Mark 2.0

by Prax Venter

  Using his momentum, Mark swung his blunt weapon through its giant skull, instantly erasing the spirit within.

  He turned to see Abby and Angel taking care of another wanderer that snuck up from behind, and Mark wondered how soon they’d get swarmed down in these dead-filled tunnels.

  “Let’s move,” he said, leading them further down the twisting cave toward the center of this horrid place. More paths converged and the tunnel expanded to be about twenty yards across.

  Five more came at them near one of the junctions, but between Jezebel’s Vines and Abby’s Mind Crush, it was quickly down to three. Mark and Sasha were getting in some good practice with the martial artist Angel as the three of them tore through the rest.

  However, with every one of these ghost creatures that they dispatched, he felt more of the ambient malice in the area turn its focus on them.

  The path continued down in a constant left-sloping spiral for a while until the group reached a much larger cavern. They hadn’t been trying to sneak around or keep quiet, but Mark decided that it was time to start treating this place with a bit more caution when he saw what came rushing to meet them.

  “Split up!” Mark commanded as the ghost of a towering giant wearing dinosaur bones brought down its fists to hit anyone it could.

  He heard Jezebel roar into her bear form as he rolled away, and when he came back up to his feet to check everyone else, their tank Druid was attempting to draw its attention by standing on her hind legs. Behind her, Angel was hovering in front of Abby like some futuristic superhero as the Mind Melter wove her high-damage spell. Both he and Sasha circled back around as the silent bone-covered apparition kicked at Jez. She took the attack against the thick armored plates on her massive chest, and although the ghost giant was about twice her size, she was able to clamp on to the bones covering its foot with her savage jaw and powerful arms. While she grappled with the huge monster, Sasha and Mark each took the opportunity to strike at its other spectral leg, causing some damage. This one was far more powerful than the others they’d fought.

  However, as the creature was losing balance and about to go down, Abby finished her Invisible Lacerations. Her one attack ended the fight by severing its phantom head, and only its skeletal armor fell to the ground.

  “Nice work!” Mark said, wincing from the burst of essence streaming into his balls. He dismissed his mace and moved to check Jez for wounds. Her body melted back down to her curvy satyr form as she held up a hand.

  “Save it,” she said. “Mamma Bear is built to take a hit like that.”

  He gave her a nod and then started moving them forward again. The more of these reanimated spirits they faced, the more Mark felt a feverish, single-minded existence from them.

  They weren’t in any kind of pain that he could tell, more like an echo of the dusty frustration he felt coming from every direction.

  An ancient music box warped over time and now only sending out sour notes.

  It seemed like it had been a while since he’d fought side by side with his beautiful entourage of battle-hardened lovers and despite the dreary environment, he was having a great time. Even Angel fit perfectly as a competent guardian for their most vulnerable member. And her upgrades! They’d finally have a way to track the shards down instead of relying on old folklore or lost history.

  Mark became aware that layers of the unconscious barriers holding him back from being digital life were fading and falling from his mind. Not all of them, but he was finally starting to get a handle on wrapping his artificial mind around where to even begin.

  It was what this world was made for- to acclimate his mind to being pure energy.

  With a devilish grin, Mark summoned a second ethereal mace in his left hand and pumped his legs faster into the bone-laden tunnels. It wasn’t long before they ran into a large cluster of animated dead blocking the way forward and instead of slowing, he sprinted straight for them.

  Sasha armored her arms and wings as she kept pace by his side and they both began to tear into the monsters determined to take their lives. Using his True Strike ability, Mark was able to predict enemy movements and began taking on two at a time, his dual maces flashing out to both block and destroy. To his left, Sasha tossed a Shock Bomb over the heads at the front of this ghostly pack then proceeded to kick the shit out of everything in range of her deadly solid legs.

  A few seconds later, the explosion from her bomb was deafening in the confined space, but the number of enemies went from over ten down to two.

