Crimson Five vs Crimson Fiend

It was a fine summer's day. The sun was shining through a partly-cloudy sky, the grass and trees were a vibrant green after a recent rain, and I found myself wondering: How had things gone to hell so quickly?

We had gathered at Eli's house for a friendly round of kicking ass and taking names on the Xbox 360, as well as to discuss the expansion of the Crimson Society. We were just about to vote on a new candidate when a sharp knock came on the door - odd, since the only door in the room led to the kitchen.

That should have been our first clue that something was up, but we were kind of fuzzy after our debate/gaming session, I guess. Instead, Eli gave an offhand "Come in", without any of us turning around.

Nobody came in. Instead, we heard a voice on the other side of the door: "Knock knock!"

It sounded oddly familiar, but I didn't put the pieces together just yet, instead opting to look at my friends in confusion. Eli shrugged and decided to humor the person on the other side, even as they repeated their previous statement.

"Knock knock! KNOCK KNOCK!"

"Uh...who's there?"

"Wah."

"Wah who?"

"Hey, don't jump the gun! You're supposed to say that after I do this!"

The maniacal cackle that followed was the last piece I needed to solve the mental puzzle - unfortunately, it came too late to prevent what happened next. The door flew open and a HUGE metal fist came flying through the room, sending us diving for cover as it smashed through the opposite wall, taking the couch, the television, and the Xbox 360 with it as it soared into the house beyond the yard.

"Hey! Our Xbox!" yelled Terrence.

"My man cave!!!" lamented Eli.

"The hell was that?!" snarled Scafe.

I had no time to reply before the answer stepped into the room, and I probably wouldn't have been able to articulate it even if I had. The golden armor, the crimson scales, the slimy black hair, the demented, fang-lined grin...I knew exactly who it was, but I couldn't believe my eyes - which judging by how his gold-on-black eyes gleamed maliciously, was precisely what he had expected.

"What's with the bug eyes? You look like you've seen a murderous ghost crawl out of the television - which, incidentally, I would've TOTALLY saved you from if it was actually happening just now!"

Words finally returned to me at that moment. "N...Nevic! How in the grape-soda-purple hell did you get here?!"

"Therein lies an epic adventure and a riveting tale, Brian - which, unfortunately, you won't live long enough to hear! You see, you're all about to get HAMMERED!"

With another wild cackle, Nevic whirled to face the nearest target; Eli, still gaping at the havoc erupting in his house. In a flash of golden lightning, a massive hammer formed in the monster's hands, which promptly swung the mallet into Eli's head and drove him into the ground like a nail. Despite this, Eli seemed only briefly dazed, allowing him to quickly begin screaming an impressive array of curses as he struggled to free himself.

This predicament did not go unnoticed by my other friends. Terrence quickly rushed forward, crying "Hang on, Eli! We'll get you ou-!!!"

"Wait! You don't know what Nevic can-"

Both of us froze mid-sentence as Nevic whirled around, the tip of his tail narrowly missing Terrence's chest. By the time Nevic finished his turn, his hammer had shifted into a golden baseball bat, allowing him to soundly smack Terrence into the nearest wall. The force of the impact shook the whole room - frankly, it was probably a small miracle that neither Terrence nor the wall shattered into a million fragments (although the latter developed an entire spiderweb of cracks).

"I'm...okay! Somebody...just get...the license...of that elephant...uuuugh..."

"Huh, he's tougher than he looks! Oh well, he'll stick around long enough for me to finish the job later!"

By now, my initial shock had given way to righteous anger, prompting me to pull my Almighty Pencil from my ear and fix the hated heathen with my best death glare. "You know what? I don't care how you got here, Nevic - in fact, I'm glad. Now I can kick your scaly ass personally!"

"Keep dreaming, spider-bunny! You think this is the first house I've visited today? I've killed creators like you before, and I'll do it again here! Your severed heads will make a nice hoodie - the perfect compliment to my new raptor-skin cloak!"

Scafe's eyes widened briefly before narrowing to intensely glowing slits. "Raptor-skin...no! NO! YOU DID NOT F***ING TOUCH BECKY, YOU WEAK EXCUSE FOR A DRAGON!!!"

In response, Nevic only laughed cruelly. I narrowed my own eyes, trying to find any sign of truth or deceit in the heathen's claims, as Maxcutter tried to keep the infuriated Scafe from doing something stupid.

"Calm down, Scafe! If he had somehow gotten Becky, don't you think he'd be wearing it to taunt us?"

"Would I? Or would I save it for after I got the matching accessories from your cooling corpses first? HAHAHAHAAA!!!"

"You...yoooooouuuuu..." I could tell that Scafe was at the limit of his patience. To be honest, so was I, but my previous experience with Nevic had made me better prepared for his usual mindgames.

"Listen, Scafe, don't fall for the heathen's tricks! He's trying to get a rise out of us; trying to make us lose focus!"

"Yep...and it WORKED! Heads up!"

I realized too late that we had taken our eyes off of Nevic for a crucial moment, allowing the crimson chaos-causer to charge. Shifting his bat into an oversized metal arm, Nevic delivered a vicious punch that sent Max and I sprawling. Scafe, however, took the brunt of the blow on his chin, sending him flying into the ceiling and bouncing back towards the ground.

"If you thought that was a hit, wait'll you see the PUNCHLINE!"

The meaning of this horrible pun became clear as Nevic lined up the fist of his metal arm with the falling Scafe. Suddenly, the fist detached from the arm and flew at Scafe, punching him into the far wall. The force of the impact left another gaping hole in the wall, but Scafe was left comically spinning in place before flopping onto the shattered edge of the hole, looking extremely dizzy.

"Three down, and only you to go!"

