Mark 2.0 Read online

  Mark 2.0: Book 3

  Change

  By Prax Venter

  Cover by Jaka Prawira

  Edited by Celestian Rince

  Copyright © 2020 Prax Venter

  All rights reserved

  Author's Note: This is a work of fiction, and all characters depicted in sexual situations are 18 years of age or older. Characters with any resemblance to persons that exist now, or have ever existed, are purely coincidental.

  -= Special Thanks =-

  Miranda, Kristen, and Lori Ann

  What isn’t is as important as what is.

  Table of Contents

  Mark 2.0: Book 3

  Table of Contents

  - Recap -

  - 1 -

  - 2 -

  - 3 -

  - 4 -

  - 5 -

  - 6 -

  - 7 -

  - 8 -

  - 9 -

  - 10 -

  - 11 -

  - 12 -

  - 13 -

  - 14 -

  - 15 -

  - 16 -

  - 17 -

  - 18 -

  The End

  ~ Connect with Prax Venter ~

  - Recap -

  Mark knew the shriveled plant elf named Noma looked frail but wielded potent magic and considered his next words carefully.

  “We all wake up a new person every morning, changed by experiences that we collect the day before.”

  “Indeed,” Noma said, narrowing his eyes. There was a longer than comfortable pause, but the old pile of walking bark grunted once and then started moving for the display that held the seven Crystal Heart shards.

  They all followed him past the other pedestals displaying nuts, berries, and seeds before Mark saw the soft red glow of their coveted treasure.

  With a wave of his staff, Noma caused the glass covering to disappear.

  “Take your reward, Collector, and may your legendary quest to gather them all result in a better world for everyone.”

  “Actually,” Mark said, “I don’t want to touch them all right now. I’d probably burst a blood vessel from the torrent of essence. Probably waste most of it in the process.” He looked over to Jezebel. “Would you be so kind, my love, as to load them up into your bag?”

  She nodded a little too frantically then did what he asked.

  “Thank you, Noma,” Mark said, turning back to the Guild Master. “Thank you for believing in us.”

  He grunted once, nodded, and then hobbled off back toward his vines.

  “Come back any time you feel like helping the people of Starglade,” he shouted over his shoulder, apparently done with the conversation.

  Mark couldn’t believe it. They were getting away with this. They’d teleported the reportedly immovable Orb of Stars from this dimension to Lagos, the Lagomorph home world, and every second that passed without alarms going off was making his heart race faster. He saw Jezebel put the last shard in her bag, then he turned to casually hurry for the teleport chamber, but the essence reward for simply finishing the centaur door frequency mission assailed his senses. Mark clenched his teeth through the pleasure and kept moving. His pools were nearly full again- and he had yet to absorb any of the seven shards they’d just acquired.

  “What now?” Sasha asked as she clomped faster to match his swift strides.

  But before Mark could answer, the pure-black eyes of the game world’s admin AI appeared floating in his vision. He came to a skidding halt in the middle of the expansive hallway, fear gripping his insides as the rest of her face appeared distorted and then sharpened to a crystal-clear image.

  “People of my Universe,” she said in a deafening voice, and Mark noticed that not only were his Enthralled also seeing and hearing the same thing, but everyone passing through the hall around them had stopped to focus on the image floating in front of their eyes.

  “My name is Lady Maliah. It was I that created you and all that you know. Now know this, a great evil has returned to cast your home into the Void. They are the four death-bringers, the four liars, and their quest to restore the Crystal Heart must be thwarted. In time, I will return, but I will grant godhood to the one that slays the Collector, Mark; or his succubus, Sasha; or his satyr, Jezebel; or his abyssal horror, Abby. Keep the shards safe, my people, until I return to you. I am watching.”

  Then, the Helper Fairy’s face faded away.

  - 1 -

  “That was a system-wide message,” Jezebel murmured.

  “We have to go,” Mark said, and the strawberry-blonde satyr instantly began rooting around in her backpack.