  Abby ended one with her mind powers, and Sasha Arc Bolted the final foe in a flash of light.

  More essence poured into him from the kills, but he didn’t stop to talk about it. With a gleeful grunt, Mark dashed forward again, and his bonded monster-women followed behind his charge.

  They tore through a few more clumps, but he could tell more were coming to join them from offshoot passages. And that his current reckless plan of assault happened to be the correct one. If they took their time and moved carefully, the tunnels ahead would have time to grow stuffed with stirred-up ghosts and their attached bones.

  Further down they went into the Wrongside dirt, and Mark noticed that the gnarled roots of the Ghost Ent became more prominent. They were going the right way. What he did when they got there… he didn’t know, but what they were doing felt right- or at least harmless. As if they were plucking the dried leaves off a dead plant.

  Mark smashed one of the ghostly entities wearing a crab’s carapace on the run and rounded a corner to come face to face with a huge new challenge.

  Curled up in another underground chamber was a glowing bone dragon. Where other ghastly entities in the Bone Rain seemed to have mismatched skeletal armor sparsely attached to their ethereal forms, this was a seven-story dragon ghost with a full set of metallic black bones covering a vast percentage of its massive body.

  “I’ll try and take hold of its attention,” Jezebel yelled, as she shifted back into an armored grizzly.

  “No!” Mark said, holding up his hand. The undead monstrosity opened up a spot that had to be its mouth to let out a savage roar, but all that came out was an unsettling hissing noise. “I got this one,” he continued as he took a step forward, causing it to focus its full attention on him. The link was all he needed to establish a deep mental dive.

  However, this boss creature in the underground chasm was merely a shallow puddle compared to the magnificent terror it used to be in life- she used to be. This was the spirit of a female dragon that died alone. And then it hit him like the forward windscreen of a cargo transport pod flying down the highway.

  Everything here had died alone and afraid. There were no murder victims in the Bone Rain. Only a collection of those who’d felt the terror of a solitary passing.

  “Rest,” he said calmly as he held out his hand toward the ghostly dragon preparing mindlessly to launch toward its prey. With a gentle sigh, Mark unleashed his Lover’s ability at a new level of unfiltered potency.

  A searing beam of golden light tore into the creature from above and melted its ghastly body as if it were a crayon under a blowtorch. It let out one final confused hiss into the dark cave before its spirit form faded away and its outer skeleton fell to lie with the roots and bones of this place once more. Mark sucked in a quaking breath as his pleasure center received a huge jolt of essence. He was a quarter full already.

  “This is a lonely place,” Abby said.

  “A graveyard for those not laid to rest by anyone,” Jezebel added.

  “How does the tree fit in?” Sasha asked, her tail snapping once to dissipate the brutal attack she’d planned for the undead dragon boss. She turned her blue eyes on his. “That was impressive, by the way. I was wondering when you were going to heal something in here.”

  “I don’t know how the Ghost Ent fits in,” he said, “but I don’t think it wants to be doing what it’s doing. It wasn’t made for this.” Glowing movement across the dark underground chamber caught his eye, and M
ark turned to hold out his glowing mace toward the shambling creature.

  “This way,” he shouted as he dashed toward it. “We’ve got an ancient pissed-off tree to interrogate!”

  - 18 -

  Deep below the dry, blue dirt of the Wrongside and the constant skeletal downpour from the Bone Rain, Mark and his party eventually came to the bottom of the spiral passage. They met more and more resistance as they drew close, but since the creatures were only diluted copies of what they’d been in life, the reanimated entities swarming throughout the roots and bones fell swiftly before their upgraded powers.

  The floor of the tunnel leveled out at the bottom and left them at the threshold of a massive underground chamber with the Ghost Ent standing on a mound of bones directly in the center. There was no mistaking their target and seeing the pulsating swirling skulls and the waving tendrils of its pure white branches in person almost made it appear as if it were underwater.

