint of Kikyo being dead in this–warns Kagone this is suicide.  Kagone (implicitly) looks into Humber’s bizarre, unaging eyes and feels realization flood over her like an invigorating tide: I can take him.  She rips out the arrow, proclaiming, “LIVE AGAIN, VASH!”

Humber dispatches the demon with his usual lack of care for description.  The elder lassos him with a mysterious artifact and commands Kagone to “udder a word that stops him”.  Eew.  “paralyze spell? That won’t work on me” Humber lies, and Kagone sees through the lie like the transparent super-fragile glass it’s clearly made of.  “SIT!” she proclaims, and Humber takes a beating courtesy of Lady Gravity.

Humber is now Kagone’s bitch.  Oh man, is this satisfying.  He stalks her, offers to help with her homework, and every time a single utterance sends him to kiss the Earth-Mother that unwisely proffered her womb for him in which to grow.  Was that correct English?  I’m not lucid enough to guess on my own.  Humber wines, “The truth is that every time I get a girl she, ether tries to kill me or try to seal me away”  1. Drawing from life experience, Humber the Man?  2. Suuure, that’s why you never cast a glance at a woman but oggle Sora’s tight teenage power level.

Humber does not unveil his past to her, even though there are entire branches of Ivy League colleges devoted to studying his impact on the universe, and so he must be among the most recognized and feared people(oids) in the world.  Kagone is unimpressed, especially with his raggedy-ass clothing.  Stripped of his precious equipment like a postmortem saint is stripped of body parts, he has only the clothes on his back and the cyberlimb implanted in his socket to his name.  Kagone takes him to the mall to civilize himself up, but Humber being Humber, he acts like an even more petulant and annoying child than usual.  A sample: one of the few things he likes is “a toilet with a built in ass cleaner, since I’m part wolf, well…put it together”.  You heard it here, folks: Humber likes analingus.  You’re not doing your apparent sexuality any favors.  Further, “I got kicked out of the store for drinking out of a toilet, and it was actually quite funny and gross”.  Having not been there, I can nonetheless assure you it was not funny.  Last, Humber’s arm malfunctions, requiring a mechanic, which is found.  The most interesting moment in the mall misadventure is summed up in a single line, one third of what is devoted to toilet jokes.  Priorities!  He’s got ‘em.

Kagone is a saint.  She puts up with Humber when most people would be dead by his own hand.  This is partly enforced by her origins, as Inu-Yasha never makes good on his frequent promises to rape or murder Kagome, and partly because Kagone herself is the strongest, most controlled character in the Humbsaga.  She does not have an abundance of power, she does not have an abundance of skill; she has willpower, intelligence, and sheer manipulative skill.  With these purely human talents she will topple the equal of ten billion gods and counting.

She embarks on what most would dismiss as the most futile gesture imaginable: trying to get Humber interested in education by way of a museum.  Humber tunes the whole thing out while Kagone enriches herself with the mysteries of the past.  Humber remains a moody and petulant child until he finds nothing less than the white Shikon Jewel: “so, there you are, I was looking all over for you.”  The white Shikon Jewel, as you remember, last mentioned aaaaaaall the way in Act Five.  What all did Humber experience of the Shikon Jewel?  It hit him in the head, he shoved it in the Magun, and shot it at the animated corpse of his brother.  He cycled the chamber (that’s the correct term, right?), chucked the Shikon Jewel, and noted it had gone gray.  Some forward-thinking gent probably picked up the ejected jewel and saved it, only to make a killing when Humber memorabilia got big.  Now it’s supped on enough demonic essence (poor Hell…) to become bright again.

Humber, rationalizing the jewel as “his” despite using it as a glorified caster shell, decides the time has come for Stealin’ Time.  “Who are you talking to?” asks Kagone, exasperated by Humber’s greed.  Humber explains the jewel is his (Kagone rolls her eyes; she’s read that combat report, she knows damn well he tossed the gem aside… hell, this exhibit is titled Discarded: Priceless Artifacts Christian Humber Threw Away).  Humber then mentions Kagone is become “look like some one I was in love with, until, hatred separated us”.  Which is of course another lie, as Humber knew nothing of Kikyo until being shot by her.  Then he asks Kagone’s name.  Kagone tells him.  It took him THIS LONG to get her name, and he’s been frigging stalking her for Lord-knows-how-long.  Humber, just for that, I’m striking “disinformation” from your list of covert skills.  YOU HEARD IT HERE, FOLKS!  KAGONE MADE CHRISTIAN HUMBER LESS POWERFUL!  NO OTHER THING IN ALL THE UNIVERSE CAN MAKE SUCH A CLAIM, HUMBER LEAST OF ALL!  HOLY SHIT!

I love you, Kagone, as much as any man can love a fictional character crudely ripped off of a copyrighted character only to become the most beloved character in said work by virtue of everyone else being horrible.

Not that she doesn’t show up Humber by virtue of just being her.  She quotes trivia at him and he freaks out.  How could she be so knowledgeable?  Because he’s that damn dumb, and Kagone knows it.  She almost certainly smokes, just a little, but she doesn’t care.  She’ll grow up to help save the universe some day.  This I can tell.

“We also found my swords, shotguns, climbing claws and my mask, which were in the museum”.  Given how powerful these artifacts are, they must be seriously maligned by association with Christian Humber for the collection to not instantly shatter on contact with non-Humberic hands and into the war chests of every crackpot third- and first-world country with a craving for power and a lack of ethics as to how that power was obtained.  Even the most hardcore bastards might feel queasy about owning a sword that personally slew 6 million innocent people and then some, much less a finicky shotgun and a dangerously unpredictable summon gun.  Plus, Humber’s icky blood is all mixed up in that one sword.  Who’d want to touch that?

Hum says for Kagone not to worry, for this is not a Thing for him.  Kagone, being the badass she is, wants to come along, but Humber denies her the opportunity, knowing she’d show him up some way.  Later that night, when they beat away the last of the Humber cultists, Humber sneaks in and starts stealin’ stealin’ his equipment.  And trips a silent alarm.

Whoops.

Humber says “fuck it” and snatches all his stuff, then makes it to the last object on his Shopping List of Stealing: his Ghost.  The Ghost, if you do not know, is a class of vehicle from Halo, and it is my favorite light land vehicle ever.  Say what you will about Humber, but he’s got great taste in light assault vehicles.  Mm’… the Ghost.  You know, the Chopper is fun, but it’s just too damn clunky.  It is very literally a tractor with a Covenant hoverpod for an ass and spike cannons bolted onto the side.  Now, I’ll gladly take a Prowler over a Warthog–no smack meant, but the Prowler is big, mean, and super-stable, and I can’t balance for crap in a Puma.  But that’s my fanboy side showing.  Humber climbs in the Ghost, in which he “used to break the speed limit about 600 times.”  A Ghost isn’t especially fast, with a roughly 40 mph cruising speed, so he’s actually well under the speed limit for most streets.  At boost it’s about 60 MPH, so what he’s saying is that he rove a lot in suburban neighborhoods and used high hills to get some sweet air time and piss off the WASPs.  Humber’s hatred for Whitey will come to play even more disturbingly in later volumes of the Saga; until then, he has some piggies to roast.

Humber blasts out of the museum, teases the officers with a shy blast of superheated plasma, and races off, where he is promptly overtaken by the faster cars and forced off the Ghost via a rifle shot to its weak point, the exposed engine on its left half.  Wait, no, that’s what should be happening, but Humber being Humber, he ditches the cops with the most hilarious of ease.  Admittedly this takes three hours.

When Humber ditches the cops he parks the Geist on Kagone’s nonexistent lawn (assuming this is Japanland) and crashes, wherein he is immediately yelled at for being an ass on TV… again.  Women, am I right, fe… wait, no, she is totally in her rights to bitch at Humber for getting in trouble with Japan again.  You go, Kag.  Have a cig, you’ve earned it.

Next: Wolves, science, and now for something completely different.

Name: Chaos Hunter Vash-Blade God
Age: 82 (574 wolf years)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Background: Orphan wolf-Saiyan-Horteka-demon-cyborg
Current Occupation: Bitch
Weaknesses: Tends to forget about life-threatening injuries
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; Wind Scar technique; Spinner projectile; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; artifact fusion; useless guardian spirit; three purifying bullets in chest; Dark Templar powers; alien atmosphere adaptation; access to Ice Emeralds; ice elemental; Angel Arm; judge of the dead; time travel; Claw of Exorcism; flight; Scroll of Town Portal (via Magun Mark II); Uniting of Sides; Absorption; Merging; healing powers used once and then promptly forgotten about.
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, house shopping, dragon taming, cocaine ingestion, mecha pilot, UFO pilot, intimidation, arctic survival, faking death, Metra Nui history, population demographics, volcanology, botany, in-field power study, disguise, lichen hunting, grenade throwing, weapons appraisal, nuclear weapon operation
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1/2/3/4/5/6, Hyper, Horteka, side unison, fusion, human form
Form Combos: Ultimate (Super Saiyan 6 + Hyper), Mega (Ultimate + Side Unison), Sora fusion
Gear: Virtue Tetsume, Tetsaiga, Tetkume keyblade, climbing claws, the Magun Mark II, +5 shotgun, Samurai pulse rifle, a shitton of normal guns, ice-elemental cyberlimb, Super Ice Emeralds, Wing Zero’s buster rifles, “serial killer” costume set, “My First One” Kid’s Large Neo Halloween costume, iPod, skull of a Miami Dolphin, bloodstained guard uniform, copy of John Romero’s “Daikatana” still stained with the great man’s blood, Kagone’s “You’re My Bitch” necklace, Ghost
Sidekicks: Season-Bringer, Sora from Kingdom Hearts, Kagone The True Heroine
UGLY: 18

Episode Twenty: Wolfman Jones and the Wolfmen Joneses
It opens with Kagone screaming, and Humber eager for murder, only for Kagsy to reveal that no, what she needs is a science project, which is due “to day,” and her subject what be wolves.  Humber naturally volunteers his services as a Wolfman Jones.  With the sleightest of efforts, Kagone has made Humber into her Science Bitch.  You’re the man now, Kag.

Later, at school, Humber, as a wolf, erupts from a heating vent, inducing the Japanese children to “probability shit themselves from fright.”  As the title hath said, he is “revealed to the world, well, sort of.”  I wonder if they’ll recognize the cyberlimb or distinctive face marking.  In fact, cyberlimbs are not well-known for their ability to transform, so what he’s got now is a human-set robotic arm jutting out at a weird angle as a forepaw.  I want to see this thing try to run.  No wonder Humber doesn’t much linger as a wolf–he must look even more ridiculidiotic than normal.  Anyhow, Humber snarls when the innocent children of Japan try to pet him; one manages to touch Humber, and of course Humber bites his hand off; “I said telepath to the guy ‘I told you not to touch me, you jackass.’”

You know… this reminds me of a story.  A horrible, racist, terrible story.  But for once, for once, it is wholly applicable.  Kagone, you are a sly little lady, but have you considered the power you’re trying to contain?  Humber is like the nuclear bomb of nuclear bombs, the way Jesus is the King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Albeit Probably Just a Cool Guy With Overenthusiastic PR.  Kagone, you knew what you were getting into when you took him.  Or perhaps she didn’t.  Did she harbor in her heart of hearts a hope he’s never actually murdered innocents?  Did she, in her youthful naivite, thought no one man could be capable of Humber’s atrocities?  For the sin of wanting to pet the wolf, a boy is permanently crippled.  Today, Kagone has grown wiser; she knows there is true evil walking this earth, and its name is Christian “Chaos Hunter Vash Blade” Humber (currently gnawing on a severed hand).

While Humber does not mention the paramedics or cops being called, or the subsequent brutal massacre of civil servants, or Kagone suffering no small level of anguish for her trust, we can, through the magic of pattern recognition, guess they happen.  Humber, in what passes for Humber’s mercy, decides to take the severed limb back to the lad.  He leaves it on the lad’s windowsill; “when he leaned out the window to pick it up he saw me sitting there calm, he probably went insane, I don’t blame him.”  At least he’s got no illusions.  I mean Story-Humber.  Actu-Humber is another story.

Later, Humber seeks a store of some sort on the street.  What happens but a fateful bump-in with Fate, followed by a kidnapping by Fate, followed by … oh God, you will see what it is followed by.

Humber has bumped into a small adventuring party running around town looking for the nearest Item Shoppe and Equipment Dispensery.  Humber senses with his Wolfsense that the folk are in fact not human at all, but wolves.  Humber tries to pass himself off as one of them, but he’s so damn white even his fellow wolfen think he’s full of shit, calling him “human.”  Humber takes infinite offense from being compared to the most industrious and powerful specie on the planet, and clocks the poor wolf-bastard.  Wolfstard.  Chain-smoking psychic leader-girl observes that Humber is telling the truth.  She smells like flowers, at least under all that pungent clove cigarette smoke.  Her name is also Chaeza, as one of her underlings inquires.  He transforms into a white wolf, but not as awesome a wolf as Humber’s Wolfstate, of course.  Chaeza, between puffs, says, “Vash, we meet at last”.  It seems that not only are they wolves, but the one whom Humber has decked is nothing less than one of his estranged brothers.  Well, wolves do have litters… still, this one is a purebred wolf without so much as a hint of horror.  Perhaps he’s a brother in the rhetorical “we’re all descendants of that one guy from so-and-so years ago” sense.

Humber invades the wolf-man’s mind and finds he’s named Kiba.  Through the magic of Google, it seems that this is in fact a crossover with Wolf’s Rain.  Remember that?  I do, vaguely, but I can’t knock out the image of Chaeza as the abovementioned chain-smoking psychic girl with a third-eye tattoo peering between her light-brown bangs.  Her eyes are cold and unchanging; it seems as all her expression is held in that staring purple eye.  It seems to dilate or contract when the lighting changes, glare when Chaeza is unamused, flare when she is startled.  But it is only ink embedded in skin… isn’t it?  Stranger things have happened, and usually fall on your head.  Such is the Pin.  Whatev’.  Humber is introduced to the gang, who are all introduced one after the other and whom I care achingly little about.  Humber catches wind they are headin’ toward Paradise, and Humber understandably wants in, “but I had to bring my things.”  Humber, the fun thing about Paradise is that you don’t need Stuff once you get there.  Unless Paradise is the nickname for the 20-years-later version of the Volcano, in which case there are still scientists to worry about, them and their probes.

Humber decides to make Kagone take care of whatever he can’t carry with him.  Upon telling Kagone he’s going to hi-tail it to Antarctica, and presumably from there to freedom, Kag Sits him out of horror.  Humber recovers and rips off the necklace, proclaiming that he’s neither Kagone’s pet or project.  No, he does not get the irony of his current situation vs. how he claimed Season-Bringer as a pet for numerous chapters.  Nonetheless, he accepts a gift from Kagone, a hand-made necklace “, with a symbol in it,”.  As it turns out, Kagone has hand-enchanted this necklace with the same damn spell and Sits him again.  Humber just laughs this off “because she gave me a home” and not because she is the one who wears the pants in the relationship and remains, now and forever, the only person in reality who can heel Humber at will.  She still stows his shit in an “underground garage,” possibly next to Dan Dreiberg’s old digs.

Not one bloody minute after setting off toward Paradise, the whole shebang gets Scienced!  Humber takes another fashionable Tranq Dart Necklace and is rendered useless.  When Humber wakes up, he finds himself and Chaeza in separate cages.  Through psionic thievery he discovers they are become taken to Omega Sector 68903, which is apparently an inescapable Hate Bucket where the cold clammy hands of science molest the secret powers of wolves from their supple furry bodies.  And again I have stabbed my sex drive, appropriately, in the crotch.

Humber and his TV Puppet Pals are separated.  Whilst Humber can maintain psionic contact with fellow sensitive Chaeza, he is muchly fucked in regards to the more combat-ready Wolfmen Jones.  He psijacks a radio signal to try and get into contact with Br’er Lupin, but the scientists grow wise to his intrusion and shut him down.  That’s two more tungsten bars they’re sticking in your gray matter, you snot-nosed wolfpunk.

Humber gets experimented upon juuuust a little bit.  What happens to him?  Use your +2 vorpal imaginations, you’ve earned it.  :3  Anyhow, while Humber suffers unimaginably at the desperate hands of the brave few putting their lives on the line to discover just what makes this thing tick, the other wolves have made their way free and barge in.  Humber joins in on the massacre.  The scientists beg for their lives.  It’s as effective as praying for God to stop the hurricane moments before the car it’s hurling at you crushes you into paste.  Humber says, “no, there will be no mercy, FOR KILLING MY FRIENDS AND FAMILY!”  He does Violence to them, and the life leaves their flesh.  With surprising wolfodexterity, he writes “BLADE WAS HERE” on the wall in the blood of the men he’s killed.  Guards blast him with tranquilizers, but at last he’s gotten around to erasing that weakness from his character sheet, and declares he’s had just enough Purple Tranq to forever be immune.  With the last of the wolves freed, Humber implores them to leave and let him wipe the thing from the earth.  He goes down as far as down gets and hurls a generic energy blast to the heart of the place.  “That was probably one of the stupidest things I’ve done because I left no time for me to escape the blast”.  He has just enough time to contemplate his idiocy before the mess collapseth upon him.

And suddenly, without pretext or explication, the viewpoint shifts to… I suppose it’s Kiba, as he’s got the most genetic material shared with Humber.  Without a breath or an asterisk or even any prior experience with perspective swaps, SWOOSH!  We go right into Kiba territory: “When the facility blew up, I thought Vash was dead”.  Wishful thinking is wishful, and Humber erupts from the remnants of the day.