The words brought Max and I back to our senses as we struggled to recover from the previous hit. In the middle of the room, Nevic shifted his weapons again, creating what appeared to be a miniature rocket launcher in one hand and a large flail with a beetle design in the other. The heathen's face was a study in malevolent glee, his eyes seeming to shimmer with anticipation of a kill.

It was a look that I would look forward to wiping off of his scaly face. Evidently, Max agreed, as he suddenly dashed forward with his sword raised.

"Really?" Nevic sneered, clearly unimpressed. "Didn't the last three failures give you any tips about the 'rushing in blindly' strategy?"

"As a matter of fact," said Max, "they did!"

With a long-practiced movement, Max stopped mid-dash and swung his sword, creating an attack wave that Nevic only barely evaded. The wave proceeded to tear the chair behind Nevic in two, as well as leave a sizable gash in the floor - neither of which escaped the notice of the still-buried Eli.

"Watch the furniture, will you?!"

"Maybe when we're not fighting for our lives, Eli!" Max quipped as he sent more attack waves at Nevic. One flew out the open door into the kitchen, and another slashed the opposite wall as the first, but the only casualties were the corner of the kitchen counter and a tall lamp on the side of the room. For his part, Nevic danced around the attack waves and returned fire with his rocket launcher, but the projectiles either missed us or were cut down in midair by Max.

I was occupied not getting caught in the crossfire, but finally saw an opportunity to attack...at least, I thought I did. No sooner had I gotten behind Nevic and started drawing, the heathen shifted his rocket launcher into an acid gun and nearly took my arm off with his first shot. Max used Nevic's brief distraction to slash the flail in two, but Nevic seamlessly morphed his other weapon into a (admittedly rather wicked-looking) sword that manifested a crackling beam of green energy to meet Max's own massive blade.

Despite the din of battle, I heard Nevic hissing to Max, "Why don't you just roll over and die already?! Your doom is inevitable - it's just a matter of how and when!"

"Says you!" I retorted, using my pencil to scrawl a flurry of shrapnel to launch at the acid gun keeping me at bay. "We'll decide when we're doomed - and even then, we'll fight it to the very end!"

Nevic's reply was lost in a loud *POP* as my makeshift flechettes managed to puncture the holding tank of his acid gun, splashing corrosive goop all over the villain's hand. Nevic's yelp of pain and dismay was quite satisfying, but the feeling vanished when I realized that he was still holding his own against Max. To make matters worse, Nevic was still able to hold me off with his flailing tail, now charged with dangerous-looking golden energy.

"It's only a matter of time before you're overwhelmed!" snarled the crimson fiend, already regenerating his damaged hand and manifesting a gun somewhere between a handgun and a bazooka. "First you, then the world, and then the entire multiverse - I don't care how long it takes, but you're all going the way of dodos, disco, and the electric car!"

If not for my seething hatred of the heathen, I'd be half-impressed by the creativity of his taunts. As it was, I gritted my teeth, ducked under a rocket, and began creating a rift in reality with my pencil, calling my creations to my aid.

One way or another, this red-faced freak was going down. And I had no intention of letting him take me -or my friends- with him!


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Well, this is a drawing long in the making! There's quite a story behind its creation (for those of you still conscious after the previous wall of text)...

A year or two ago, noted us with a request: a drawing of himself and battling Nevic (our rogue creation and everyone's least favorite demented dragon-demon). We attempted a few sketches, but nothing really ever came of it, and we set it aside.

However, inspiration struck at the beginning of 2013, and we began working on Max's request pic, but with a new twist. Having seen the birth of the Crimson Five through this picture (thespidermanager.deviantart.co… among others, we decided to add Eli (), Scafe (), and Terrence () to the picture as well! Of course, since we have little to no idea on how they fight, we had to relegate them to pre-pwned casualties of Nevic's attack, giving Brian and Max the cool battle poses.

The real challenge, however, came when we decided to try and color this picture with Paint, as our pencil crayons are becoming increasingly unreliable. To everyone on deviantART who reads these comments, take this word of advice from a superior life form...

...NEVER, EVER, EVER TRY TO COLOR A SCANNED IMAGE IN PAINT!!!

You would not believe the amount of trouble we had to go through to get this thing colored properly. For some strange reason, the colors tended to "bleed" out of their confines and shade the lines beyond them. It's not really noticeable unless you zoom in, but it drove us even more nuts than we already were. And that's not even touching on the irritation of having to color with the Pencil tool, due to imperceptible shading differences on the seemingly-uniform white parts of the uncolored image preventing the simple solution of the Fill tool...or the fact that we had to revise a few things on the fly to account for the characters' updated looks (namely, Brian's hand-mouth and unique pencil design)...

Long story short, this was an undertaking of titanic proportions compared to most of my previous work. Still, we're proud of the results - we got a lot of little details into the background, our ability to draw dynamic poses seems to be improving, and you even get a glimpse of Nevic's new (and hopefully final) design! If you have any questions about the work, leave a comment - we'll be sure to answer it when I have the time (which, judging from my current luck in job-hunting, might not be for a while).

If you're still reading this far, congratulations! All that's left is to comment, fave, and read the disclaimers below (hopefully in that order)!

*Sergeant Spider/Brian and Mr. Lookie ka Lookie belong to

*British Mummy/Maxcutter belongs to

*Not-so-Hell-Spawn/Scafe belongs to

*Drive Mustang/Eli belongs to

*Fut Juck/Terrence (is that how you spell it, or are we being a Grammar Nazi again?) belongs to

*Becky belongs to , and for the record, she's fine - Nevic was actually lying to distract the others.

*Nevic (unfortunately) belongs to us. If anyone wants to take him off our hands, however, please fill out a form and make an appointment with Nuclear Bob-Arm, at any time between 8:00 AM and 7:00 PM on weekdays and second Saturdays.