Dracula vs Doom

Casually walking through the building at his own pace, Dracula looked around the structure and found much to his curiosity that he was in what the plinths and podiums around him referred to as an 'embassy', a diplomatic spot of land meant to be a place of residence for a foreign nation. The concept fascinated him, but not the art and tapestries that filled the halls and corridors. There would have been some to dare call the Impaler egotistical, but this Latverian lord, this Von Doom had his ego on full display on every wall, floor and even the frescos on the ceiling. Artwork, stone busts and tilework all showed the iron clad man as some returning war hero, or a messiah to a ravaged wasteland. The sight of this man's hubris made Dracula sneer. Heading towards the double doors to a great hall, Dracula opened the doors and stepped inside.

"That's FAR enough intruder!"

Looking up to the far end of the room, Dracula found the proprietor of the Latverian embassy sitting on a throne with his hands folded in front of him. His body was fully armored, and wearing a green robe and hood that did nothing to obscure the iron mask that covered his face.

"You dare steal from my personal reliquary?"

Looking down at the black blade sheathed at his side, Dracula unfurled the blade in his hand and showed off its polished finish in the light of the chamber, making his way deeper inside and finding the doors closed behind him of their own accord.

"Theft implies I took what was yours, this blade was forged for me 784 years ago by a master swordsmith in the Walachian wastes, forged and doused in the blood of sinners and thieves who dared to invade my former kingdom. This sword is mi..."

"All that Doom claims, belongs to Doom alone." Standing up from his throne, Victor pointed accusingly at the vampire. "You are a Count no longer, and cannot lay claim to my treasury, even if it once belonged to you."

Frowning, Dracula narrowed his eyes and sheathed his sword, wiping down his coat with his gloved hands. "I had planned to kill you with the black blade for your insolence, your audacity for stealing what was mine. But now I see that you are not brazen, you are simply mad. And I do not sully my blade on the blood of fools."

Spreading out his arms and clenching his iron fists, Doom glared back at the no-life king with wild eyed rage, his fist igniting with a strange fiery plasma that made the room glow orange and hot.

"You steal from my treasury, than you mock me on my own lands, I shall see to it you shall die by my hands PERSONALLY vampire vermin!"

A column of plasma fired towards Dracula, like raw fiery destruction it burned everything it came across when it struck him on the chest and sent him back against and through the doors of the throne room, continuing to blast forward until the vampire spun out of its momentum and landed on his hands and knees to watch it keep going. Looking back up to see his attacker, he found Doom levitating off the floor by several feet conjuring lightning from his outstretched hands, sending arcs of lightning towards the count who darted out of the way faster than light.

"You think you are the first to try and attack the magnificence of Doom? Many have tried and many more have failed! You shall fair no better."

Firing more arcs of lightning, Dracula transformed himself into a blur of red and black, like a scar in reality snapping and recoiling out of the way of the lightning before he could be struck. Like some dark lightning bolt, the streak of darkness snapped and twisted out of the way of another electric bolt before lunging forward and blasting Doom with a blow comparable to a speeding freight train. Sending the steel clad dictator through three walls and into a bust in his image, shattering the marble to dust and leaving Doom to stagger to his knee.

Reforming himself and hovering above Victor with a look of pure rage, the walls began to warp and bend, the light fixtures giving a sickly orange glow and the light draining all around them until there was but total darkness save for Dracula's burning red eyes.

"I AM DRACULA VLAD TEPISS! THE LAST KNIGHT OF THE ORDER OF THE DRAGON! THE BIRD OF HERMES! THE THRICE DAMNED OF BASSAT! I WILL NOT BE DEFEATED BY A THIEF WHO GLORIFIES HIMSELF A KING!!!"

The darkness then erupted into fire, spilling out and flooding every hallway like a tidal wave and causing everything the flames licked and caressed in their path to explode or melt from the intense thermal shock. The mechanical staff, all built to give the illusion of the building being occupied with people all melted like wax as the embassy burned. Looking around him and protected by a forcefield from his armor, Doom was beside himself with rage. Pressing a button to his belt and setting off the fire suppression system and flooding the building with retardant chemicals to stem the flames before returning to the air to collide with the Vampire Count.

Outside, onlookers watched on in both curiosity and horror as the embassy smoked and the windows blew out from bursts of heat and air pressure. A terrible battle raged inside, knocking down walls and causing displays of their power to bleed out through openings carved out of the building or fume out the windows.