And now we’re back to Humber.  Humber’s gone and hurt himself; in a rare tender moment, Humber tries to hide his agony, and only succeeds in slumping into the arms of his companions.  Chaeza nuzzles up against him and fills him with healing light, easing his wounds.  Chaeza is officially the first being in CHR who can use healing magick without forgetting about it moments later; her gift is rare, powerful, and intimate.  It’s a tender, loving moment, a sudden blossom of life in an ashen twilight of destruction.  Humber, who is dense as a neutron star and gay as the German springtime, likes the healing “because the way she heals someone is more soothing than being cooped up in a hospital”.  Meanwhile, Desuchan, who would injure itself in the first place if it meant a powerful psychic-girl would nuzzle up to them and pump them full of hot, virile healing light, facepalm through the floor.

Humber muses that perhaps mankind will stop fucking with him and wolves now because he’s exploded everything that’s tried to imprison him, except for Kagone, ’cause she rocks.  Then he notices his fellows, who are on the low end of superhuman and heavily injured, probably need to take a rest before they head back to Paradise.  Humber knows a guy who knows a guy, and “so I used the Transfer System that I gained from helping Zero fight against Copy Xthr”wwhuuuuuuuut?!  That’s right, he knows Zero, of Megaman X / Zero fame, and he teleports his canine companions to the Land of the Zeroes, where there will be no Tribble at all.  Did I mention that Humber mentions “Zero also gave me a copy of his sword, and pistol which I like”?  Because that’s about to become super important.

Next issue: Everything is clearer now.  Life is just a dream, you know, that’s never-ending… I’m… descending…

Name: Chaos Hunter Vash-Blade God
Age: 82 (574 wolf years)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Background: Orphan wolf-Saiyan-Horteka-demon-cyborg
Current Occupation: My First Universe-Ending Science Project
Weaknesses: Does not understand this thing you call “Love”, nor would you want to teach him
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; Wind Scar technique; Spinner projectile; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; artifact fusion; useless guardian spirit; three purifying bullets in chest; Dark Templar powers; alien atmosphere adaptation; access to Ice Emeralds; ice elemental; Angel Arm; judge of the dead; time travel; Claw of Exorcism; flight; Scroll of Town Portal (via Magun Mark II); Uniting of Sides; Absorption; Merging; healing powers used once and then promptly forgotten about; invasive telepathy; Transfer System access.
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, house shopping, dragon taming, cocaine ingestion, mecha pilot, UFO pilot, intimidation, arctic survival, faking death, Metra Nui history, population demographics, volcanology, botany, in-field power study, disguise, lichen hunting, grenade throwing, weapons appraisal, nuclear weapon operation
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1/2/3/4/5/6, Hyper, Horteka, side unison, fusion, human form
Form Combos: Ultimate (Super Saiyan 6 + Hyper), Mega (Ultimate + Side Unison), Sora fusion
Gear: Virtue Tetsume, Tetsaiga, Tetkume keyblade, Zero’s Sword, climbing claws, the Magun Mark II, +5 shotgun, Samurai pulse rifle, Zero’s energy pistol, a shitton of normal guns, ice-elemental cyberlimb, Super Ice Emeralds, Wing Zero’s buster rifles, “serial killer” costume set, “My First One” Kid’s Large Neo Halloween costume, iPod, skull of a Miami Dolphin, bloodstained guard uniform, copy of John Romero’s “Daikatana” still stained with the great man’s blood, Kagone’s hand-made “You’re My Bitch” necklace, Ghost
Sidekicks: Season-Bringer, Sora from Kingdom Hearts, Kagone The True Heroine, Zero (Not the Ghost Dog)
UGLY: 18

Even More Melodramatic Fiction: I Had to Cope Somehow, People
Twenty years was not enough.

Still the hells were reeling; year by year the gyre widened.  Normandy was empty.  The game was over.  The souls of the dead left through whatever worm-dug tunnels they could find, escaping to… somewhere.  Kithaungo saw nothing beyond the worms’ tunnels but a silent void (but hadn’t he heard something in the darkness?).  The damned and blessed disappeared together.  So did most of the remaining demons.  All that were left, in fact, were demons of various ranks trying to claim so-and-so dying patch of Hell-Terrain as their kingdom and all devils below them as servants.  Not a one heard his voice.  Not even Hell responded to his summons; spells known since youth, that he knew as well as the strength of his hands and the keenness of his eyes, were failing, sputtering.  They would never be cast again.  The life of Hell was draining.

He saw the void of Chaos above grow fat on the life-force of Hell.  The days were shorter and shorter, in part because Hell’s rotation grew wider and slower as its metaphysical gears rusted and broke, but because Chaos Itself was growing across the skies of the Pit.  It would be a few years, the width of a breath, before Chaos would consume all of Hell.  There was one bastion between the breaking and the birth of a new Hell–Kithaungo himself.

It was the old deal of Hell: in absence of a Satan, the strongest noble would rule.  In the negligent hands of Christian Humber Hell veered off course and into Chaos.  The cursed arrow was not enough to kill Humber, though it would have even slain the Maker, and an innocent act of self-defense was all it took to unleash the vile bastard again.  He wore the mantle of Satan and refused to use it, didn’t even know he wore it.  In absence of official authority, even Kithaungo’s noble family could not earn the respect of the hordes of Hell.  And now the diaspora was complete, the strongest gone out to the Pin, to greener pastures where the old demonic courts became nothing more than fodder for adventurers.  Billions of years of history, of upheaval, of change, of glory and horror and brutality and wonder, were coming to a close, all because Christian Humber thought killing Leheung-Do was more convenient.

Humber.

It all came down to Christian Humber.  “Chaos Hunter” by title.  His birth saw the birth of the Shade; his every atrocity fueled its inevitable return, strengthened the maw of Chaos chewing away at the skies of Hell.  He stole the crown of Satan without knowing the responsibilities.  He was awake again, surely moments away from murdering yet more innocents out of a misplaced need to survive.

His every breath was an insult to the memory of Hell, a blasphemy against Father Lucifer.

At the dawn of time, the Maker struck the glowing coal of the forge of Nothing; from the first blow made the stars, the second made the planets, and the third gave birth to the Invisible Clergy, that the stars and the planets could make a meaning for themselves.  Lucifer descended into the Eternal Darkness, where collected the loathsome and terrible impurities of the heavens.  In that vast and terrible Pit he named Hell, he promised to marshal the damned and rarify them to something greater than they had ever been, could ever be in the world struck from that coal of Nothing.  The process would take until the end of time, would consume the hearts and souls of all who dared join Lucifer.  In his wisdom, Lucifer divided each of his followers into two essential halves: a human soul and a demon’s form.  The demon’s form could jade and fracture and become grim and terrible, but with a human soul, even the eternal labor of Hell could be survived–triumphed over.

Humber used his demonic side to gain more power but rejected humanity, the essential part of him that would lead Hell to heights undreamed of.  If Humber had taken the mantle of Satan, Chaos would have been extinguished ages ago, the Work advanced by countless ages.  But all he wanted was power, all he needed was victims to use it upon.  And now the demons had fled, their dream forgotten; the souls of the damned had wasted away into the darkness, simply erased.  Lucifer’s dream was dead.  For want of power, the work of fourteen billion years was gone.

Tears in his eyes, the dream of Hell in his heart, the impotent rage of a demon in his shadow, Kithaungo made his final bid.  As far as he knew, there was only one chance left for him–for all of Hell.

He must kill Christian Humber.

Age 21: The Chapter That Can Legally Drink Alcohol

If every single other atrocity Christian Humber has performed hasn’t hammered the point home yet, then this, the day of my daughter’s wedding, shall see the end of your doubts.

When we last left Christian Humber, he and his new wolfpals completely abandoned the whole “looking for Paradise” idea and chill at Zero’s base.  Not the ghost dog, not the Hutt.  Zero, known robot.  The first stupid words out of Charisma Humberter’s mouth are: “‘here’s your old armor?’ he gave a look then I remembered ‘oh yea, you gave it to me as a thank you gift, I need repairs for the armor, and some food.’”  Humber can info-dump like he’s got info-diarrhea.  Anyhow, Humber chats up the Cyber-Elf (my mind is feverish with mental images, but no, they’re just these… thingeys… that… stuff) by the name of Elypso.  It seems that another Copy X has been birthed from the X-Womb, and requires postnatal abortion like you wouldn’t believe.  Humber volunteers his services, but it seems that Copy X’s Pimpin’ Bachelor Base is a fair distance away.  Humber remembers that he can fly and teleport, and so naturally calls in a favor to his good pal Cid to take him to the lair of the Land-X so he doesn’t have to do either.  Which Cid, you ask?  Cid from Final Fantasy X.  And he’s brought the gang along with him, because why not?

Get used to the sight of the cast of Effeff Ecks; it’s readily apparent that Humber loves him some Final Fantasy X.  “Tidus, Rikku, Lulu, Wakka, Kemarhi, Paine, Yuna and Aroron” are aboard, and leave it to Humber to screw up the names of the two biggest badasses of Final Fantasy X: The Thunder Down Under.  Or perhaps they deigned step out of this duel by purposefully getting into a modest car accident, necessitating some bed rest conveniently long enough to get them out of filming their cameo for CHR.  All while getting to bang Spiran nurses.  Auron, you dog!  Khimari, admittedly, is likely brooding and speaking broken English.  Spirglish?  Whatever.  Auron is too busy being better than you to care about niggling details like how the airship, with Humber and Zero abaird, is a-rushin’ to X-Land, Home of the Dollar Pinata.

Because there are anti-air defenses, Humber requests they pretty please use that grapnel line thingey to grind down to the base and explode stuff stylish-like.  Humber and Y.R.P. ride down; Humber goes to the unnecessary length of mentioning that everybody is in their default combat outfit, all to lead up to yet another clue that Christian Humber is queer as a western sunrise: he has a dressphere.  He rocks the Psycho Sphere, and, to Humber’s mind at least, “I looked like a psychopath because I had a leather jacket, jeans a white shirt, hockey mask and a huge knife”.  Apparently, Christian Humber’s mental image of a psychopath is Arthur Fonzarelli with a hockey mask and cutting implement.  Tidus backs away, Humber attributing his nervous gut to fear.  In all honesty, Tidus has a crippling fear of The Fonz after a disturbing incident involving an animatronic The Fonz head attempting to devour him when he was but a shota.

Anyhow, after clearing the surface defenses, Humber and Zero burn through the base and find Copy X in just a few minutes–and guess who’s there negotiating something or other?  “Kekanu’s brother, the same mother fucker who killed my friends 24 years ago”!  Holy shit, it’s Kithaungo.  And to think Humber was on a completely unrelated tangent until now.  What a tweest!  X and Zero pair off for sweet murderous murdering; Humber and Kithaungo have a staredown.  “I went to my mega form and he transformed to his demon form.”  The final fight for the destiny of Hell begins!
Zero and X duel, the din taking an hour to resolve.  But Christian Humber’s war with Kithaungo lasts for two.  Two lines after the fight starts, Humber declares, “The fight lasted for about two hours until I pulled the Z saber out and slashed him, when it cut him part of his body disintegrated”.  Humber realizes only the Z Saber can kill Kithaungo, and so activates his Zero-gifted armor, which amplifies his whatever.  Humber seems to believe in some strange branch of magical thinking where things that look like each other have a tendency to merge with each other, for the moment he straps on the Zero Equipment, Zero Himself is dragged into Humber and Fusion-Raped into “the Legendary Blade Zero.”  Hum: you can only be legendary if you’ve ever been before.  Blade Zero just happened because you craved Zero’s masculine robot body, but realized balls touching was not gay enough for you, and so went to the logical extreme of balls existing coterminously, the only other thing in all the universe as gay as the Westboro Baptist Church or Orson Scott Card.  Humber is distracted from setting back the cause of gay rights by the still-aliveness of Copy X, whom he murders in but a blast, which also destroys exactly 1/10th of the base.  That’s what you mean by “decimate,” isn’t it, Humber?

Megaman X, Known Copy, is STILL not dead, and shoots Humber, only to have the fused bastard’s aura drink it like a refreshing Mint Julep, and eking out one more Mordblitz from Humber.  X is dead; long live the X.

Humber is busy picking his nose when suddenly more demons arrive!  But rather than start murdering, they start… weeping?  In fact, one of them rushes to the dying Kithaungo and sobs, “‘Kethongo, my son, who did this to you?’ Kethongo said ‘It was him’ pointing in my direction”.  With that, Kithaungo passes from this land.  Humber, in the ultimate, ULTIMATE dick move, sarcastically says, “I’m sorry for killing your son, how can I make it up to you for his death”.

Picture this: the last hope for Hell is dead, killed in one stroke by the one thing that stood between him and the rescue of the Underlight.  He is your own son; as you cradle his destroyed form to your chest, you can feel the last of his life leaving him.  Kithaungo is dead; all that you have fought for, believed in, is dead with him.  His blood stains your robes.  As you rock back and forth, wishing to the uncaring and impotent gods to bring your boy back to life, the bastard responsible for his death, for his brothers’ deaths, for the death of everything that matters, snaps out of some daydream and notices you.  He says, layering on the insincerity, “I’m sorry for killing your son.  How can I ever make it up to you?”  He pretends to be sorry, pretending to wipe away tears.  Christian Humber does not care about you, or your family, or the universe.  Your boy’s death is just another in a long, long line of destroyed lives.  And this is the thing who chooses who goes to Hell and Heaven, who has the impossible cosmic responsibility of judging the worth of the dead, and he hasn’t even the most basic respect for life even a demon feels in its heart of hearts.  This monster has murdered everything worth saving.  And here he is, mocking your son, whose blood still flows warm from his killing wound.

Christian Humber says, “they all rushed at me, they fucked up big time because I had my hand on Tetsiga”.  In light of all this, I think we can forgive Kithaungo’s family for a sudden lapse of judgment.

The last ruling family in Hell perform the Demon Rush, and Humber knocks them all back with decisive slashes of the Tetsaiga.  But they constantly regenerate from the damage he puts out.  Just when it seems that Humber is slightly inconvenienced by this demonic onslaught, Sora shows back up, and is himself fused into the morass what is Humber.  “Kekanu’s family backed away scared from the sight of me, I also was fused with Zero, which makes me Blade-Zero Matrix.”  Blade Zero Matrix, the newest rape-born abomination of Christian Humber, finally puts Keikanu’s family to the sword, erasing their corporeal forms to ensure they cannot regenerate.  And with that, Hell plunges irrevocably into the endless night of the soul.  Hooray!

I pull this review to a premature stop, for there is much horror to come, and in the conclusion of Act Four, we shall see even more horror than previously exposition has unveiled.  We’re getting closer to the ropes, and Humber is pulling out all the stops.  Or, rather, we were getting closer to the ropes.  Were.

There are more than six parts to Christian Humber.  If indications are true, there are many, many more than six parts.

For the sake of my sanity, I will curtail this particular review at six.  Further parts, if I dare, shall be reviewed under the auspice of Christian Humber Reloaded II: The Tsundere Down Undere.  The Work is sacrosanct; it is inviolate, save in all the violate ways Humber has thrust it into us.  Let be be finale of seem; there is no emperor but Christian Humber, the Wolf Sayan Dragon Demon Horteka Vampire Cyborg.

Name: Mr. Chaos Hunter Vash-Blade God Selfdestruct
Age: 82 (574 wolf years)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Background: Orphan wolf-Saiyan-Horteka-demon-cyborg
Current Occupation: Dick
Weaknesses: Complete irredeemable monster
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; Wind Scar technique; Spinner projectile; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; artifact fusion; useless guardian spirit; three purifying bullets in chest; Dark Templar powers; alien atmosphere adaptation; access to Ice Emeralds; ice elemental; Angel Arm; judge of the dead; time travel; Claw of Exorcism; flight; Scroll of Town Portal (via Magun Mark II); Uniting of Sides; Absorption; Merging; healing powers used once and then promptly forgotten about; invasive telepathy; Transfer System access; being a total dick.
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, house shopping, dragon taming, cocaine ingestion, mecha pilot, UFO pilot, intimidation, arctic survival, faking death, Metra Nui history, population demographics, volcanology, botany, in-field power study, disguise, lichen hunting, grenade throwing, weapons appraisal, nuclear weapon operation, mocking the dying
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1/2/3/4/5/6, Hyper, Horteka, side unison, fusion, human form
Form Combos: Ultimate (Super Saiyan 6 + Hyper), Mega (Ultimate + Side Unison), Sora fusion, Zero fusion (Blade Zero), Sora + Blade fusion (Blade Zero Matrix)
Gear: Virtue Tetsume, Tetsaiga, Tetkume keyblade, Zero’s Sword, climbing claws, the Magun Mark II, +5 shotgun, Samurai pulse rifle, Zero’s energy pistol, a shitton of normal guns, ice-elemental cyberlimb, Super Ice Emeralds, Wing Zero’s buster rifles, Psycho Dressphere, “My First One” Kid’s Large Neo Halloween costume, iPod, skull of a Miami Dolphin, bloodstained guard uniform, copy of John Romero’s “Daikatana” still stained with the great man’s blood, Kagone’s hand-made “You’re My Bitch” necklace, Ghost
Sidekicks: Season-Bringer, Sora from Kingdom Hearts, Kagone The True Heroine, Zero (Not the Hutt or the Ghost Dog)
UGLY: 18

Episode Twenty-Two: The End of an Era
Here is the make of our days.  2/3rds done with the original Christian Humber Reloaded.  What lies behind us?  What slinks ahead?  The top of the mountain is shrouded in mist, the path ahead becoming clearer the further we descend.  It took twelve acts to reach the end of the first third; only ten to reach here.  How long shall the last age be?  We shall see.  Know the number of your days, gentlemen, for we are in the court of the Christian Hum, and it just makes less and less and less sense from here.

“But,” you say, “it has made no sense thus far!”

Even now you make the mistake of underestimating Christian Humber.  He will break you down.  He will make your head hurt.

Let us pray:

Here we shall see a side of Christian Humber we have never even guessed before: the Christian Humber that gets pissed off when something deviates from canon!  Yes.  Christian Humber.  Being picky.  About canon.  Actual canon.  I told you this was going to make even less sense, and you didn’t believe me, and now you have to have expensive surgery to fit your brain back together.  You knew I was a scorpion when you picked me up.