  Perhaps the wood followed the currents of the dead spirits drifting just beyond the shadows in this cursed place.

  Around the small mound of bones where the Ghost Ent silently writhed were over thirty reanimated ghosts with all manner of mis-matched bones. Mark watched as the tree sent out a pulse of wispy light down through its roots and followed its path around the dry and dusty dead until the traveling glow shot upward toward the surface.

  “It makes them,” Abby whispered from his side as she wrapped her tentacle around his waist.

  “Maybe it’s my Druid class talking,” Jezebel began quietly, “but whatever is going on here appears to be a natural process. I think we need to be very careful before chopping this tree down.”

  “Roots…” It was a dry raspy voice and there was no way it wasn’t coming from the tree.

  Mark shared a glance with the others before he noticed that the animated spirits of the dead all started moving toward them.

  “We mean you no harm,” Mark yelled out into the chamber toward the throbbing white creature crouched in the darkness. “Are you attacking us?”

  “Tear and rend!” it shouted back.

  “That sounds like attacking to me,” Sasha said, extruding the metal plates that covered her arms and wings.

  But Mark knew better. This creature was indeed responding to their presence, yet it was all wrong somehow. What the Blazar had named Ghost Ent was old beyond words and there was a dryness to its mind- a twisting distance to it. Mark struggled to stretch his own thoughts to understand what there was to see within.

  He received flashes of pain and a cleaving, as if someone removed its limb or a part of its mind.

  This creature was vast, both over time and space, and Mark was having difficulty understanding what he was perceiving. During the countless eons, it had grown and cleansed the unclean. It filtered out the deadwind and replaced that which was used up. There was a cycle of transformation here, and that engine of perpetual change had been interrupted- broken.

  There was a jolt from those he loved, yet their colored tethers stretched so thin and sparse… What were they trying to tell him? Did they even exist?

  With a gasp, Mark forced himself back into his own mind to return to the ones he loved more than anything and found them currently fighting for their lives.

  “He’s fucking awake!” Jezebel shouted.

  “Mark!” Sasha sobbed as she Side Kicked a monster right in its face.

  He blinked away the haze from this new timeframe of thought… the one he was used to, but his body took a moment to make sense of the danger they were in.

  The animated, mix-matched spirits were everywhere.

  He finally pulled it together and bashed the closest in the head with a sledgehammer a moment before it tore into Sasha’s arm. Angel was behind him doing her ninja impersonation while Abby kept casting as fast as she could, but the thirty that were there turned into hundreds. There was no end in any direction.

  How long was he in that thing’s mind?

  He was about to pop his bubble and use his ability to open his escape hatch when he heard the Ghost Ent croak out the word “Roots” again. Snarling hatred filled the creature as it formed a new animated spirit monster about six feet away from where Mark stood.

  “Roots,” Mark repeated as his eyes moved to a specific area of the enormous chamber. A place where the mind of the tree had obsessed for decades. It was easy to spot as shambling spirits avoided stepping directly on that section of damaged roots. His heal was ready, but if the glowing True Strike information he was received from his eye was to be believed, his healing would only do further damage to this undead legendary creature.

  There only seemed to be one thing they could do for it and a plan quickly formed in his mind. With another shambling ghost dealt with via a crack from his summoned weapon, Mark activated his red-tinted bubble and a massive, twenty-yard dome formed directly over his head.

  The nearby bone-covered spirits were all shattered instantly, and some were tossed so violently backward that their destroyed skeletons became buckshot, taking out many others behind them.

  “The roots,” Mark repeated, louder, now that they had a minor respite from the onslaught he’d been sleeping through.

  To demonstrate, he reformed his summoned mace into a two-handed, blood-red axe. He paused to catch Jezebel’s emerald eyes before he made the first cut.

  “It’s gone insane,” he said, and she knew he meant the tree. “I’ll explain later.”

