The demon was a huge, towering mass of spike-encrusted flesh. Under the blood-red non-sky of hell, it grabbed Reginald and tore his skin off in dinner plate-sized patches, like a gleeful child impatiently opening presents on Christmas morning. But the release of death was denied to him: he had passed through that door already. But when he was a mere clump of oozing matter on the dirty, hot clay, his torn-out eye saw the giant monster shrink, lose its armor, and change shape until it looked like a young girl. His ripped body knit itself back together, and he was whole again in minutes, towering over the small female who shrank away from him. He felt the old urges, the ones that surely were the reason why he ended up here in the first place. Grabbing one of the rusty pieces of metal that littered the ground, he went to work. He lost himself in the glory and ecstasy of the ravaging. Soon, the small, soft body was little more than a slaughtered carcass.

Reginald momentarily felt a sense of loss, already yearning to do it all over again, when the dismembered thing suddenly squirmed and squelched, and from the ruins his old nemesis, the armored demon, arose again. He tried to run, but the thing easily caught him and subjected him to a bout of rending torture that exceeded the last in savagery by a good margin. And when he was little more than gobbets of bleeding flesh, the strange reversal occurred yet again.

"Why though?" he whispered, as the wounded female crawled away from him. She -it- turned to him, her eyes wild and her mouth distorted with fear.

"Punishment," she hissed, "what else?"

"I don’t feel punished right now," Reginald said, grinning. His jagged, rusty blade came down.

"For both of us, you dumb fuck," she groaned through gritted teeth. He stopped what he was doing for a moment, looking puzzled. "Don’t you get it? I’m a fallen angel. I chose to renounce God. My punishment is to be here, stuck with scum like you forever," she spat.

"You could have left me alone, you goddamn monster!" he growled back.

"I hate you, you stinking bag of meat! You were given everything, and you squander it on meaningless perversions! I despise you!" she screamed at him.

"Oh yeah? Well, I've got so much planned for you, little bitch," he retorted. She seemed about to scream at him again, but for a moment her expression changed.

"I hate you, but… Maybe we could just stop?" She looked uncertain, waiting for his reply. He thought. Was there an escape from this cycle? Did he even want to? He looked at the female’s soft flesh and considered the many things he still wanted to do, or wanted to do again.

"One more. I’ll think about it. Just one more," he said, and advanced. The demon-girl-thing screamed, in rage and despair.