Humber births Sora and Zero, who promptly curl into balls and pray to their heathen gods for death.  Humber chats up the swanky Al Bhed in their Al Bheddish tongue.  I knew a guy (on a forum) who could speak fluent Al Bhed, and I bore witness to a fluent Al Bhed conversation there.  I am unkidding.  Interrupting this multilingual funfest is an alarm from Cid, for trouble is aboot and can only be looked at from the bridge.  What could trouble be?  “if you guess Kekanu your either stupid or retarded, it was Sin and Vagnagun[.]“  Well, Keikanu is an infinitely-recurring villain who we all wish to see again, and neither of those fellows are native to Earth.  In fact, quite the opposite!   They are native to Not Alive Anymore.  Humber remembers this tidbit and is heard to proclaim, “WTF? SIN AND VAGNAGUN- ALIVE? THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE! THEY BOTH GOT DISTROYED!”  Like I said, it’s a weird feeling.  Puffing on his mystic and previously-unseen pipe, Cid says, “they were-until now”.  Humber takes off in a huff to murder both of them again (it’s not really murder in regards to Vagnagun, but it’s murderous intent, which should count).  Before he can make with the murder, Tidus makes a painful revelation: “Sin… is… my… old man”.  Confronted with the news that Tidus, friend to children, is the son of a scourge of worlds, remarks, “you mean Sin is Ject! Well that means killing Sin will be a lot more fun.”  Humber’s been nursing that kill-a-celebrity fetish in silence for a while.  Now he can actually kill a famous person and not just a B-grade toy big-bad-evil-guy, location, or unnamed prominent unit type!  Or the last hopes of Hell.  Save one…

Finding the two garfuckinggantuan monsters is going to be a problem, for they have taken refuge in the sea, known to harbor such natural terrorists as Godzilla and several squids.  Humber knows the score, for to attract Sin, they must find its spawn, for, as anybody who has played Final Fantasy X can tell you (several, anyway), Sin is known to come back for its cutlets.  They seek and find three Sinspawn and… take them to Iraq?

In the grim darkness of the distant future there is still an Iraq War, either that or Iraq is still undergoing a messy occupation, for there is an army base in Iraq and Humber’s just hauled a bunch of blasphemous abominations there; Humber convinces them to lend a shootin’ hand in the name of stopping Sin.  Why?  Because Humber doesn’t give a shit about Iraq, in those precise words, even though he’s asked the Army to help torture a bunch of Sinspawn to attract an unfathomably powerful monster to attack it.  A primarily seabound monster.  How far away from big bodies of water is Iraq?  Did Humber think this through clearly?  Of course he did not, because he just dragged a bunch of Sinspawn to Abu Ghraib for torturin’.  The LSD Humber’s brain produces as a byproduct of his writing (like toxic waste) must be potent stuff.

The Army rolls up its collective sleeve and prepares to plumb the depths of the Sinspawns’ untouchables.  I know it’s torture and all, but the noises, the noiiiiises!  Oh God.  It’s just as bad for the torturist as the tortured.  They open their Deluxe Punishment Bag for this one.  Meanwhile, where is Humber and co.?  “Sora, Tidus, Wakka, Aruron Yuna, Rikku, Zero, Paine, Lulu, Kimahri and myself kept an eye out for Sin and Vagnagun”, presumably while sipping chilled ices.  Some men will never get that smell out of their limb, and Humber is sipping a chilled ice.  With flavour!  Such wastefulness!

And yes, torturing the Sinspawn has a cumulative effect with just havin’ ‘em.  Humber espies the dread lord crest the horizon, finishes his chilled ice, and intones, “let’s get to work”.  He heck of pops his knucklebones for this.  The rest are still languid from the flavor and richness of their ices, with their flavors, and their sweetness.  “I used my power to blow a hole in Sin” begins Hum, wounding Sin in a moment where an entire game was spent finding a weakpoint just to crawl in.  But well, there you go.

“but I didn’t count on Vagnagun doing something I hated: it merged with Sin, making it stronger.”  Shit, we really are playing under Batman Begins bad guy escalation.  Humber does not like it, no siree.  I mean, I don’t either.  Think of how the rest of the world is dealing with this fallout.  If all the world scales to Christian Humber’s character level, Oblivion-esque, what of all those poor guards who have one suit of armor and edged weapon forever?  This is like if The Dark Knight were about Superman somehow spawning a Super Joker, and Superman being too busy killing Miami to care about whatever Super Joker is Super Doing Horrifyingly.  Why so super serious?  Anyway, if Sin and Veg–

Wait.

VAGNAgun?  A world-killing super weapon, and he calls it VAGNAgun?  Toss that onto the Christian Humber As Folk evidence puddle.  It’s ever-deeper.  Speaking of which, Christian Humber re-sexsorbs Zero and Sora, but finds that he still can’t reach his highest level of power.  Possibly because they haven’t recovered from their last molestation adventure.  Humber remembers that whole “Paradise” and “I’m an ice elemental” thing and orders Cid “head to the artic, because there are too many people around and I’ll make it follow us”.  Why are you now conc… oh, because they’ll see you slightly weaker than you prefer, and you can’t have that happening.  To the frozen south!

Humber has excellent dramatic timing.  In a sense.  For when we have reached the end of an age, we are assailed with the most senses-shattering b.s. he can summon.  And Lord do I mean summon.  Sit awhile and listen, for we tread unhallowed ground, and it was not meant that we should venture here.

The Man-Train (w/Yuna, Rikku, Paine, and Lulu) rides out for Staten Island, I mean Antarctica, while Humber casually hurls energy blasts at the combination Sin-Vegnagun.  You know, given what Sin is, and what Vegnagun is, they probably “fused” via an unusually large roll of duct tape.  With Vegnagun astride Sin, Sin astride the world, and Humber astride the aforementioned Man Train, the incredibly lazy and uninteresting battle explodes its way to the arctic wastes that, ironically, serve as the gasoline on Christian Humber’s tire fire of power.  Upon reaching the arctic, Humber hops onto his native land (so cold it is, and not exactly native) and faces the beast head-on.  He’s got a home field advantage in fighting from the Extinct Volcano… which we may deduce to be Paradise… which is where all Humber’s wolfish relatives live… and which Humber has just put in the path of two monsters, one of whom routinely levels cities, the other of whom is designed to bust planets.  Ha ha.  Oh wow.  Meanwhile, the airship craps out a “Machina scout,” sequel to the scout droid, known hero of the revolution, to see the carnage unfold from a safe distance.  Christian Humber pulls out all the stops: “I used the Super ice emeralds, went super Sayin stage 5 and activated my armor”.  Whatever Sin ca– wait, it’s Sin and Vegnagun combined.  So it’s… Vagnasin.

Vagna-Sin.

Humber is sore afraid of the female specie.  So speaks Kriegsaffe!

Vagna-Sin hurls a beam of coherent light at Humber, which strikes him what for.  But Humber seems to be experiencing an absence of pain!  Is he that sheerly broken?  Yes, but not in the way you’re expecting: “when I opened my eyes the blast was stuck, I was wondering what was happening until I looked at my reflection in the ice and I saw I was wearing the Kanohi Vahi: the mask of time”.  Where did it come from?  Why did it come from?  And when?

The same place the “mysterious sand” comes from as it fuses with the mask.  Yes.  Sand.  Do you know what’s going to happen?  Vagna-Sin shoots another blast at Humber, which means that first blast had to go somewhere.  Guess what he’s standing in front of?  Christian Humber, you ruin everything you’re associated with.  Even with his new Fancy Mask, the next blast shears Humber’s cyberlimb off… until time reverses and instead it is de-sheared.  “I thought ‘I’m very pissed off and confused’”  So do we, Hum.  Fortunately, the Prince of Persia, confusingly introducing himself as a prince of Babylon, butts in, explaining that Humber has been impregnated with the Sands of Time, and that he should really watch his back for those Time Dudes what hate when people screw around with time.  Humber could care less and excuses himself to murder Vagna-Sin, who patiently waits for Humber to take his turn and scratching at the nasty peeling skin on its hide.  Which of course become Sinscales and make with the attempted murder.  The Prince wants to help, but Humber says “you can’t hurt it because it is a fusion of one creature and one machine called Vagnasin”.  If it were called anything but Vagna-Sin, he’d be cool.  But the name is the tipping point.  That, and the Prince is righteously squicked out by the Sinscales being nasty dried skin flakes.  Did anybody else think of Sin when the monster started shedding parasites in Cloverfield?

Humber unites all his sides like the ingredients in a shaker of liquor and readies Tetsaiga for a dose of Wind Scar.  The standard-issue Wind Scar is but a breeze on Vagna-Sin’s cheek.  Humber, no shit, remembers he’s an ice elemental and USEs ICE on WIND SCAR to juice it up to Ultimate, “but I actually skipped the Ultimate form and accidentally went Omega.”  This has no consequence other than achieving what Humber set out to do, knocking off one of Vegnagun’s limbs.

Sin makes a tactical retreat into the ocean depths.  Christian Humber follows, and… sees Vagna-Sin swim into a portal.  “I have a real bad feeling about what’s going to happen,” the end.

Of series 2.  Of 3.  Steel thyselves, for sensicality has, once and for all, been stabbed in the throat.

Next time: Two Funerals and a Wedding.

Name: Mr. Chaos Hunter Vash-Blade God Selfdestruct
Age: 82 (574 wolf years)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Background: Orphan wolf-Saiyan-Horteka-demon-cyborg
Current Occupation: Sin-chaser
Weaknesses: Remembering that collateral damage happens
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; Wind Scar technique; Ultimate Wind Scar; Omega Wind Scar; Spinner projectile; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; artifact fusion; useless guardian spirit; three purifying bullets in chest; Dark Templar powers; alien atmosphere adaptation; access to Ice Emeralds; ice elemental; Angel Arm; judge of the dead; time travel; Claw of Exorcism; flight; Scroll of Town Portal (via Magun Mark II); Uniting of Sides; Absorption; Merging; healing powers used once and then promptly forgotten about; invasive telepathy; Transfer System access; being a total dick; control of the Sands of TIME.
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, house shopping, dragon taming, cocaine ingestion, mecha pilot, UFO pilot, intimidation, arctic survival, faking death, Metra Nui history, population demographics, volcanology, botany, in-field power study, disguise, lichen hunting, grenade throwing, weapons appraisal, nuclear weapon operation, mocking the dying, tracking, persuasion, chilled-ice taster, swimming
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1/2/3/4/5/6, Hyper, Horteka, side unison, fusion, human form
Form Combos: Ultimate (Super Saiyan 6 + Hyper), Mega (Ultimate + Side Unison), Sora fusion, Zero fusion (Blade Zero), Sora + Blade fusion (Blade Zero Matrix)
Gear: Virtue Tetsume, Tetsaiga, Tetkume keyblade, Zero’s Sword, climbing claws, the Magun Mark II, +5 shotgun, Time Mask, Samurai pulse rifle, Zero’s energy pistol, a shitton of normal guns, ice-elemental cyberlimb, Super Ice Emeralds, Wing Zero’s buster rifles, Psycho Dressphere, “My First One” Kid’s Large Neo Halloween costume, iPod, skull of a Miami Dolphin, bloodstained guard uniform, copy of John Romero’s “Daikatana” still stained with the great man’s blood, Kagone’s hand-made “You’re My Bitch” necklace, Ghost
Sidekicks: Season-Bringer, Sora from Kingdom Hearts, Kagone The True Heroine, Zero

Episode Twenty-Three: Welcome to Spira, Here’s Your Moisture
Live–streaming–from the distant past, an oddly-specific 1,002 years ago, is nothing other than… “Zanerkand!”  Jesus on the Christ River, Hum, it’s been years since I played and I know it’s spelled “Zanarkand.”  Humber splashes into the sphere pool, and the announcer… announces… “this is truly amazing, someone fell out of the sky and is in the middle of the field”  Humber naturally whips out all his swords and starts killing pe–wait, no, he doesn’t.  He says “Hi” to Tidus, excuses himself, and leaves to watch the game.  What… what manner of sorcery is this?!  Humber, being polite and excusing himself?  Not attempting to fuck up the timeline other than weirding out Tidus with a friendly greeting?  This tears it: Christian Humber is in love with Final Fantasy X.  He actually holds its canon with respect.  Mind, he will still bend and rape it ever-so-softly, because, well, it just wouldn’t be Humber without symbolically raping canon in the fashion of hounds, all whilst gulping down cans of creamed corn–such disdain he has, and so much.

In fact, the opening ten minutes of Final Fantasy X play out almost uninterrupted by his presence, save for assisting in the killing of Sinscales with his commemorative Greetings From Zanarkand! Buster Sword.  Shake it and snow falls on the Abes as they plant the flag at Iwo Jima.  Long story behind that.  But it’s fascinating, especially from the perspective of a xenoanthropologist, as outlined in my upcoming thesis War of the Man-Apes: The Story of Iwo Jima From the Perspective of Earth 236 and the Men and Men-Apes Who Fought It.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So, the entire demo is plain through, suddenly Humber experiences an epiphany: “When my powers returned I flew straight up and went fast enough to go forward in time.”  Humber learned time travel from Superman, apparently, and… okay, get this.  Humber was apparently depowered for the extent of the opening, which oddly enough does not prevent him from using a Buster Sword in what we can hope is human form; thus we may assume he didn’t fuck with time sheerly because he couldn’t.  But when his powers return, instead of fucking with the timeline–as we expect him to do–he just flies off to the future.  Humber is taking only Sinscale-heads and leaving only footprints and an extremely confusing memory for Tidus.  This is like one of those Star Trek “Evil Stuff” epishore.  Sans the goatees.

So, Christian Humber speeds to the future on a wing and a prayer and arrives back in the Comparative Present.  Did I mention Humber calls the Sinscales “ugly” [19]?  Welcome back, Ugly.  We’ve missed you?  Humber emergeth from time’s birth canal and into the Farplane, where hangs Vagna-Sin.  It seems to be supping on souls in the Farplane.  What does a Pyrefly taste like?  Imagine dumping Pop Rocks in lemon-lime soda and misting it out in an atomizer while somehow keeping the Pop Rocks suspended in it.  Also it cries when you eat it.  “I used my radio to contact Cid and I did”, quod Humber.  Is handling a radio that difficult?  It is when it’s a novelty Rubix Cube radio, where you have to flip the colors juuuust right in order to call who you wanna get your call on mit.  If you pull off the stickers, you forever ruin the radio, and it also bursts into flame and insults your mother.  So yeah, good job, Humber!  You cubed that Rubix good.  Humber updates Cid on his position and espies something queer on the deck of the Vegnagun chunk of Vagna-Sin.  Humber takes a closer look at the two duct-taped-together monsters, through the scope of the sniper rifle he keeps next to his wallet and cell ph… I mean next to the rest of his guns.

It’s Shujan!  You mean Shujen, I mean Shuyin?  Jesus, Humber is bad at spelling names you see named in the games.  So, Humber is pissed off at Shujen.  So pissed off he actually calls Yuna to get there and take care of him herself.  Humber, you’re starting to scare me.  You’re Christian Humber!  I thought you hated deferring to continuity!  His respect for Final Fantasy X is both so deep and so superficial all he does is sit twiddling his thumbs in anger for an hour while Yuna and co. work on the Farplane paperwork.  Will Wakka’s accent get him a cavity search for Spiran cannabis again?  It just might!

The Final Fantasy Funpal Gang rock back to the beginning, sinking, spinning, that they may fight Shuyin again and re-teach him the valuable lesson he seems to have forgotten.  Maybe Pyrefly ghosts have a tendency to repeat shit.  You’d think the destruction of Vegnagun would preclude this attempt succeeding, but no!  He carved his own Vegnagun out of thousands of tons of exotic matter using only a prison spoon (made of Pyreflies) and his sheer determination to shoot Shira in the head with a gun big enough to kill God.  In that light, perhaps he’d have a better chance just sticking a pistol grip on Christian Humber.

Sora and Zero, still in tremendous spiritual pain, are still hanging on the ship, and Sora volunteers his eyes to see Shuyin’s “ugly” face.  That’s [20] and, well, isn’t Shuyin a dead ringer for Tidus?  I hope you didn’t say that aloud around our girl Yuna.  He invites Sora to finally use that Hellfragger rocket launcher, referred to always in its fullest of names, the prospect of which makes Sora smile a “psycho smile,” “which he learned from me”.  Sora is as threatening as a goldfish with unusually large car keys, ergo the “psycho smile” must be hilarious.  Sora opens fire, but the effect merely makes Shuyin aware that someone is shooting at him.  This keeps him from killing the dead long enough for Yuna and Special Dead Girl Guest Star Len to stage an intervention.  Humber chews out Shuyin for being an apocalyptdick, which is so ironic one of my eyes rocketed out of the socket and bounced off the monitor of my laptop, leaving a creamy, bloody eyeprint.  In fact, Humber declares, “I COULD GET YOU TWO MARRIED BUT YOUR HEART IS TAINTED WITH DARKNESS, SO YOU CANT GO INTO A TEMPLE WITH OUT GETTING BAPTIZED!”  I’d critique Humber’s assumption that baptism figures into Spiran religion, but hell, there’s water everywhere else, including the temples, they might as well dunk people in ‘em.

The whole misunderstanding… clears up.  Because Len and Shuyin comically thump against the wall between the Spiran deadside and liveside, Yuna has to go borrow a priest to get them wed.  There’s some snafu about getting the Fayth chambers all straightened up, but that is, of course, never mentioned again.

So, Humber solved this problem nonviolently and without gaining any new powers in the way.

WHAT?!!

“You know how a wedding goes but this wedding was more interesting than any other wedding because I’ve never seen two unsent people get married before.”

A wedding.

Shuyin and Len are getting married.

In Christian Humber Reloaded, two lovers separated by gulfs of time, death, and rage are united at last in the matrimony denied them in life.  This is happening in Christian Motherfucking Humber Reloaded.  What kind of deviltry is this?!  I mean, it’s still horrible, but it’s so different it’s like driving to work and discovering the boss installed a boost pad into the parking lot whilst you were out.