With roar of rage, Dracula swiped his arm back, a jagged blade of shadow and eyes sweeping out from him and taking out the foundation pillars of a display room, causing it all to fold in and collapse like a house of cards burying Victor in rubble. Just as quickly as he was buried, Doom blasted out of the rubble like a blue, fiery comet, striking and colliding into Dracula and sending the two of them across the embassy together.

"I AM VICTOR VON DOOM! I WILL NOT BE DEFEATED BY AN OVERGLORIFIED TALKING CORPSE!!!"

With a command from his gauntlet, a wake of pressure exploded from his armor like a bubble, sending the entire ruined embassy to explode and rain down as debris all around them. Unphased by the rubble that fell from the sky, Dracula glared back at the tyrant with the same murderous stare in return.

"YOU! ALL of you are beneath me." Growled Victor, turning his attention to the crowd of people who stepped back in fear of the debris still raining down over the street around them. "I have TOLERATED these people and their nations because in time all would serve DOOM! ALL WOULD BE DOOM! But I will not have my powers challenged by some monster of old best left behind in the pages of Bram Stoker!"

Plucking a small device from the tattered ruins of his robes, Victor clicked a red dimple on the top of the pen shaped item he grasped and tossed it overhead. While it flew overhead, he pressed a button to his gauntlet and a tempest of energy erupted behind him, bending and twisting with raw energy until it opened like an eye, revealing another landscape behind it. A portal back to Latveria that doom quickly stepped through and looked over his shoulder to sneer back at the count. "I had planned on conquering London... Instead I can claim its lands after the smoke clears."

Not understanding what Doom was threatening with, Dracula was pulled away to the whine of energy behind him. The pen Doom had thrown activated in mid air and exploded like a bomb, only to cave in on itself and became a point of space the size of a cherry. That dot of blackness began pulling everything towards it with the strength of a hurricane, lifting debris and brickwork up to be swallowed up into its tempest with the same ease as wind pulling in leaves.

Finally unsheathing his black blade and striking it down to his feet to anchor himself, Dracula gasped as said feet lost purchase and he held to the blade for dear life while the black hole swallowed all it could claim, devouring stone, cars, street lamps and people as they failed to escape its pull.

A black hole. Victor Von Doom had unleashed a black hole in the heart of London. Looking up over his shoulder, he could see those who had been pulled in, their bodies twisted and slowed down by the immense pull of the black dot that consumed everything around it; matter, space, energy, light, even time. Snapping his attention back to the portal, Doom raised his chin in what could only be a smug grin behind the mask as the portal slowly closed, leaving him safe from the cataclysm he unleashed.

Looking back over his shoulder to the black hole as it started to rip apart the buildings across the street, he loosened his black from its stone mooring and allowed himself to be taken by the demanding gravitational pull, brandishing the blade with a warcry.

*

Watching the man be swallowed up in the black hole as the portal closed, Victor Von Doom stood pleased and turned his attention to his home castle of Latveria. Hundreds of mechanical vassals and slaves bowed before the man marching his way back to the palace as his closes servants bowed and followed his step.

"Welcome oh great and powerful Doom, we have been waiting for your return in several days from now, may I ask why of the early arrival?"

"NO... Prepare my throne room, and give me a manifest of my treasury in London, I will have to update the relics I have disposed of."

"Yes oh great one, it shall be done by your..."

An explosion where the portal nearly closed outside the grounds alerted the entire palace, the legion of Doombots and the villagers across the entire landscape snapped to attention as a scream as loud and as chilling as a banshee cry sent everyone to their knees, clutching at their ears in terror at what came through. The portal was barely closed when it was ripped wide open and a column of blood and darkness poured out, flooding the lands and making its way skyward to dance over the night sky.

The overcast clouds turned black and churned into a storm, leaving only the light of the crescent moon to illuminate the lands as the mass of darkness sprouted leathery wings and spread them over the kingdom in its descent back to the ground. At that moment the shadow serpent crashed into the main gardens of the Latvarian palace, leaving vassals and minions to collapse to their knees in horror as the mass of chaos draped itself over the kingdom and people, sending them into screaming fits of madness as the fleshy shadows poured away from them and pooled into a central mass.

That twisted mass of shadow and darkness shrunk and retracted, reclaiming a physical form until it became a man holding the black hole back by sheer will alone. Dracula's hands held the bubble of gravity in his hands like one would hold a ball, his face contorted to a fanged grimace of concentration as he put all of his powers into containing it. turning his red eyes up at Victor Von Doom and his frightened staff, Dracula had formed enough of himself to speak.

"WE are not finished! And you left this behind..."