  Jezebel trusted him implicitly to do the right thing, so the bear-shaped Druid nodded once before she turned her iron-coated claws toward ripping up the knotted wood within their protective shield.

  The Ghost Ent’s wailing groans echoed into the bone-littered caves and summoned more mismatched dead around its trunk in response.

  “They won’t walk over the severed roots,” Mark shouted as he hacked downward on a thick tendril running under his dome. The other undead entities pressed forward to pound on the magic barrier, and it wouldn’t be long before the swarm did enough collective damage to bring it down.

  “Angel and Sasha, clear us a path through the ghost things,” he ordered, pointing toward the tree. He then spun on his green-skinned abyssal horror.

  “Chop that thing down at its base.”

  “Understood,” she said, as she started to weave her tentacles.

  The two melee fighters worked together to push back the bone-coated spirits while the others worked to uproot the writhing, anguished tree. With a solid goal and competent teammates, the progress was swift. Once they had severed a large enough swath to keep the animated dead from swarming them, it was only a matter of time. Abby’s Imaginary Lacerations gouged into the spirit tree’s trunk over and over, but this obviously wasn’t a normal hunk of wood.

  Even with her upgraded ability, she was about ten chops in before Mark thought he could make it to the tree himself. Her gashes in the wispy, white bark revealed only a strange swirling mess of gray light inside, and Mark hoped he’d made the right call here. It was far too late now.

  “Cover me!’ he yelled out, but it was mostly for Angel’s benefit. His Enthralled knew what he was about to do.

  Mark dashed up the small mound of bones as his boots slid on pelvises and rib cages, and quickly came face to many-faces with the ancient unknowable entity made of perpetually screaming skulls.

  “I’m sorry,” Mark whispered as he hefted his red axe and swung it as hard as he could straight into the twisting madness Abby had already gouged out. As soon as his magic axe bit deeply into what little remained, he closed his eyes and began to saturate the entire macabre grotto in potent healing energy.

  The dying creature before him stopped wailing for a moment as the flow of its existence in this world faded away, and the chaotic twisted nature of its thoughts became as calm as gathering mists on an early spring morning. As difficult as it was to understand the mind of something so old and bizarre, Mark felt a flash of gratitude from the Ghost Ent before the terrifying trunk and wispy branche
s faded away. The torrent of essence that flowed into him from its destruction almost knocked him on his ass back down the mound of bones, but Jezebel was right there next to him with a steady hand on his shoulder.

  He gave her a nod and was about to turn away, but a flash of light where the ethereal undead tree stood demanded his attention. In the ancient creature’s place was a fist-sized acorn carved entirely from a single clear diamond. Bright, white energy flickered around its edges as if it were a hunk of flaming coal with its colors inverted.

  “What is that,” Abby asked, her eyes twinkling in the light of the carved gem.

  “An object of great power,” Angel said from nearby. “Scans show a mix of Life and Death magic. Beyond its incalculable arcane applications, this jewel would no doubt be considered quite valuable.”

  Sasha pumped her fist into the air. “A cathartic dungeon crawl, priceless treasure, mountains of essence, and a major quest completed! Let’s hope everything else we face from now on goes this smoothly.”

  Mark shot her a sideways smirk laden with doubt before he noticed Jezebel rubbing her horn. She was staring at the diamond acorn, and now that he was paying attention to the quiet trickle coming from the Druid’s mind, he could see she was upset about what they’d done.

  “There was no saving it, Jez,” he said as the petite abyssal horror moved in to retrieve the gem-like seed. “I think the Blazar damaged its roots and broke its ancient mind. It was stuck in a pattern of defense and confusion. In the end, I think this is what it wanted.”

  She nodded, but her emerald eyes never left the glowing artifact the ghastly tree had left behind.

  “Wait,” she said as everyone else began moving down the central bone pile. “We can’t just take this. It feels wrong, and I have been thinking a lot about making the wrong choices.”