It’s a wedding.  It’s wedding as hell.

“I pretty much fell asleep during it the thing that woke me up was the sound of a huge machine moving and when I looked over where the noise was coming from, I laughed because Vagnasin was coming looking beautiful.”  The ultimate war machine is now gussied up properly for love, strewn with streamers, beautiful fields of flowers growing across Sin’s ancient, vile hide, bringing life and verve to its sterile ecosystem.  I have to admit it, it takes him a while to get there, but Christian Humber has succeeded in filling me with unending horror.

And now, a surprise guest appearance by Jecht, who is drunk and demands more beer!  Humber removes him and tells the couple-to-become that it’s cool to continue.  Jecht, for appearing a few lines, is perfectly in character, and could only be moreso if he insulted Tidus and then impregnated Tidus’s mother while mocking Tidus.  “Think this one’ll come out better?  We’re gonna see, ain’t we?  Woooooooooo!”

It’s going well.  It’s going suspiciously well.  In fact, now that I’ve mentioned it’s going suspiciously well, something spectacular is going to occur and cut me off in mid-sentence to do so.  We

A Momentary Diversion on the Road to Completion: Just One More, I Promise
Twenty-three years.  A number of destiny.

Twenty-three years in the jaws of his methodological opposites.  As a tender of the damned, he was offensive to them in every way; as a demon lord, he was worst among the wost; as someone who dared to fight against the Thing Itself, he was a mirror that showed them all the many ways in which they had utterly failed.  Twenty-three years of loneliness and pain.  Even the merciful god they served could only look on as His servants tore him to pieces, again and again.

Twenty-three years.

In the end, it was the queen of the angels who called an end to his suffering.  She drew her flaming sword and parted the angels.  While they had almost forgotten how to feel, the fear of her sword burned through the numb haze of decades of irrelevance and they fled, leaving him untouched for the first time in all those years.

She walked beside him… knelt.  He breathed for the first time in Heaven’s celestial shores, having been strangulated from the moment he arrived.  The wind had the recycled and bland taste of the air in a morgue.  The delicate scent of Heaven faded since Humber eclipsed the greatness of its maker.

“You’re still alive,” she said.

“In Heaven, I cannot die,” Keikanu said.  His voice was strange, fractured.  He’d almost forgotten the sound of his own voice.

“You should have been dead moments after you arrived,” she says.  “A demon is not allowed to live for long in Heaven.  We’ve seen it before; Humber enjoys that trick.  You should have been destroyed.”

Keikanu says nothing.

She reaches out.  He flinches, but her touch is soothing, calm, full of the warmth and care Heaven has forever denied him.  He thinks of his mother.

“You were meant to come here,” she says.  “Of all the demons who ever lived… you were the only one worthy of Heaven’s shores.”

Keikanu opens his eyes and sees the master of the angels in all her glory.  His heart is understandably cold to the beauties of Heaven, and though he is startled, he is not moved.  “In the furnace of Hell,” Keikanu says, “every demon must beat down on the anvil of Hell.  In this way…”  His voice cracks.  “In this way we do we redeem the fallen.”  He knows it.  He can sense it now that his head is clear.

“All gone,” she lies.  “At his hands.  Not long ago.”

Keikanu weeps.  His wails tear at the hearts of every angel in attendance.  The queen of the angels cradles his head in her lap.  Two decades of torture could not destroy him.  The angels could not destroy him.  Only Humber.  Of course.

When the crying stops, Keikanu rises to his feet.  They are unsteady; the queen catches him.

“We cannot offer much,” the angel says.  “Only this.”

She presents him with her sword.  The first of firsts feared this blade.  Not even Christian Humber’s sword, any of them, is its equal.  He takes it.  His wounds, all of them, heal, and he is changed.  In his hands destiny quivers with naive hope: could this be it?  Is this the one moment?

It may be.

“Thank you,” Keikanu says, and swings the blade.  He can feel it slice through destiny.  It is heavy with meaning.  This is its calling–a blade to bring balance to infinity.  It is Atonement.

The queen’s impossibly beautiful face cracks a faint smile.  “Shall we open the door?”

We Now Return To Our Scheduled Horror
Interrupting Len and (cough cough) Shuyin’s wedding is nothing less than a host of angels tearing open the way to let Keikanu Himsel ride through with a blade of white hot angelic vengeance!  Hot damn.

“I sighed and started fighting, Tidus said ‘don’t mind them, they’re just settling a score’ I finally killed him and erased his soul from the world. And made sure Kekanu and his family won’t ever come back.”

Wep.

The wedding’s over, I mean, that’s all we hear about it.  In what is the very spirit of Irony, Keikanu’s final bid to stop Humber has ended in his eternal destruction and steered him back on the Path of the Bleeding Real.  In fact, Humber now goes on a disturbed rant: “I didn’t tell you I have an obsession with destruction, which means, if a Biffy blows up it’s probably me, entertaining myself.”  A… what?  A Biffy?  What the… apparently it’s an outdoor toilet.  Christian Humber, who can annihilate all of reality, will blow up outdoor toilets for shits (pardon the pun) and giggles?  What the fuck, Humber.  “I’ve made explosives before for everyday use, I will level city blocks just for the thrill.”  Oh.  Also that.  You see, Kithaungo didn’t have to stretch especially far to get in-character as Christian Humber.

In fact, this has reignited his bloodlust to such a degree that he now contemplates revenge against Bevelle for “locking [him] in a prison.”  What prison?  Are you speaking as Humber The True, the man-child behind the story?  He hunts down Seymour Guado, takes him out of the Farplane–resurrecting him–and kills him AGAIN, all while Yuna offers to Send him.  Humber refuses.  In fact, he deposits Seymour in a New Yevon rockery, “they found him upside-down, heart ripped out, eyes ripped out, castrated, tongue cutout, gut-less and wrapped in barbed wire.”  Good God, Humber!  He’s dead, he’s sufficiently punished!

“I also met Yunalesca; I pretty much did the same thing I did to Seymour but instead of hanging her upside-down I left her lying on Bevelle’s temple’s doorstep, yea I’m that ruthless.”  She’s ALSO dead!  And a hair follicle for a much larger and more horrific monster!

Okay, Christian Humber is now the Ultimate Experience in Gruelling Horror.  Jesus on the Christ River.

Next Time: Nice job Not Breaking It, hero; meeting some old acquaintances and killing them; you know how he didn’t gain any new powers this time?  Well, that’s not going to last too long.

Name: Mr. Chaos Hunter Vash-Blade God Selfdestruct
Age: 82 (574 wolf years)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Background: Orphan wolf-Saiyan-Horteka-demon-cyborg
Current Occupation: Sin-chaser
Weaknesses: Remembering that collateral damage happens
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; Wind Scar technique; Ultimate Wind Scar; Omega Wind Scar; Spinner projectile; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; artifact fusion; useless guardian spirit; three purifying bullets in chest; Dark Templar powers; alien atmosphere adaptation; access to Ice Emeralds; ice elemental; Angel Arm; judge of the dead; time travel; Claw of Exorcism; flight; Scroll of Town Portal (via Magun Mark II); Uniting of Sides; Absorption; Merging; healing powers used once and then promptly forgotten about; invasive telepathy; Transfer System access; being a total dick; control of the Sands of TIME.
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, house shopping, dragon taming, cocaine ingestion, mecha pilot, UFO pilot, intimidation, arctic survival, faking death, Metra Nui history, population demographics, volcanology, botany, in-field power study, disguise, lichen hunting, grenade throwing, weapons appraisal, nuclear weapon operation, mocking the dying, tracking, persuasion, chilled-ice taster, swimming
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1/2/3/4/5/6, Hyper, Horteka, side unison, fusion, human form
Form Combos: Ultimate (Super Saiyan 6 + Hyper), Mega (Ultimate + Side Unison), Sora fusion, Zero fusion (Blade Zero), Sora + Blade fusion (Blade Zero Matrix)
Gear: Virtue Tetsume, Tetsaiga, Tetkume keyblade, Zero’s Sword, climbing claws, the Magun Mark II, +5 shotgun, Time Mask, Samurai pulse rifle, Zero’s energy pistol, a shitton of normal guns, ice-elemental cyberlimb, Super Ice Emeralds, Wing Zero’s buster rifles, Psycho Dressphere, “My First One” Kid’s Large Neo Halloween costume, iPod, skull of a Miami Dolphin, bloodstained guard uniform, copy of John Romero’s “Daikatana” still stained with the great man’s blood, Kagone’s hand-made “You’re My Bitch” necklace, Ghost, sniper rifle (for zoomin’ purposes), Atonement–what used to be the symbol of the universe’s hopes for the death of Humber and now left as a heart-breaking monument to the inevitable descent of the universe into darkness
Sidekicks: Season-Bringer, Sora from Kingdom Hearts, Kagone The True Heroine, Zero
UGLY: 20

Episaint Twenty-Four: Back to Basucks
This next load of Christian Humber is… odd.  It’s like World War I, trench warfare.  Day in and day out it’s nothing but mud, stink, and disease, and then suddenly BLAM, SHIT, MORTARS, RUN RUN FIRE PUSH PUSH PUSH BOOM BOOM OH GOD!  Then… silence.  It’s over.  Until next time.  And before long it’s back to mud, stink, and disease.  And death.  The fresh red death.  That’s Christian Humber Reloaded.  Sometimes Humber blindsides us with mourning the death of a dragon, or advising his brother on herbs, or solving a problem without violence.  But without fail it returns to the soul-deadening normality of constant, brutal power escalation.  Like now.

Humber returns from his latest murdscursion to the Farplane.  It seems whenever he enters the Farplane, he is bewitched with “a flashback showing someone carrying a white wolf and saying something that I can’t understand”.  After dumping this thought into a memory sphere, he reveals this curiosity to the “elder.”  Is it that elder we’re so familiar with, the one almost certainly annihilated by that blast Vagna-Sin didst project?  Perhaps, for we are in the afterworld, where the dead may live… for a time.  The Elder confirms a true and terrible secret, which, as Humber puts it, “I WAS BORN IN THE FARPLANE AND I DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT IT!”  Well, Hum, most people don’t actually remember a whole lot about the moment they were born.  It seems that his godparents, Tidus and Yuna, took him to the arctic so that he could escape the ravages of Seymour Guado.  Who, incidentally, is still re-alive–seems Humber ALMOST killed him, but he still had a few hit points left, so he was okay.  F’n Seymour!  So, if we may guess, Humber’s dad got killed by Seymour whilst in the Farplane, while his mother and perhaps a helpin’ wolf of some kind were slew by hunters in Liveside.  I… I’m trying to fill the plot holes left by Christian Humber.  His father was a half-dragon Sayan.  His mother was a half-demon wolf.  He was born in the Farplane but picked up some ice element while he was still new and sticky.  I GOT MY ARMS A FLIP FLOP FLIP FLOP!

So, Seymour Guado, known dick and killer of his father, is still alive, and in need of murder.  But how to put this fucker down yet again?  It seems the answer is, as always, “stay in the Farplane, and do some training until you’re ready.”  Humber cracks his rhetorical knux and gets to USE TRAIN on FARPLANE.  Meanwhile, the Elder indulges in a delectable chilled ice, Humber out of his hair.  In these moments unlife becomes bearable, and he briefly forgets that Christian Humber has again ruined everything for everyone vis a vis the destruction of Paradise.

This calm cannot last, and the Corrupted Self appears again, reborn from Humber’s newest atrocities.  “the final battle against you.” lies Humber.  Even the Corrupted Self knows this isn’t the last time, smirking as it calls forth its newest weapon: a whole shitload of Aeons glued together with Dr. Portmanteau’s Guaranteed Aeon Adhesive Mixture, made with Love and only the Purest of Nature’s Cure, Heroin.  And who forms the backbone of this Balsa-wood dinosaur skeleton but Christian Humber’s own half-dragon Sayan-daddy!  Humber has just enough time to make in his metaphorical grays before the Corrupted Self merges with the mess and prepares to give Humber a dose of his own horrible, sexually-invasive medicine.  What can Humber do to stop this terror?  Wait for the calvary in the form of “all [his] friends” to arrive and tell him to “aim for the Aeons.”  Humber considers their offer and decides no, “I will aim for my Corrupted Self.”  Well, whatever.  It’s not like the Aeons are 9/10ths of the mass and, upon shearing off, will make aiming for the Self that much easier.

Humber screams “DAD, I WON’T LOOSE YOU AGAIN!” and whips out Tetsume and Atonement, which (say it with me now) fuses with Tetsume to form an even Tetsume’er Tetsume.  It also triggers his Rockin’ Form: “I had golden-white-blue-silver hair, my eyes were silver and I looked more dangerous than when I have all my sides united.  Then all my sides united and I became even stronger. When it attacked me again I blocked its attack with one finger, the elder was scared because I reached my true power and ascended past it.”

Well, that’s good for you, Hum.  Humber screams “THIS IS IT YOU UGLY SON-OF-A-B****, LET MY FATHER GO!” [21]  Then he looses a generic energy blast that, no shit, “could destroy the universe twice, when it hit him, he absorbed the blast and shot it right back at me tainted. I dodged the blast just by a nanometer”.  Hey.  Humber.  This thing could destroy everything that exists… twice.  And it misses you.  Where does it go, if not to Something?  Apparently it runs out of effective range and fizzles, because the Elder howls “USE YOUR GODDAMN SWORD!”  Humber takes his advice.  Thank our impotent and distant God.

Humber leaps into the fray and is immediately smacked with the Slayer of Souls.  What do you suppose happens?  Is he horribly injured?  Wounded?  Mildly inconvenienced?  Of course not.  “when I got hit by the Slayer of Souls, something awakened in me and in [motherfucking] response I [motherfucking] said ‘Kamehameha!’”

Let me repeat:

“‘Kamehameha!’”

I would like to observe the last time Humber was wounded with the Slayer of Souls he lost an arm and gained a bionic one instead, requiring a whole sentence or two worth of lag until he could get his next powerup.  But that was Then, where he was barely capable of bringing civilization to its knees.  Now that he can destroy everything twice, he doesn’t even lose something to trade in for New Awesome–he performs the conversion right there, like a potato being turned into a crude battery.  Crazy shit!  The Elder informs Humber that he’s indeed learned the Kamehameha, and so Christian Humber Kamehamehas like there’s a fire sale going on.  Guess what?  By virtue of slinging it around, the Corrupted Self learns it too, and poor humble Christ they’re just Kamehamehaing the living hell out of everybody but each other.  You know, maybe the afterworld was better off with Vagna-Sin hella munchin’ on some skeleton bones.  At least it just left a big single footprint in the tranquil grass.  The Elder groans in horror, but Humber just keeps throwing bolts around, except for one time when he sneaks up on the Corrupted Self and gives it a nice point-blank Angel Arm to the spinal-column-equivalent.  Then, more Kamehamehas!  At last they do the “two Kamehamehas hit and start making that Mean Burning Globe Thing in the middle of ‘em.  While so distracted, Sora makes himself useful and cuts Humber’s dad out of the Aeonic mess with a blunt object.  Take notes, Humber, this is some hardcore shiz.  “he told me he freed my father and that I can become reckless.”  Well, it’s terrifying to know that hurling around universe-extinguishing energy blasts is Humber’s version of restraint.  “It was intense because both it and I were using all our energy to try to push the opponent’s beam towards him.”  Yes, stalemates are super-intense.  Humber’s dad comes up to give him some words of advice, and the Corrupted Self casually nukes him to oblivion.  Humber gives in to despair and starts weeping.  Then…

Oh God.

Then an android walks up and tries to comfrot Humber in his time of loss.  Then the Corrupted Self explodes the android, and Humber screams, “‘Android 16!’ then I said ;you loved life, you would give anything for it, and I just let you die, AND I WONT WATCH THIS ANYMORE!!!’”  So, walk-on cameo Android 16’s death cuts Humber deeper than that of his own father.  Good job!  Humber starts to transform, and what do you know, Sora, Zero, and Kosongto’s violated corpse show up, and joining them at last for the first time in a billion fucking years, Useless Guardian Spirit Kaze shows up!  This much soul-rape can only mean Humber is serious.  So serious, in fact, that his new form is commensurately even more ridiculous, as we are again whiplashed right into what’s-his-name wolf’s point of view with no warning or pretense:

“When the bright light subsided there was someone who was standing there he was wearing tattered chain paints, a torn black T-shirt, no shoes, a torn leather jacket, one ear pierced and he had a spiked necklace on, he had long gold-blue-silver-white hair, no pupils, his mark on his face and a lot of electricity cracking around him.”

The entire ship of fools watching this spectacle back into corners in fear, because Mr. Self Destruct has never been so dangerous and so stupid-looking simultaneously.  Ch’za (screw you, that’s her name now) utters, “is he really that angry at his shadow?” and presumably draws a fresh menthol and tucks it between her lips.  The spectacle continues.  Pray it doesn’t destroy all reality.

Next!

“After I transformed I looked at my corrupted self and saw he didn’t expect me to transform into a very pissed off Super Sayjin-Horteka-wolf-demon-dragon who is in his Extreme-Super Sayjin form, on the edge of tearing you to pieces at any sign of movement.”  Most people wouldn’t expect that in any circumstance, really, be it buying toothpaste at the toothpastry or investing stocks.  Then–screw it, here’s the other half of that … segment: “He used my new attack against me and I used mine, I over powered him easily and destroyed him. I destroyed him that way he can’t come back.”  Keep telling yourself that, hon.

Humber waltzes out of the Farplane, and “everyone gathered around me and was asking way too many questions”.  Some of those questions are likely in the form of fervent prayers to be spared in the coming armageddon.  Humber ejects all of his assembled friends/rape victims and returns to his basic form.  It seems that he can’t maintain this new and terrible state without first training even more in the depths of the afterworld.  Humber hops right to it, to the sure dismay or broken-souled lack of surprise of his assorted butt buddies.

Welcome back, Humber!  Sigh.

Next: Startling revelations, that didn’t take too long at all, and fucking with the timestream.

Name: Mr. Chaos Hunter Vash-Blade God Selfdestruct
Age: 82 (574 wolf years)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Background: Orphan wolf-Saiyan-Horteka-demon-cyborg
Current Occupation: Serial polymorphic rapist
Weaknesses: Inability to recognize patterns
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; Wind Scar technique; Ultimate Wind Scar; Omega Wind Scar; Spinner projectile; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; artifact fusion; useless guardian spirit; three purifying bullets in chest; Dark Templar powers; alien atmosphere adaptation; access to Ice Emeralds; ice elemental; Angel Arm; judge of the dead; time travel; Claw of Exorcism; flight; Scroll of Town Portal (via Magun Mark II); Uniting of Sides; Absorption; Merging; healing powers used once and then promptly forgotten about; invasive telepathy; Transfer System access; being a total dick; control of the Sands of Time; the Kamehameha.
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, house shopping, dragon taming, cocaine ingestion, mecha pilot, UFO pilot, intimidation, arctic survival, faking death, Metra Nui history, population demographics, volcanology, botany, in-field power study, disguise, lichen hunting, grenade throwing, weapons appraisal, nuclear weapon operation, mocking the dying, tracking, persuasion, chilled-ice taster, swimming, speed mourning
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1/2/3/4/5/6/Extreme, Hyper, Horteka, side unison, fusion, human form
Form Combos: Ultimate (Super Saiyan 6 + Hyper), Mega (Ultimate + Side Unison), Sora fusion, Zero fusion (Blade Zero), Sora + Blade fusion (Blade Zero Matrix), New Ultimate (all of the above + Kosongto and Kaze)
Gear: Apocalypse Tetsume, Tetsaiga, Tetkume keyblade, Zero’s Sword, climbing claws, the Magun Mark II, +5 shotgun, Time Mask, Samurai pulse rifle, Zero’s energy pistol, a shitton of normal guns, ice-elemental cyberlimb, Super Ice Emeralds, Wing Zero’s buster rifles, Psycho Dressphere, “My First One” Kid’s Large Neo Halloween costume, iPod, skull of a Miami Dolphin, bloodstained guard uniform, copy of John Romero’s “Daikatana” still stained with the great man’s blood, Kagone’s hand-made “You’re My Bitch” necklace, Ghost, sniper rifle (for zoomin’ purposes)
Sidekicks: Season-Bringer, Sora from Kingdom Hearts, Kagone The True Heroine, Zero, Kosongto
UGLY: 21

Episode Twenty-Five: The Madness of King Humber
Christian Humber has become quite the apocaypsoul.  He’s even more omnipotent than before, and, well, that’s good for him.  Not so good for everybody who isn’t him, but that’s just how the d6 rocks.  He also seems to be living in the Farplane now.  Admittedly it’s got a hell of a view, but the company (the memories of the dead) must be boring as hell.  At least they don’t complain about dropping property values.  Humber gets Los Hangos of his latest transmutation and drops a line on Season-Bringer.  Season-Bringer gets to meet Humber’s father, who apparently got better after having his soul destroyed, and his brother, whom Humber still thinks is his brother and not the hollowed-out soul of his dead br’er.  Season-Bringer coquettishly asks if he can spar with Humber, reliving the old days, back when Season-Bringer being a 22-mile dragon meant something.  Humber chortles, “‘alright, but if I accidentally kill you, it’s not my fault.’”  Good ol’ Humber, showing such concern for his lifelong friends.

Humber is, startlingly, actually scared of transforming, his brush with mercy and nonviolence giving him the brief foresight necessary to realize he can’t possibly control himself and will murder his only real friend.  In many myths and legends this would be a sort of epiphany, a changing point where one moment of realization remakes the world, the “A Warm Place” in Christian Humber Presents “The Downward Spiral.”  Imagine, if Humber realizes the story of his life is a series of holocausts punctuated by moments where his fury happens to be focused where it needs to go to keep the world breathing another moment.  He is the universe’s immune system gone rampant, attacking itself when it doesn’t have a virus to consume.  He must feel the keening scream of the universe in agony, incapable of saving itself from its own panacea.  What happens when the body is outclassed by a single cell?  Humber.  Christian Humber is the Godcell slowly eating away the Pin.  In this brief moment, in this tiny way, Humber acknowledges his horror.

Season-Bringer, our distant God have mercy, implores Humber to continue.  For curiosity and a need to confirm himself, Season-Bringer sends Humber out of the moment of quickening and careening into his Killmood.  Nice job, S.B.

The two stretch and bend and do other cliche “we’re about to fight” stuff, and right around the time Humber goes Super “Sayjin,” Season-Bringer, surprise surprise, gets Stascream’ed by the Corrupted Self.  Humber grunts and reverts to nonlethal warfare against Season-Bringer.  He figures that he’s destroyed the Corrupted Self’s physical body, the one Humber watched it build by eating so, so many cities, and now just needs to deal with the tatters of its consciousness.  Humber whips out the long-forgotten Claw of Exorcism and follows it up with the Claw of Oblivion, “which destroyed him and erased him from the universe.”  Yeah, let’s see how long that lasts.

No, Keikanu’s not coming back.

Season-Bringer gets a good view of Christian Humber’s newest format and decides yes, he was probably going to die if he took it.  In the warm afterglow of a brush with conceptual infinity, Season-Bringer casually mentions that he’s Christian Humber’s brother.

I’m serious, Christian Humber is rapidly losing his grip on his shit.  I never noticed this before, but now…  Think about it.  Humber can destroy the universe twice over, but he fast-forwarded through all the suffering and difficulty inherent in acquiring power.  What is his life?  Murder, murder, murder, life lived in a cave with a draconic roommate, with temporary friends disposed of whenever they’re even slightly in the way of whatever he wants to achieve.  Nothing is meaningful–it’s not a challenge he needs, it’s a cause, a reason to fight.  Think about it–he hasn’t emotionally connected with anybody but Kagone and the ideal of his dead family.  Now that he’s had his experiences expanded by Spira, where he sees that not all conflicts need to be solved violently, where finesse and a gentle hand can win the day over brutal, unnecessary violence, he’s starting to doubt himself, the entire foundation of his life.  How much more worse, how much weirder, can it all get?

Well, he’s got a brother now.  A real one.

“MY OLDER BROTHER? HOW CAN YOU BE MY BROTHER WHEN WE WERE BORN IN DIFFERENT FAMILIES?”  It turns out that Daddy, to paraphrase Warren Ellis, was a half-slut-lizard that did the nasty with another, full-breed slut-lizard to sire a bastard quarter-Sayan son.  Humber’s questions are all shot down with solid, if incredulous, answers.  Humber, and I cannot begin to kid, breaks down crying.  This seems to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

“‘I can’t believe it, a dragon; my brother? What the fuck is going on?’ I started crying and said ‘you’re lying, I saw my family die, I saw them die and I couldn’t stop the hunters from killing them! I wish I could go back in time and prevent them from dying!’”  Unfortunately, Season-Bringer hits another … thing… that… Baseball-Bad.  I don’t know baseball terms.  He fails at baseball again, and suggests to Humber that it’s impossible due to the horrors that would emerge in the timestream.  But Humber gets an idea.  Regale us, Humber:

“I will get their DNA and have them cloned then I will stop time and replace them with the clones, and bring my real family to the present.”  Well, Humber, the obvious problem there is that your brother’s corpse and father’s ghost weigh very heavily on your future development as a thingey.  I mean, what the hell is the Corrupted Self going to do if it doesn’t have Humber’s father’s soul to use as bait?  Well, to heck with it, Humber’s gonna do it.  Does it work?

“And I did go back in time, got their DNA samples, got them cloned, and I brought the clones with me to the past. I waited until the hunters appeared and I froze time and replaced my real family with the clones.”  Meanwhile, Kosungto is still lobotomized, the Corrupted Self stuffed Android 16 into its vacant chest cavity, and the timeline backlash only slaughters a brighter world filled with joy and no Humber.  All in a day’s work!  And he only killed trillions and trillions of people to do it.

Humber’s regained control of his destiny using the only tool he knows how to use: ridiculously overpowered special abilities.  All it took was futzing with all of his time-space powers and threatening a biology lab with apocalypse.

Humber reacquaints himself with his ma and pa.  Wait a sec, wasn’t Pa a Sayan hunted by … no.  Screw it, I’m done trying to–no, but I… must … if … wait… I am only an astronomer putting a name to the bundles of stars swirling overhead…  Sigh.  This is starting to drive me crazy, too.  Frigging Humber.

So, his family’s back, and as you might anticipate, leaping forward roughly 82 years in the twinkling of an eye is a remarkably awkward experience, especially when your little wolf-freak grows up in a split second.  Humber reveals himself to his family via use of a thankfully-undescribed birthmark.  Humber’s wolf/demon mother gushes, “Kibasu! Look at you you’re all grown up”.  And now we know Humber’s Truename.  Take notes, enemies of Humber!  Christian Humber complains; he’s already gotten used to Vash Blade etc. to switch to such a name that hasn’t been taken yet.   Humber’s mother complains that “Blade” is too violent a name for such a sweet wolfling as him.  Humber disagrees, and shows them why by pointing them in the direction of the FBI’s Most Wanted.

What’s more awkward–being caught masturbating to bizarre fetish pornography by your parents, or educating them on the countless billions who have perished directly at your hands?  Does Humber seriously think his parents are impressed to discover that, in absentia their love, their child has become a genocidal psychopath?  Oh, and who let his father’s attempted-murderer go free after failing to kill him in the present?  Face it, Humber, you’re pretty pissy at this whole “has a family” thing.

Well, he tries to make it up by asking Yuna to put on a party to celebrate the first time he’s actually saved a life instead of just sparing it until further notice.  The party kicks off with Yuna playing, impotent and distant God help us all, “Bring Me to Life” by Evanesence, which is certainly the song I’d have playing to celebrate my parents’ resurrection.  Humber shows up playing the Electric Guítar and singing the male vocals.  A variety of FFX-Men are in attendance playing other instruments, and a massive screen behind them shows something “jawesome.”  Is that a sound of thunder?  You bet.  Then Humber and Tidus combine forces to sing some song called Runaway.  Tidus is dressed in “his” gothic clothing.  Given that he wears lederhosen seriously as a day-to-day outfit, we can bet his idea of what constitutes “gothic” is equally hilarious.  Then Humber just plain puts on some music and assembles (after removing his parents from the crowd) a Spiran mosh pit, or a “mash” pit, which is like a mosh pit, but it deals 1d4+crowd’s Str bonus bludgeoning damage each round you’re in the thick of it.

It’s been a half-hour, so yes, trouble is brewing yet again.  Next time: Misinterpreting prophecy, a villain returns (yawn), and Humber plays a delightful prank.

Name: Kibasu Fluffernutter
Age: 82 (574 wolf years)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Background: Orphan wolf-Saiyan-Horteka-demon-cyborg
Current Occupation: Serial polymorphic rapist
Weaknesses: Inability to recognize patterns
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; Wind Scar technique; Ultimate Wind Scar; Omega Wind Scar; Spinner projectile; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; artifact fusion; useless guardian spirit; three purifying bullets in chest; Dark Templar powers; alien atmosphere adaptation; access to Ice Emeralds; ice elemental; Angel Arm; judge of the dead; time travel; Claw of Exorcism; Claw of Oblivion flight; Scroll of Town Portal (via Magun Mark II); Uniting of Sides; Absorption; Merging; healing powers used once and then promptly forgotten about; invasive telepathy; Transfer System access; being a total dick; control of the Sands of Time; the Kamehameha.
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, house shopping, dragon taming, cocaine ingestion, mecha pilot, UFO pilot, intimidation, arctic survival, faking death, Metra Nui history, population demographics, volcanology, botany, in-field power study, disguise, lichen hunting, grenade throwing, weapons appraisal, nuclear weapon operation, mocking the dying, tracking, persuasion, chilled-ice taster, swimming, speed mourning, estimating temporal fallout, bold assumptions about the playing of instruments
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1/2/3/4/5/6/Extreme, Hyper, Horteka, side unison, fusion, human form
Form Combos: Ultimate (Super Saiyan 6 + Hyper), Mega (Ultimate + Side Unison), Sora fusion, Zero fusion (Blade Zero), Sora + Blade fusion (Blade Zero Matrix), New Ultimate (all of the above + Kosongto and Kaze)
Gear: Apocalypse Tetsume, Tetsaiga, Tetkume keyblade, Zero’s Sword, climbing claws, the Magun Mark II, +5 shotgun, Time Mask, Samurai pulse rifle, Zero’s energy pistol, a shitton of normal guns, ice-elemental cyberlimb, Super Ice Emeralds, Wing Zero’s buster rifles, Psycho Dressphere, “My First One” Kid’s Large Neo Halloween costume, iPod, skull of a Miami Dolphin, bloodstained guard uniform, copy of John Romero’s “Daikatana” still stained with the great man’s blood, Kagone’s hand-made “You’re My Bitch” necklace, Ghost, sniper rifle (for zoomin’ purposes), guítar
Sidekicks: Season-Bringer, Sora from Kingdom Hearts, Kagone The True Heroine, Zero, Kosongto, his family
UGLY: 21

Episode Twenty-Six: Revenge of the Nerds V: The Preppie Holocaust
I’ve had a lot of bad ideas in my life.  Reviewing Christian Humber was one of them.  Writing while I’m ill is another.  Reviewing CHR while ill, and covering more and more disparate ground than ever before, is the crowning horror of my recent idiotic ideas.  Hooray!

Now, before we begin, let’s take a line break.

Okay.

When we last left Christian Humber, he was gothin’ it up with the crewe of Final Fantasy X: The Love Conniption, and celebrating the temporal dedeathing of his parents, much to the terror of countless infinities.  Now that we rejoin the Hum, we find that he is “looking at the stars to read the prophecies of the world”.  I’m just imagining him in a little astronomer’s hat with MY FIRST BOOK OF ASTROLOGY open nearby, looking into a toy periscope at the vast and chaotic starfield of the Afterworld, and somehow gleaning a “legend in the stars” about some prophecy or whatever: “the darkness that was banished by light, will return and try to plunge the world into shadow, thus the chosen one will face the shadow again and banish it again”.  The process of grinding out sequels isn’t a prophecy, Humber, it’s how stuff happens.  In fact, Humber gets a ring from Sora who confirms that yes, the Heartless are back and all brand-new.  Humber actually asks why they bother trying to take over the universe when they keep failing.  Humber, honey, it’s a Thing.  If you’re a Lovecraftian terror, taking over the universe is second nature, like paralyze spells, or ice claws.  They do it because they are compelled.  Humber’s parents are understandably disturbed at the notion of their genocidal little boy trying to genocide more people, so Humber assuages their fears by giving them a Scout Droid(tm) to watch him perform yet another bloody massacre.  Well, not literally, but in spirit.  Humber shows up at the unnamed Murder-Locale to find Sora busy trimming the weed what is the Heartless, so he cues up a Linkin Park song and joins him.  After a few Wind Scars, he says, apropos of nothing, “I will regret this later, but I will take the risk.”  “The Risk,” as Humber eventually fills in, is turning into a full-fledged demon.

To this, Sora saiith, “WHAT ARE YOU NUTS?”  Sora’s right.  Humber just unlocked a Super Stupid Big form with tattered chainpants and horrible rainbow hair, strong enough to unmake everything twice over.  Now he wants to become a demon, forsaking 4/5ths of his convoluted gene-heritage, including the one with the fractally-scaling super forms, just to do… what?  Take the form out for a jog?  Impress his half-demon mother?  Perhaps he’s pondering the mysteries of Keikanu and thinks going full-demon is the final way to fully desecrate everything his fallen enemy believed in.

Whatever the reason, he flips his iPod to an Evanesence song and demands Sora leave, ‘lest he be killed like every other mutha in the room.  Sora picks up Humber’s dropped killweapon and rides out.  Humber is left alone to kill the infinitely-respawning Heartless, which sounds like a great idea ’til you recall even his generic super form has more potential energy in a skin flake than a pure-devil Humber has in his entire body.

Humber sits back and lets the Heartless rip him to shreds, much to his family’s assured delight.  When his HP start tanking, he transforms, and we are again hurled head-first into the POV of another character without the slightest of pretenses.  Who’s doing the narration here, anyway?  I Pforget.  Whatever, it’s one of the Wolf Ises, and the Wolf Is observes that “his eyes were blood red, claws extended, fangs became longer and he had marks on the side of his face.”  Humber makes with the genocide.  It seems that “he took pleasure in killing everyone that he sees. It took him two hours to kill all of them, after he killed all of them, he was gloating over how he killed them easily”  So, he’s actually less genocidal as a demon than he is normally?  Normal Humber would be killing police officers at this point.  Demon Humber is content to do his job and then gab about it at the water-cooler that are become from his enemy’s shattered corpses.  I hope that was English I just wrote.  It’s the NyQuil(tm) speaking, I swear.

So, just to make sure Christian Humber doesn’t not-kill anymore, they cart in Kagone, who makes a guest voice appearance just long enough to yell “SIT!” and convince Humber to calm the fuck down, despite already being pretty calmed down.  Then he transforms into his non-demon form and erases some Heartless he somehow missed the first time around.  Which he could have done two hours ago, but he says going demonic was to “save Sora.”  Whatev’, man.  Whatev’.

Just after Humber muses on how awesome he is, Season-Bringer chimes in to inform Humber that the Eye of Terror is back.  The Eye of Terror has finally consumed all of Hell and is back for vengeance!  Humber is hyped, for he is ready to take it down one and for all with his True Power.  He invites Sora to Hopalong Cassidy, and Sora, having just sat out the last two hours of genocide, is feeling pretty ready for whatever.  Humber shoots open a portal to the Eye of Terror right there, slaps a mask on Sora’s face, and this somehow allows Sora to see the Eye of Terror all terror-eying space and such through the portal.

Humber walks his bad self in and declareth unto them “I’m baaaack.”  He gets zero response whatsoever, because you have to wake up pretty early to make Chaos give a shit, and Humber is a late sleeper.  He USEs TELEKINESIS on ASTEROID to get its attention, and Telekinesis disappears from this narrative like the little paper boat from IT.  You’d think Christian Humber would abuse Telekinesis like the girlfriend he’ll never have in a million years, but no, it only shows up once to throw a rock at a guy/concept.  Goes to show he never played Psi-Ops.  Or Half-Life 2, for that matter.  Mildly annoyed at this display, Chaos gets out of its chair, just as it was getting comfortable, and sets forth the task of killing Humber for interrupting Sit-Time.

As much of Chaos is new material, it does not recognize Humber for what he is, but the Dark Gods (be they Khorne, Slaanesh, Tzeench, and Nurgle) understand him instantly, and naturally hurl their weak-ass-by-comparison forces at Humber in hopes that he’ll choke on one of them as it gets near.  Unfortunately, Humber, Sora, and Guest Star Zero just chop them into bite-sized fun bits.  The Dark Gods–who are never mentioned, leading me to believe that Humber has only played the Dawn of War version of Warhammer, and wouldn’t know Khorne from actual corn–take arms against the vile Humber and his repeatedly-raped, Stockholmed sidekicks.

Surprisingly, they hold up well, managing to hit Humber several times before he pulls his bullshit superform out of the closet.  He tells us it’s at least “900x stronger” than before.  The Elder reminds him that he has NO CONTROL OVER THAT POWER, which is another recurring theme in Christian Humber I’ve begun to notice: Christian Humber neither has nor apparently wants much control over his power, relishing in his “insanity,” “thirst for destruction,” and “uncontrollability.”  If he actually had people he cared about, and he inevitably hurt them, he might sing a different tune.  But he doesn’t, and so he turns on an Avenged Sevenfold song and starts killing the Dark Gods.

AGGH PERSPECTIVEFUCK AHHGCK.  The Elder tells the secondary narrator, mournfully, that Christian Humber has “no personality” in this form.  OBVIOUS JOKE: He doesn’t have a personality in any form.  /OBVIOUS JOKE  So, with that out of the way, NarraTwo tells Humber, “Goddamn it Blade, obey the elder because he has been around longer than you have.”  Humber tells him to fuck off.  Then he rescinds, apologizes for being an asshole, and goes back to his jorb, which is to facilitate communication between species and put an end to hostility.

Also to swear: “THIS IS IT CHAOS, YOUR DEATH IS AT HAND! NOW, DIE YOU GODDAMN, MOTHER FUCKERS, PIECES OF SHIT, AND GO TO HELL YOUR UGLY SON-OF A-B****!” [23]  Humber decides to learn the Spirit Bomb, and it is so, and Zero sticks a weary, rape-filled hand out of Humber’s tattered chainpants and explodes the bomb with a little extra love.  So it’ll take, I guess.  Whatever.  This Nyquil is making my skin feel all improperly aligned.  It should be taken taken taken off.

It gets very confusing as to who’s speaking when Blade (man, it’s been a dillion years since I called him that) gets his blasted-ass drug to the Farplane for recovery.  Humber insists the Mystery Narrator kill the last fragments of Chaos, but no… no.  Humber’s return to health takes priority.  Thanks a lot, you stupid secondary narrator.  So Humber’s bedridden in the Farplane and the Final Fantasy X crewe have to stand guard to make sure Humber isn’t bum-rushed by millions of fans/anti-fans/cultists/would-be assassins.  It’s a little weird seeing the saviors of Spira reduced to such acts as Lulu hurling fireballs at the crowd to get them to disperse, or Yuna singing life-positive pop anthems to get them to calm down.  All the while, Humber is illin’, with Ch’za helping out with delicious soups and poultices.  Oddly, she does not whip out that curing spell she used earlier.  Perhaps her attempt to open up to Humber backfired so badly she could no longer bear the thought of shoving life energy back into his noisy health-hole.  This is better for Desuchan’s health, too; so many are here and SO RONERY another intimate Curehug may very well destroy us.

Meanwhile, the narrator is having some issues.  “Jesus Christ some of the guy’s are fucking perverts, who are trying to look at my panties, so I drew my sword and cut a pervert’s hand off for squeezing my ass”.  This helps narrow down who the narrator is.  For one, the narrator is wearing panties, has clothing on that would allow the looking-of at panties, and is armed with a sword fit for hand-chopping.  Our speculation ends a few rounds later when Wakka characteristically spoon-feeds us a weird bit of Jamaican knowledge: “geez Paine to the guys here you’re attractive to them”.  It’s hard to tell it’s Paine, just because Christian Humber can’t write women (see above for why).  He tries to girly him, I mean her, I mean Payne never really attracted me that much okay she seemed like a third wheel.  He tries to girly her up some with this little moment: “I let Wakka and Lulu though to have some time alone to care for their son, who is extremely adorable.”  It doesn’t quite work.  This is especially evident in the awesome audiobook version, where Payne is no less gruff evoking how cyuuuute the Terror-Childe is than when she’s hacking off some guys’ extremities.

Meanwhile, how is Humber holding up?  Even with his injuries on Scout Droid Cam(tm), the people must assuredly be chewing through their tongues to escape the agony of Humber and Kupo the Moogle’s misadventures.  Christian Humber Reloaded becomes Kupo the Moogle’s Treasure Hunt when, as a gift to help assuage Humber’s mild injuries, Kupo sends Humber’s attendant pals to go find a bunch of fantastically rare objects in the Farplane so he can forge Humber a “Get Well” Weapon.  Humber likes it, but not enough, and makes Kupo fuse all his keychains together to make an Even Better Keyblade Doohickey, creating the Omega Weapon.  Then Sora remembers he has Curaga, and pumps Humber full of healing light, completely negating his friends’ efforts to keep him comfortable and alone during his convalescence.  THIS JUST IN: Humber is kind of a jerk.

Well, Humber’s all nice and patched up.  What now?  What else, it’s time for another holocaust!  It just so happens “the snobs” are having a party tonight in Spira, and we cannot allow a flagrant display of wealth on Spiran soil.  It’s time to send the Czars packing.  It’s time to eviscerate the Bourgeois!  Or it would, if Humber had a Communist bone in his body.  He’s 1/5th wolf, 1/5th Sayan, 1/5th dragon, 1/5th demon, 1/5th Horteka, and, imminently, 1/5th vampire, but he is most certainly not a shred Communist.  He’s just acting on his “screw the preps” instinct, and he is also heavily armed.

So, he calls up his wolf buddies, and also Sora, and two hours after meeting to discuss the plan and it fineries, they stealthily intrude the “rich snobs’” mansion.  What mansion, where?  He never says.  When the time comes, Christian Humber USEs SPEED on CHANDELIER and orders Tobee to “cut the lights.”  Lights are cut, and actions are taken: Humber leaps out wearing “sunglasses, black trench coat and I was holding a minigun in each hand and said sarcastically ‘Where’s the party?’”  The rich snobs (are they snobs?  They are never shown being anything other than “rich” and “threatened by Christian Humber,” and they share half their traits with the entirety of the universe) make their first offense against mankind by ordering the people they’re paying to defend them to defend them from the heavily-armed murderer about to murder them.  I’m using the word “murder” like Humber uses the word “ugly,” but hell, it’s appropriate.  This is Humber using military-grade weaponry against unarmed civilians with no provocation other than “they’re rich and I’m bored.”  If that isn’t murder, I don’t get paid enough to know what murder is.

Humber opens fire, destroying countless “priceless articles” snipped from priceless issues of Time or Playboy, and also killing hundreds of guards.  Hundreds!  When the rich are defenseless, then Humber and Humber’s wolf-brothers descend upon them like, uh, wolves on sheep.  Blood spills.  Red red red.

Humber enjoys a good laugh afterward, calculating they have done roughly a trillion dollars of damage.  Is that in Spiran Gil or actual dollars?  Either way, I think Humber’s done damage fatal to really important artifacts, bits of Spiran history rescued from the all-cleansing eldritch blasts of Sin.  Man, Humber.  What are you gonna do next?  Paint LITTLE PIGGIES on the walls with blood?

After painting LITTLE PIGGIES on the walls with blood, Humber steals a Richbrau and takes a loving sip of it.  How bad is Humber at holding his liquor?  Humber is so bad at holding his liquor that he turns into a dragon.

And that’s the end of Part 5.

Of 6.

What the HELL?

Name: Humber–The Man, The Myth, Da Dragon Dyron
Age: 82 (574 wolf years)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Background: Has-a-Good-Home wolf-Saiyan-Horteka-demon-cyborg
Current Occupation: DRAGON-MAN
Weaknesses: Complete fucking psychopath
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; Wind Scar technique; Ultimate Wind Scar; Omega Wind Scar; Spinner projectile; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; artifact fusion; useless guardian spirit; three purifying bullets in chest; Dark Templar powers; alien atmosphere adaptation; access to Ice Emeralds; ice elemental; Angel Arm; judge of the dead; time travel; Claw of Exorcism; Claw of Oblivion flight; Scroll of Town Portal (via Magun Mark II); Uniting of Sides; Absorption; Merging; healing powers used once and then promptly forgotten about; invasive telepathy; Transfer System access; being a total dick; control of the Sands of Time; the Kamehameha; telekinesis; Spirit Bomb.
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, house shopping, dragon taming, cocaine ingestion, mecha pilot, UFO pilot, intimidation, arctic survival, faking death, Metra Nui history, population demographics, volcanology, botany, in-field power study, disguise, lichen hunting, grenade throwing, weapons appraisal, nuclear weapon operation, mocking the dying, tracking, persuasion, chilled-ice taster, swimming, speed mourning, estimating temporal fallout, bold assumptions about the playing of instruments, divination, recuperation
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1/2/3/4/5/6/Extreme, Hyper, Horteka, side unison, fusion, human form
Form Combos: Ultimate (Super Saiyan 6 + Hyper), Mega (Ultimate + Side Unison), Sora fusion, Zero fusion (Blade Zero), Sora + Blade fusion (Blade Zero Matrix), New Ultimate (all of the above + Kosongto and Kaze), Demon Form, Dragon Form
Gear: Apocalypse Tetsume, Tetsaiga, Tetkume keyblade, Zero’s Sword, climbing claws, the Magun Mark II, +5 shotgun, Time Mask, Samurai pulse rifle, Zero’s energy pistol, a shitton of normal guns, ice-elemental cyberlimb, Super Ice Emeralds, Wing Zero’s buster rifles, Psycho Dressphere, “My First One” Kid’s Large Neo Halloween costume, iPod, skull of a Miami Dolphin, bloodstained guard uniform, copy of John Romero’s “Daikatana” still stained with the great man’s blood, Kagone’s hand-made “You’re My Bitch” necklace, Ghost, sniper rifle (for zoomin’ purposes), guítar
Sidekicks: Season-Bringer, Sora from Kingdom Hearts, Kagone The True Heroine, Zero, Kosongto, his family
UGLY: 22

Episode Twenty-Seven: Viet Hum and the Infinite Vampire
When we last left the destroyer of worlds, Christian Humber had become a dragon who is “pure black.”  This means he’s become one of two things: 1. A Great Wyrm black dragon, known for its decrepit skull-like head, acid breath, and sorcerous nature, or 2. An ebony rept-stallion of considerable style.  Regardless of his style, Humber is freaking right the hell out.  But why?  Hasn’t every other transformation been met with open arms and several guns?  What has made Humber so paranoid?  Simply put, his drunkenness is so absolute he has descended into a paranoid fugue, believing himself to be hunted by the hunters that hunted his family, also him, in the distant past.  Humber is either an 82 or 572-year-old man and he’s never had so much as the aroma of liquor pass by his lips.  Can you forgive a man for being so weak at his first taste of Lowenbrau?

Well, maybe not, because he flies off, screaming and weeping and possibly soiling himself, to a barn, where he climbs in and sobs in horror… excuse me, “meditates.”  Perhaps, in what has to be the most ironic thing in the past paragraph or so, Humber is a complete wuss as a dragon.  Season-Bringer, his side-kick and bosom buddy, is multitudes bigger than him.  In fact, Humber is probably the size of the terrible draconic infants still unaccounted for from his Draco-Bortion.  Where the hell did all those eggs go?  Did the scientists just scuttle them, or use them in a gigantic omelet, or use the for Nefarious Science, or what?  Who cares, Humber is fuguing and he’s just been found out by the kid of the family of the barn of the Land.

Humber freaks out and wraps the lad with his mighty tail, and tells the bastard, “be quiet, I don’t want to get caught and killed by hunters.”  Well, surely this kid can be trusted with keeping such a wonderful and magical secret, right?  Especially since “if you do I will have to kill you and your family got it?”  Oh yeah, this is Christian Humber.  He also says, “return here with food every night, because if you don’t your entire family will die.”  Wow.  …Shit, Humber just can’t resist raping the dog when the opportunity presents itself.  So, this goes on for a while, ending when the kid’s dad gets suspicious and, mercifully, Humber’s team finds him and distracts Pa while Humber can slink off and return to the Farplane.

Humber “meditates” in the Farplane for a couple of “year’s”.  S.B. tells Humber to trust the dragon within, and with this little tidbit Humber shifts back: “I did with difficulty”.  Welcome back, Humber, you were missed the way diseases are missed.  Sora gives him a please-don’t-rape-me hug to celebrate, and to try and convince Humber not to fusion-rape him again.  Humber does not care.  He has… unfinished business!  He goes back to the Snobzone, which after several years must surely have been abandoned.  It’s occupied, perhaps by venture capitalists who’ve made a killing on a risky Spiran investment strategy.  Humber finishes what he finished years ago, going Super Saiyan whilst in his sexy black dragon-form, and … blatantly steals a line from Red vs. Blue.  Specifically, O’Malley’s ridiculous “I will rip out your hearts eat them then crap out your souls, you will taste oblivion, which tastes like Red Bull, which is disgusting!”  Oh, you little bastard.  You invoked the Halo novels, you’re about to inappropriately appropriate a Halo song for your own dirty deeds (done dirt cheap, on a shoestring budget of Horrible), and now you steal a line from the best Halo deriviate.  Now?  Now, this is personal.

Humber beats up a few guards, returns to normal, and venture capitalism pays off again as Humber is bitten about the neck and face and sent into La-La Land.  It turns out THESE venture capitalists ventured into the growing venue of Rent-an-Undead-Horror, and they’ve invested some of their capital in renting The Best.  See you in Hell, Humber!  Which is now entirely consumed by Chaos.  As for the dead?  They’s wemt, in the fire.

Humber wakes up–again–in a bed, with a machine thoughtfully regurgitating his blood back into him.  Let it be known: Humber’s mongoloid blood caused Alucard Q. Dracula to vomit.  Through his incisors.  You know how bad vomiting is (unless you’re an emetophiliac), now imagine all that shit coming back through your teeth.  Eeeggh.  Or perhaps Alucard is just being polite, having drained Humber’s life fluids on a professional basis.

A girl tells Humber the score.  What girl is forever unknown.  Humber does not care for women, as you have discovered, and he barely even registers if this is Seras, perky vampire girl, or Sir Integra, androgynous shootskiteer.  Perhaps both are there, and Humber marginalizes their presence into one.  Either way, Alucard shows up, and, for no particular reason, is gonna give Humber a good Hellsing training once-over.  Humber scoffs, “training? Don’t you know who I am? I’m the God of destruction!”  Then he does the training.  It only takes about ten hours, a work day with overtime, so apparently it’s training in the same way video game tutorials are “training.”  Also, note the capitalization!  He’s not a god of destruction, or a God of Destruction, but a God of destruction.  He has replaced God, but his is not a loving God.  No, his is a God of destruction.  How subtly ominous, and thus wholly accidental.

“I want to learn how to do Control restriction LV1″ says Humber after his complimentary Hellsing Organization Bed and Breakfast breakfast.  Lunch?  Dinner?  Alucard humors him.  You know, this might actually be good for the kid.  Note how often Humber goes into battle, does NOT power up to maximum, and instead gives himself the equivalent of a blindfold and a Heart-Attack Machine, dueling well under his potential or even standard power.  Given that Control Restriction is not a power, but Alucard’s allowed use of power, teaching Humber how to actually use his multiply-godlike powers instead of going Demon like an idiot could make him a more efficient universe-killer.  …wait…

Humber pins his HELSINKI WARIOR (sic) badge to his chest and joins Alucard in the killing of Ghouls.  His song of choice?  “Blow Me Away.”  A song about SPARTAN-IIs marching off to sure death, facing overwhelming odds from intelligent, powerful opponents with a mix of humility (”Only the strongest will survive / lead me to heaven when we die”) and heroic bravado (”I’ll be the one to save us all”).  Though I read far too into that, nonetheless Humber has chosen a song that is literally the antithesis of the situation he’s marching into.  He is going to sure victory over impotent, mildly-annoying undead, and he’s approaching it with jocular inhumanity, like a hunter hunting hunts, I mean ducks, with grossly overpowered firearms for the laugh of it.  Overpowered guns like the “double helix magnum” that can punch through “14 solid concrete buildings”.  Damn, man, a building made of solid concrete?  Humber brings his Samurai and whips up a UV-sprayer.  Alucard says that a UV firearm won’t work because THEY’RE FUCKING VAMPIRES AND IT’S NOT UV LIGHT THAT KILLS THEM IT’S THE LIGHT OF THE SUN, YOU KNOW, THE STAR THAT NURTURES THE PLANET EARTH AND ALL ITS LIVING THINGS, FOR FUCK’S SAKE IT’S A VAMPIRE NOT A GUY WITH A FATALLY WEIRD SKIN CONDITION!  He supplements this with a “Hell Angel Chaotic 100cal cannon with liquid nitrogen and UV slugs”.  100 caliber means that a slug is a fricking inch across, double the volume of a .50 caliber shot–in fact, a bigger shot than what they used to shove down the barrels of elephant-killing black powder rifles.  He says it’s for killing everything in a 2-mile radius, because he is so terrible at area attacks, you see.  Also a full-auto silver stake launcher, which sounds great for werewolves but rather miss-the-point-y for vampires.  Pun not intended.

How much guns does Humber?  So much guns, he writes Kagone to pester her for all his guns back.  She instead sends back a crystal that can help control his demon mode.  See, because Kagone is sensical.  Also, she is secretly become a vigilante using Humber’s abandoned firearms to wage a one-woman war against the superpowered sociopaths rising in Humber’s wake.  Speaking of which, Humber says he’ll still go demon mode on the occasion because he’s the stupidest living thing that can still be said to be self-aware.

By the by, that UV gun works, because it’s Humber.  “you said it wouldn’t work, but I did”.

In the midst of all this zombie shootin’, the pair find a glowy portal thing.  Where does it go?  Chaos.  Yeah, Chaos has wholly rejuvenated itself in two years, after disappearing the better part of three Mega-Parts.  Eating Hell does wonders for your system, it seems.  Humber says he’ll fight alone, and leaps through the portal, flipping his iPod to “Du Hast” by Rammstein.  Du Hast is about leaving one’s bride at the altar.  This is foreshadowing.  Kind of.  Also the stupidest fucking thing imaginable to fight to outside of a romance-themed western shootout.  Humber sits (on what?) and waits for the song to begin before leaping at the embodiment of Chaos.  Alucard joins in after not-too-long, because hey, he’s Alucard Q. Dracula.  Are YOU gonna tell him not to?  “Du Hast No Firkin Holden” declares Humber.  He says that’s German.  “Firkin” is English for 1/8th of a gallon.  “Du hast no Holden” is German for “you have no hold.”  German and English happen to share syntax.  That he managed to scream that Chaos doesn’t even have 1/8th of a gallon’s worth of hold (because most of Chaos is protoplasmic and best measured as a liquid) is a sign that God lives yet and wants us to find a little to smile about in the moments before the end.

Humber goes Super Saiyan and slaps Control Restriccione lv. 1 atop it, “which means you’re fucked if you catch me in a real bad mood, which is right now”.  Woo!  Humber is immediately wounded by the Corrupted Self.  “this time I really got to kill him for good” says Humber, right before the Corrupted Self gives him some fanciful scars across his face and back.  Humber responds by exploding a bunch of Chaos-held planets, “which I proved to have mastered the system destruction skill.”  The Corrupted Self is so impressed that he rips Humber’s fucking heart out.

Holy shit.  I knew this day would come.  Humber has sewn enough misery and horror into the world that the Self is now self-sufficient and no longer needs his physical member to carry out his will, and so executes his physical self in same way he killed the rightful Satan of Hell, a far better man than he could ever have been.  Or he would, if Alucard didn’t interrupt by giving Humber the Embrace, which causes Humber’s heart to melt in the Self’s hand and suffuse into his body.  See, so he can be a vampire without his heart becoming a weak point.  Humber, ladies and gentlemen!

Fucking Humber.

Humber embraces his crown as the last and most terrible Satan and somehow turns his angel arm into a freaky “LV1 Hell-Angel” that blows the upper half of Corrupted Self into naught.  “ON YOUR KNEES, I WANT YOU TO BEG FOR FORGIVENESS!” says Humber, and, well, the Self only has knees to get onto right now.  Spin the Hedgehog shows up to shoot some people, because he was such an integral character and we’re all glad to see he’s back.  Everybody gets all sufficiently super and Humber breaks the limits “that held me in sanity”.  FUCK, HUMBER.  What the hell is wrong with you associating complete reckless apocalyptic nonsense with heroism?  Complete socio/psychopaths aren’t heroes, they’re pitiable victims of their own mind, driven to terrible, terrible acts.  It’s possible to become heroic despite mental illness, but that’s only through resistance of one’s madness, not willful surrender to one’s worst half.  Fuck dammit, Humber, I’m an English major, STOP MAKING ME WANT TO DIE!

“THIS IS IT YOU MOTHER FUCKERS, I’M NOT IN THE GODDAMN FUCKING MOOD TO CONFRONT YOU IN COMITTY OF ACOUNTABILITY SO I’LL KILL YOU NOW!” Humber screams incoherently!  And then a shark punches him.

A shark that is about to become Christian Humber’s boyfriend.

To be continued!

Name: Christian Kibasu Vashblade Humber
Age: 84 (588 wolf years)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Background: Has-a-Good-Home wolf-Saiyan-Horteka-demon-vampire-cyborg
Current Occupation: HELSINKI WARIOR (sic)
Weaknesses: N/A
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; Wind Scar technique; Ultimate Wind Scar; Omega Wind Scar; Spinner projectile; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; artifact fusion; useless guardian spirit; three purifying bullets in chest; Dark Templar powers; alien atmosphere adaptation; access to Ice Emeralds; ice elemental; Angel Arm; judge of the dead; time travel; Claw of Exorcism; Claw of Oblivion flight; Scroll of Town Portal (via Magun Mark II); Uniting of Sides; Absorption; Merging; healing powers used once and then promptly forgotten about; invasive telepathy; Transfer System access; being a total dick; control of the Sands of Time; the Kamehameha; telekinesis; Spirit Bomb; Restriction technique; Heart diffused into body.
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, house shopping, dragon taming, cocaine ingestion, mecha pilot, UFO pilot, intimidation, arctic survival, faking death, Metra Nui history, population demographics, volcanology, botany, in-field power study, disguise, lichen hunting, grenade throwing, weapons appraisal, nuclear weapon operation, mocking the dying, tracking, persuasion, chilled-ice taster, swimming, speed mourning, estimating temporal fallout, bold assumptions about the playing of instruments, divination, recuperation, barnfinding, gun inventing, vampiric chumminess
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1/2/3/4/5/6/Extreme, Hyper, Horteka, side unison, fusion, human form
Form Combos: Ultimate (Super Saiyan 6 + Hyper), Mega (Ultimate + Side Unison), Sora fusion, Zero fusion (Blade Zero), Sora + Blade fusion (Blade Zero Matrix), New Ultimate (all of the above + Kosongto and Kaze), Demon Form, Dragon Form, Control Restriction Level 1 (Everything And More)
Gear: Apocalypse Tetsume, Tetsaiga, Tetkume keyblade, Zero’s Sword, climbing claws, the Magun Mark II, +5 shotgun, Time Mask, Samurai pulse rifle, Zero’s energy pistol, a shitton of normal guns, a shitton of extremely unlikely guns, ice-elemental cyberlimb, Super Ice Emeralds, Wing Zero’s buster rifles, Psycho Dressphere, “My First One” Kid’s Large Neo Halloween costume, iPod, skull of a Miami Dolphin, bloodstained guard uniform, copy of John Romero’s “Daikatana” still stained with the great man’s blood, Kagone’s hand-made “You’re My Bitch” necklace, Ghost, sniper rifle (for zoomin’ purposes), guítar, demon control crystal haphazardly thrown somewhere
Sidekicks: Season-Bringer, Sora from Kingdom Hearts, Kagone The True Heroine, Zero, Kosongto, his family, Alucard Q. Dracula
UGLY: 22

Episode Twenty-Eight: Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Shark Me
Did I mention that last Act was the third-to-last?

And this is the second-to-last?

And the next is the last?

This is it, gents.  The result of three months of on-and-off review, of madness, of horror, of terror, of sadness.  Christian Humber has destroyed me, as he has destroyed everything, and now it is my time to destroy him.  Metaphorically.  Nothing is actually going to wound him in this life or the next.  But man, it’s so weird.  Look behind us: there is the peak, disappearing into the clouds.  We are in the forest again, for the first time in ages.  The scent of rain-soaked earth is thick and heady about us.  Ahead is a fist.  A fist that belongs to a shark.

While Humber brags about how “now I’m the strongest known wolf in the entire universe,” the Corrupted Self pulls himself back by his bootstraps and slashes Humber about the slashables.  Humber is irate, kicking forth, but his kick is immediately followed by a much-more-devistating megaton punch.  From a shark.  Humber sees the size of its teeth and concludes it must be a mutant, as sharks are known first and foremost for their mighty smashing hands, those hands that have doomed countless sailors and inspired the book and later movie FISTS.  Oh, those punching fists, those crushing fists!

So, Fists the Toothshark mutters, “so, this is where you have been all this time, killing such weaklings”.  Humber takes offense at the suggestion and says that he’s killing these weaklings because they totally ripped him off this one time and he’s not going to stop trying to destroy the embodiment of an abstract cosmic force until it is sufficiently disincarnated.  The shark scoffs and invites Humber to his private island once he is done murdering Chaos demons.  Then the shark walks off.  Walks.  Into space.  Back to Earth.  Damn, son, even Humber has to shoot a bucket of teleports to get hither-thither in a spacial manner.  Humber gets flustered with the shark’s instant one-upping and flips out with the “Full Synchro Control Restriction LV 1 Angel arm” to explod Chaos and the Corrupted Self.  Which does not work, so Alucard and Spin have to seal it up “for now.”  Damn, Humber, you’re starting to suck pretty badly, I mean you’re still strong enough to stupid everything to death twice, but you could single-handedly evaporate any problem or perceived problem what crossed your path before.  Somehow this shark has gotten to you.

This succulent chunk is titled “The Ultimate Creature.”  It does not refer to Humber.  Prepare to go jawslack.

The very instant Chaos is swept under the rug, Humber locates the shark on Sharkin’ Frood Island.  The shark invites Humber to punch him.  Anybody who’s seen Fight Club can guess what happens, only this involves going Full Synchro and shoulder cannons to the chest.  Humber is on the bitch-end of this exchange.  Humber turns on “Blow Me Away,” goes Whatever and tries to kill the shark via the Wind Scar, which, to this point, has never failed him ever.  It now fails him vis a vis a Sharkdodge.  The shark attacks from the back and grapples Humber.  Play the music you know should be playing, because the subtext is the only text.  Humber bucks the shark, engages his Zero armor, whips out a keyblade, diapers a gene, and says some stupid shit like “may Hell break loose, and Death to those who oppose me.”  Humber powers up to what he now calls the Ancient God of Destruction and readies a blast that is strong enough to “kill it and destroy half the galaxy.”  That’s right, this shark is so ridiculously strong it takes more damage than the universe.  In fact, roughly one and 99 99/100ths of a universe.  Sweet crap.  Even Humber had to dodge reflected universe-enders.

Sharko says it’s coo’, it’s coo’, you can put back up the apocalypser.  Exploding the planet is a wee bit excessive.

He also has more restraint than Humber.  Did I mention that?

Humber collapses.  That’s right, he didn’t even kill or seriously wound Sharko and he’s exhausted as if he’d just been dick-whipped by the Self and all of Chaos.  What the hell is wrong with Humber?  I’ll tell you:

Love.  Like all of Desuchan, Humber is SO RONERY.  Unlike Desuchan (except /tr/), Humber is queer as folk.  Has it not been obvious?  He doesn’t give womenfolk the slightest bit of attention.  There is zero sexual tension.  You might say this is because Humber is a man-child with more power than the concept of power is legally allowed to encompass.  This is true.  It is also true that Humber will not subject himself to love.  Love requires need, and Humber needs nothing but shit to kill.  But what if… what if there was someone more badass than him?  An even-more badass slotting-together of genes and cybernetics and idiocy?  In short, what if Humber could be something’s bitch?  He could live with that.  He could be the bitch.

Now, in the shadow of civilization, Humber is become the bitch.

When Humber is become around, “I was in a bed, with bandages around my chest and in a strange looking house”.  Journey is implicit: Ly-ing beside you, here in the dark, feeling your sharkbeat and mine…  The shark shows up.  How are you feeling? the shark inquires; Like shit, Humber responds, nursing his wounds.  How are you become faster than I? he asks, and looks in the shark’s pitch-black eyes.  It says I was made that way.  Is it true? Humber thinks; “I thought it must be an experiment like I was I asked ‘are, you, an experiment?’”  Yes.  The answer is yes.  “Yea, I was until I broke free, why do ask?”  “it was hard to say the truth about me ‘because I’m one as well, the humans made me into a weapon for war, without a heart.’”  You know, in the hands of a better author, this would’ve been a clever way to show someone is opening up emotionally and unintentionally.  Humber simply has no control or interest in separating his inner monologue from external dialog.

The shark observes that it is no wonder Humber is so fussy about science; no, Humber says, he just doesn’t like being Science-Bitch.  “‘I guess you are the psychopath I heard about.’” saith the shark. “‘Yea, I am, so, what’s your point?’ ‘I have no point, by the way, what’s your name?’”  It turns out it’s Blade Dragonfang now.  Yes, Humber is now famous as Blade Dragonfang.  Whatev’.  Humber also now reveals that the Sacred Sides are every stupid gene strain that poured down the sink of his … thing.  Bodyhave.  It turns out the shark is named Chridon.  According to Humber, “Your scent, it smells like the sea and a human”.  How romantic.  It turns out that Chridon is half megaladon and half human and also a cyborg.  “most of my body is cybernetic, [Seems to defeat the purpose of having a half-human half-shark in the first place! --Ed.] except my brain, spinal cord and my balls.”  Humber is become “laughed out, because I found it funny and out of fear”.  It’s afraid.  It’s afraid!

No, it’s not afraid.

It is a jillion times worse than afraid.

“I then said, ‘So, you’re a male like me, right?’

“he said, ‘Yea, I’m a male with a badass body.’

“I agreed with him because I also have a badass body.”

Bom.  Chicka.  Wow.  I want to die.

Okay, now what’s Humber going to say next?

“He showed me all of his weapons

AAAAAAAAAAA

“which were huge even though He’s at least 12 feet high”

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Then comes the armor, which as Humber notes, is rather uselessly made of metal and coconut, aka “Madu Fruit.”  In fact, Sharko admits his own skin is tougher than the armor.  Then why wear it?  Dude, injuries hurt.  Lay off the half-guy half-shark.  Besides, he’s battle-tested; he’s even marched on Washington before, throwing one tank into five others and then deciding to do something else.  This inspires Humber.

This is the final battle.

He calls his various buddies–Zero and Sora, who I imagine weep into each other’s shoulders and apply soul-lubricant for the inevitable fusion-rape; Season-Bringer, who must feel needed at last after all this time; and Alucard, who is foppishly unoccupied.  They ride out to Sharkin’ Frood Island and find Humber, and more importantly, Sharko, whom they reflexively try to attack.  Humber says no; no.

Why has he assembled them?  Because Humber… is… tired of being chased?  It seems Humber is tired of being scienced, shot at, and persecuted for crimes he is wholly responsible for committing.  According to him, “I want to show the government that I am a living creature as well, not a weapon, I want to tell them: I have a heart, and I care about my friends, family and my destiny.”  He intends to tell them by marching on the White House and slaughtering everything in his path, man, woman, child, soldier and civilian.

Alucard, perhaps unsurprisingly, is in.

Next: The end.  I’m serious as a heart attack.  I’m scared.

Name: Christian Kibasu Chaos-Hunter Vashblade Dragonfang Humber
Age: 84 (588 wolf years)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Background: Has-a-Good-Home wolf-Saiyan-Horteka-demon-vampire-cyborg
Current Occupation: Political dissident
Weaknesses: Is the uke
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; Wind Scar technique; Ultimate Wind Scar; Omega Wind Scar; Spinner projectile; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; artifact fusion; useless guardian spirit; three purifying bullets in chest; Dark Templar powers; alien atmosphere adaptation; access to Ice Emeralds; ice elemental; Angel Arm; judge of the dead; time travel; Claw of Exorcism; Claw of Oblivion flight; Scroll of Town Portal (via Magun Mark II); Uniting of Sides; Absorption; Merging; healing powers used once and then promptly forgotten about; invasive telepathy; Transfer System access; being a total dick; control of the Sands of Time; the Kamehameha; telekinesis; Spirit Bomb; Restriction technique; Heart diffused into body.
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, house shopping, dragon taming, cocaine ingestion, mecha pilot, UFO pilot, intimidation, arctic survival, faking death, Metra Nui history, population demographics, volcanology, botany, in-field power study, disguise, lichen hunting, grenade throwing, weapons appraisal, nuclear weapon operation, mocking the dying, tracking, persuasion, chilled-ice taster, swimming, speed mourning, estimating temporal fallout, bold assumptions about the playing of instruments, divination, recuperation, barnfinding, gun inventing, vampiric chumminess, Tantric man-on-shark sex
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1/2/3/4/5/6/Extreme, Hyper, Horteka, side unison, fusion, human form
Form Combos: Ultimate (Super Saiyan 6 + Hyper), Mega (Ultimate + Side Unison), Sora fusion, Zero fusion (Blade Zero), Sora + Blade fusion (Blade Zero Matrix), New Ultimate (all of the above + Kosongto and Kaze), Demon Form, Dragon Form, Control Restriction Level 1 (Everything And More), Ancient God of Destruction
Gear: Apocalypse Tetsume, Tetsaiga, Tetkume keyblade, Zero’s Sword, climbing claws, the Magun Mark II, +5 shotgun, Time Mask, Samurai pulse rifle, Zero’s energy pistol, a shitton of normal guns, a shitton of extremely unlikely guns, ice-elemental cyberlimb, Super Ice Emeralds, Wing Zero’s buster rifles, Psycho Dressphere, “My First One” Kid’s Large Neo Halloween costume, iPod, skull of a Miami Dolphin, bloodstained guard uniform, copy of John Romero’s “Daikatana” still stained with the great man’s blood, Kagone’s hand-made “You’re My Bitch” necklace, Ghost, sniper rifle (for zoomin’ purposes), guítar, demon control crystal haphazardly thrown somewhere
Sidekicks: Season-Bringer, Sora from Kingdom Hearts, Kagone The True Heroine, Zero, Kosongto, his family, Alucard Q. Dracula
UGLY: 22

The End: Christian Humber vs. America
The sacrifice of innocents,
The hailing of the gun,
My way was death and madness
Now let the tower come!
–”The Gunslinger,” Demons ‘n Wizards

Can you hear the silence?  Can you hear the murmured worries of a thousand soldiers huddled outside the Pentagon?  They whisper a thousand heartfelt prayers to a God who listens and cannot do a thing to help, for the beast they pray against is, over and over again, God’s superior.  Keikanu is dead.  Kagone is half a world away, tending to the diseases creeping in through the wounds Humber has rent in the body of reality.  There is no hope for them but to be the first to die.

The note: “Casualties are unavoidable, for Hell will follow us as we come to stand. -Signed Devil Will Cry”.  Devil May Cry was taken, it seems.  Humber and company are called terrorists by the United States, which makes them all official TERORIST WARIORS(sic), with little plastic badge.  I’m pretty certain being a TERORIST WARIORS(sic) overrides previous plastic badges.  Not that the Lads care.  They line up “30 miles” from the Pentagon, which means that Season-Bringer just has to walk forward a few steps to get there ahead of everyone else.  Unless he’s lined up so he has to tip-toe forward with the rest of those tiny-ass mega-humanoids.  Which he probably is, all things considered.  If Luigi is the Luigi to Super Mario, then Season-Bringer is the Luigi to all of Humber’s Luigis.  Poor Season-Bringer.

The gang, perhaps aware the final battle is ahead, make sure their underwear is clean and their weaponry sharpened and loaded.  Weighty with destiny, “we began to walk fully armed for a slaughter”.  Because nothing gets a protest’s point across like murdering the people you’re protesting.

With an inexplicable lurch not dissimilar from Humber’s frequent breaks for Whatsisname Wolf to observe how Humber is Humbering up the Hum, we now get a perspective from the President, who, perhaps unwisely, is holing up in the middle of the Pentagon where Humber is headin’.  “It was unbelievable [quod he] that the Angel of Death was walking to us, just to kill and destroy everything to make us near invincible”.  Wait, what?  Either HUGELY OUTDATED “BUSH DOES NOT SPEAK ENGLISH” JOKE or some queer game is afoot.  Bush receives the Lingua Franca that Hum-Man is approaching, and so he is.

The rambling wrecks from Georgia Tech hit the police barricade.  Humber is unimpressed, drawing his trademark killstick Tetsume.  Chridon, as we are no longer surprised to find, whips out two swords and… “asked me to make it rain, and I did”  Oh, Humber, you bastard.  You couldn’t let Season-Bringer have the one thing that made him special, could you.  To the end, our Hum is a dick.  And why does Chridon need it to rain?  As it turns out, he doesn’t need it to rain, because he vibrates the blockade apart via sonic blasts; he’s just more comfortable in moist environments.  Christian Humber: Humanoid Holocaustphoon, now Christian Humber, Glorified Moisturizer.  Humber is even afraid of Chridon’s sonic blast, fearing its use on him.  This is a man who routinely dodges universe-ending energy blasts and embodiments of entropy.  Love (in the butt) does strange things to people.

The New Paramounts vibrate, eviscerate, exsanguinate, cremate, and postulate their way through the army barricades as though it were not a thing, sweeping a path to the Pentagon.  If all else fails, Humbere is prepared with the “Hell-Wind Scar” to kill the Pentagon if need be/he feels like it.  Humber only gives a shit about Hell now that it’s gone.  You know, in case we hadn’t gotten that he’s a total dick.  (We have.)

With mighty boots of some sort, the Manymurderers punt open the “front door” of the Pentagon.  You know, there are five front doors to the Pentagon.  If Humber mentioned his initial po–wait a fucking second.  Every single one of those people can fly or else can lift up a non-flier.  Why did they even bother walking through police/army blockades to get to the Pentagon?  Why are they even going on foot?  They could have flown over them, blocked or absorbed any aerial punishment sent their way, landed on the roof and either broken in or simply let themselves in.  They didn’t have to kill everybody in their path; in fact, as noted, most protests involve keeping as many of the other guys alive so they can stick around to see the point you’re making instead of just dying.  This could have all been avoided, but Christian Humber.  Just… Christian Humber!

Still, perhaps the U.S. government is even more suspicious than normal in this case, because hanging out in the Pentagon are none other than Organization XIII, The Boyz (and Girl) from Brazil.  “So that’s the organization you [That would be Sora. --Ed.] told me about they look pathetic, so this will me a warm up before I get ready to beat the shit out of the President.”  Humber’s knuckles ache; it’s been too long since he’s been able to just wail the living shit out of a world leader, and what better face to pound than that of the President of the Good Nighted States?  Nighted is a word.

Humber starts The Demon Rush only to be intercepted by a keyblade-slingin’ Nobody.  Humber kicks his ass in seconds, and unsurprisingly it turns out to be Roxas Man.  Humber chides Roxas for siding with the losing team and brushes him aside, then approaches Organization The Dudes “with the look of massacre in my eyes”.  What ensues is a bloodsacre of fairly normal Humberish proportions.  The rest of Humber’s murder-team simply sit back and watch, perhaps twiddling their thumbs, waiting for Humber to get done abominating nature.  Chridon wants to join in, what with the blood and all, but Humber refuses, as he’s busy taking out his rage as a player on people he’s never actually met.  Humber doesn’t object to Roxas’s intervention, though, and even plays a twee little Rouroni Kenshin tune to accompany My First Mortal Sin.  He also takes out two keyblades, because Roxas is Humber’s new bitch.  “we both charged mowing every single member of that goddamn organization to hell, it was a massacre.”  Yes, we get it.  We get it.

So, after the night’s second massacre, the crewe squirms its way through the infamous innards of the Pentagon.  Out of the blue Humber is bowl’t over: “I felt the cold, dark feeling of Chaos”, what the Japanese call “umami.”  Humber explains that he once made a deal with Chaos to be their ultimate servant, only to break free.  Of course, as you may have guessed, he has never, ever broken free, and even now his existence is allowed purely to fuel the continual recreation of the Corrupted Self.  And Humber wonders why his non-sociopathic compadres seem to pick up on this.

The heart of the Pentlabyrinth is soon found, and Humber elects to go in and do the Deed himself, for he has a president to punch, and probably Chaos too.  But no, his stupid little pals want to “contribute” so they can “say they’ve done something” and “I can’t stop crying, what have I become?”  So it’s with their combined forces that they break down one last door, one final threshold, until they encounter the ultimate incarnation of Chaos, the unspeakably evil fiend who set the entire plot of Christian Humber Reloaded in motion.

The leader of Chaos, the ultimate in darkness, the corrupted heart of the Corrupted Self, is none other than–

–who else?–

George Walker Bush.

That’s right.  George W. Bush takes the head of a seething horde of Chaos demons, presumably flickering with unfettered Chaos energy.  Humber demands to know why President Bush allowed Chaos to manifest again in this world; he responds, “I did it just so I can continue the research on your fighting capabilities, and I see you hold a grudge against it”

That’s right.  From the beginning, Humber’s family was shot down to see which aberrant mutant wolf would grow to be strongest.  Time and again, through capture and incidental encounter, Humber’s abilities were monitored, allowed to grow unfettered.  Christian Humber’s whole life has been George Bush’s pet project to create an army of Christian Humbers–but how could he control them all?  Easy.  Note that Christian Humber is irrationally sexually submissive to Chridon the half-human half-shark cyborg with balls of balls, and how said half-human half-shark cyborg was even mightier than Humber himself.  That’s right.  George W. Bush is going to transform himself into a cyborg man-shark, served by an army of Christian Humber butt-buddies, and become God-Emperor of all reality.

But wait, you may now be reasonably observing, it has been waaaaay too long for George W. Bush to still be president–Humber’s 84 years old in people years.  Clearly he’s back in power due to an unfortunate loophole in the 23rd amendment.

And now I have officially thought through every stupidly gigantic plot hole in Christian Humber Reloaded more than the real Christian Humber.  Good night, everybody!  Right after this the-rest-of-the-story.

Like any red-blooded American, Christian Humber is angry.  Angry at the president.  But before he can murder the president like so many 9/11 Truthers, in their mouth-breathing incorrectness, wish to, he is interrupted by–Keikanu, back from the grave to set all wrongs right aggaaah ha ha, no.  It’s the vice president, none other than the Corrupted Self.  Had you there, didn’t I?  No happy ending for you!  What does Humber do in the face of his ultimate foe, in the presence of the source of all his suffering, all his ridiculously supernal might?  Does he take Tetsume, the weapon he dedicated to himself, in hand, and fight him as an Ancient God of Destruction, the culmination of all his training and talent?

Nope, he just whips out two never-before-seen keyblades and goes into a never-before-seen completely-unrelated new super form.  “I stood up and I heard a heart beating then a lot of energy welled up and before I knew it my body began to glow.”  An external observer, unknown to us, observes that “his clothes changed color to pure white, and he was hovering looking surprised and his Keyblades were hovering around him and he looked at Chaos Blade with a murderous smile.”  Humber gets to the Murder-Act, speaking of murder, and–say it with me now–with little fanfare chops the Corrupted Self down a notch, screaming, “May Hell welcome you.”  Oh, Humber, you know so little about the extent of your damage.  Then, say it with me now, he gets even more arbitrarily powerful: “my clothes were pure silver and my hair was white-silver-blue color and my eyes are pure silver and my Keyblades changed to the Ultima Weapon and Ultima Weapon+ which means you’re extremely fucked when you see me in this form and in the bad mood I’m in right now, I set my theme song to ‘Du Hast’ and said ‘There Will Be No Mercy!’” holy SHIT Humber does not pause for breath but in the spirit of fairness I wish to say I am completely underwhelmed by the stupidity of this new form, couldn’t he at least have made it more poorly-color-coded and vaguely homoerotic oh God it’s happening more “t could not keep up with me because of my speed and strength and because I’m wielding the two strongest Keyblades in the world and I’m in a new form.”

Humber notes that his power level keeps escalating as the fight continues, and it’s even less of a fair fight now than before.  In fact, for being the final fight and all, Humber is experiencing zero resistance of any sort.  Series one ended in Humber needing five years to recover from his injuries fighting Chaos; series two ended in Humber only emerging whole due to totally bullshit new powers knitting him back together; and now he’s just blending right through the Corrupted Self with nary a pause.  I am not surprised.  I’m only vaguely disappointed.  He’s not even being creatively horrible now, aside from the whole George Bush, Master of Chaos thing.  Yeah, that’s adequately horrible.  Sigh.  Why now, Humber, do you falter in the course of horrifying the universe?

Humber is whipping out a truly staggering number of attacks: the Dual Wind Scar, which is countered back at him, which he counters with the B.S. “Backlash Wave” to counter said counter.  And what now?  A little ditty he “just learned” called Hell’s Warm Welcome: “it is when I swing both Keyblades straight down on to my opponent, breaking their neck, then doing a full fury of lethal blows to the chest, arms and head then the finishing blow is full of destructive energy that shoots up engulfing them, then the energy becomes the fire from Hell thus incinerating the opponent while I continue to beat the shit out of him.”  Man.  Why is he Satan now, when there’s no Hell left to save?  Only time.  Be ba ba da, be ba wahahaeyyyy.  So, the Corrupted Self dies.  Then the Chaos hangers-on.  Then the remaining U.S. soldiers (hey, why not? they certainly won’t be in a mood to rebel against the president after he openly declares intention to conquer the world).  And last, he HWWs Bush himself.  And that’s it.  It’s over.

I would like to mention that, with Humber-Logic, this means that Christian Humber is now President of the United States.

And now, we venture into the last.

Humber’s work is done.  Still in his stupid new form, he steps from the exit of the Pentagon, followed by Roxas, Zero, Sora, Chridon, and Alucard.  Where’s Season-Bringer?  Humber doesn’t care, and neither should you.  (SB’s crying.)  Humber is so angry at wanting to get a nap or something that he yells “SHUT THE FUCK UP, I’M NOT IN THE FUCKING MOOD TO ANSWER YOUR GODDAMN FUCKING QUESTIONS!”  Then he Wind Scars the hell out of a bunch of reporters.  His pals first try to talk them down, then snip their recording equipment, but Humber just goes ahead and kills more pressmen, ensuring their children will never see their mommy and/or daddy again.  Just in case you thought being president would change him in any way.

So, later.  Humber is back in the Farplane, apparently his new form.  Sora and Roxas, who have quietly wed at a small Las Vegas wedding franchise, ask him what’s up.  Humber’s practicing his new form.  Sora suggests it be called The Insane Form.  Humber, oddly, refutes it, offering instead The Chaos-Hunter Form as its name.  They all agree that is a fine name indeed.

And that is all.  There isn’t anymore…

For now.

In the beginning, Humber was an orphaned wolf of no special power or significance.  Now he is stronger, again and again and again and again and again and again, than God.  He is the Satan of an empty Hell.  He is probably the President of the United States of America.  He is probably gay for that shark.  For want of the ultimate soldier, George Walker Bush saw to the breeding of the obsolescence of everything Non-Humber.  You might call it a tragedy, except it isn’t.

What is there to say?  I began this project on the seventh of July, 2008.  It ends now the 19th of September, 2008.  Two months, one week, and five days of Christian Humber, and it is done.  I would like to thank Normalman, for popularizing Humber’s horrors and composing those amazing audiobooks and the ongoing, amazing webcomic; a random SomethingAwful forumgoer for setting me up with the audiobooks; Doroya for showing me the webcomic; and no thanks to Christian Humber himself for birthing this terrible thing like one of those Stone Babies.  Look them up, they’re terrible–though not as bad as Christian Humber Reloaded.

I am glad to be done with it, in a sense, and sort of sad to see it go.  I was rather attached to characters who aren’t Christian Humber.  I liked writing about the Pin, and the ever-suffering Keikanu, and the ever-competent Kagone.  And now Humber is master of men all, as we knew he would be.

There may be other parts.  They may be discovered, or they may fall into obscurity, never to be seen again.  If they are, I know that Normalman will be there to contain them, become a comedic middle- (dare we say normal)man between Humber and the rest of us.  And I’ll be there, drunk possibly, ready to review the new.

Until then, it’s been … a pleasure?  I guess.  Adios, my friends.  May your artistic endeavors never suck this bad.

The Beginning
Name: None
Alignment: True Neutral
Background: Wolf with Parents and One Brother
Weaknesses: Mere Mortal
Powers: Wolf stuff
Forms: Just the one
Gear: He’s a wolf, wolves don’t have equipment

The End
Name: President Christian Kibasu Chaos-Hunter Vashblade Dragonfang Humber
Age: 84 (588 wolf years)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Background: Has-a-Good-Home wolf-Saiyan-Horteka-demon-vampire-cyborg and leader of the free world
Current Occupation: President
Weaknesses: N/A
Powers: Super-strength; super-speed; Wind Scar technique; Ultimate Wind Scar; Omega Wind Scar; Spinner projectile; generic energy blast; at-will Super-Sayan transformation; teleportation; polyglot; instinctive use of artifacts; artifact fusion; useless guardian spirit; three purifying bullets in chest; Dark Templar powers; alien atmosphere adaptation; access to Ice Emeralds; ice elemental; Angel Arm; judge of the dead; time travel; Claw of Exorcism; Claw of Oblivion flight; Scroll of Town Portal (via Magun Mark II); Uniting of Sides; Absorption; Merging; healing powers used once and then promptly forgotten about; invasive telepathy; Transfer System access; being a total dick; control of the Sands of Time; the Kamehameha; telekinesis; Spirit Bomb; Restriction technique; Heart diffused into body; Hell-Wind Scar; Double Wind Scar; Backlash Blast; Hell’s Warm Welcome.
Covert Skills: Swordsmanship, assassination, blacksmithing, marksman, butcher, hacker, house shopping, dragon taming, cocaine ingestion, mecha pilot, UFO pilot, intimidation, arctic survival, faking death, Metra Nui history, population demographics, volcanology, botany, in-field power study, disguise, lichen hunting, grenade throwing, weapons appraisal, nuclear weapon operation, mocking the dying, tracking, persuasion, chilled-ice taster, swimming, speed mourning, estimating temporal fallout, bold assumptions about the playing of instruments, divination, recuperation, barnfinding, gun inventing, vampiric chumminess, Tantric man-on-shark sex, hatred of reporters
Forms: Super-Sayan lv. 1/2/3/4/5/6/Extreme, Hyper, Horteka, side unison, fusion, human form
Form Combos: Ultimate (Super Saiyan 6 + Hyper), Mega (Ultimate + Side Unison), Sora fusion, Zero fusion (Blade Zero), Sora + Blade fusion (Blade Zero Matrix), New Ultimate (all of the above + Kosongto and Kaze), Demon Form, Dragon Form, Control Restriction Level 1 (Everything And More), Ancient God of Destruction, Drive Form, Chaos Hunter Form
Gear: Apocalypse Tetsume, Tetsaiga, Tetkume keyblade, Zero’s Sword, climbing claws, the Magun Mark II, +5 shotgun, Time Mask, Samurai pulse rifle, Zero’s energy pistol, a shitton of normal guns, a shitton of extremely unlikely guns, ice-elemental cyberlimb, Super Ice Emeralds, Wing Zero’s buster rifles, Psycho Dressphere, “My First One” Kid’s Large Neo Halloween costume, iPod, skull of a Miami Dolphin, bloodstained guard uniform, copy of John Romero’s “Daikatana” still stained with the great man’s blood, Kagone’s hand-made “You’re My Bitch” necklace, Ghost, sniper rifle (for zoomin’ purposes), guítar, demon control crystal haphazardly thrown somewhere, another keyblade, PRECEDENT WARIOR(sic) badge
Sidekicks: Season-Bringer, Sora from Kingdom Hearts, Kagone The True Heroine, Zero, Kosongto, his family, Alucard Q. Dracula, the United States
UGLY: 22