  “Go where?” Sasha said, panic and fear rising in her voice. “Everyone saw that.”

  “This was what she was talking about,” Mark said, shaking his head. “This was what the admin meant by raising the difficulty…”

  Jezebel held up a small plaster square. “This random recall charm from Audra is one of the few with a label. The word Sanctuary is written on the-”

  She was cut off when a horrible wailing siren began echoing through the hall. Mark looked around and noticed several Kalorplast mages in the area were pointing at them. It was time to go.

  Mark, Sasha, and Abby all grabbed onto Jezebel at the same time, then she snapped the charm, and they vanished.

  Stinging hot rain and darkness replaced the ramping tension of the Kalorplast hallway, and Mark immediately moved to shield his face from the sandblaster of a storm surrounding them.

  “What is this!” Abby shouted into the howling blackness, and he turned to see her short green silhouette with his magic eye. The cut-out shapes of Sasha and Jezebel were cowering close as well, and Mark was about to suggest they find cover when a savage roar bellowed over the wind. The terrible sound shook the air itself and seemed to come from every direction at once.

  Tendrils of lightning flashed deep within the fast-moving clouds and the flickering light revealed a glimpse of an odd, sandy jungle landscape. None of them were strangers to monsters; his team suppressed the primal urge to scurry from the sound alone. However, the twenty-foot cyclops ape swiveling its terrible eye above the nearby trees easily triggered Mark’s natural instinct to flee and find cover.

  “This way,” he hissed as loudly as he dared, and his Enthralled all followed Mark’s voice away from the hairy monstrosity. The ground was mostly loose sand with leafy bushes, and dark shadows of lush trees. By the darkness, Mark concluded that they must have teleported to the other side of this bizarre virtual world. With all the interdimensional hopping, individual day and night cycles had long lost any real meaning, but he was glad they had both the cover of night and of the storm.

  All their many new problems and enemies raced through Mark’s mind as he hurried his team away from the towering creature, but he forced himself to focus on what mattered right now; finding somewhere to hide.

  Another deafening roar struck Mark’s party from directly ahead as the ground began quaking in a way that could only mean giant footsteps. And they were approaching.

  Mark grabbed Sasha’s hand in the darkness and pulled her in a sharp left turn. With all of them in tune and on high-alert, Jezebel and Abby followed close behind.

  A brief flash of lightning revealed a second cyclops creature to their right with an entire fallen tree gripped in its fist. Mark felt the universe slow down as its one bloodshot eye rolled to lock directly on his one good eye. Its primitive, primate face split open in a wide, fang-toothed screech that assaulted Mark’s emotional antenna with a burst of pure hatred. Despite the terror of being discovered by a towering monster, his True Sight ability subconsciously sought understanding through their brief connection.

  In less time than it took a distant lightning strike to reach the ground, he learned this creature was female
and she perceived a threat to her family. In her mind’s eye, Mark and his Enthralled were the same thing as the blue bird creatures that frequently attacked them in their sleep. She feared those horrible tiny things that took her first child’s eye, and anything found scurrying on the ground needed to be unquestioningly destroyed.

  The storm’s natural lightshow faded, breaking their connection, and then what had to be dozens of answering roars came from everywhere but the direction they were sprinting.

  Unless he found a cave or something solid, these enraged cyclopes would eventually pound them out of existence. After several panicked seconds, the sparse landscape continued to appear endless, and Mark considered popping up a dome to stop and crack open another Recall Charm. He was hesitant to do that until they had no other choice. They might end up going through them all- with no assurance of a better situation. He knew those random locations from Audra’s lifetime of epic adventures would get them killed some day. Perhaps this was it.

  “Some sanctuary,” Mark muttered into the whipping rain and thundering roars around him as he sparked up a small dagger with his goddess-given energy. Now that he had a discrete weapon in his hand, an alarming number of valid, 20-foot targets stood out among the wind-whipped foliage, and there was no doubt the territorial creatures would encircle-

  “Mark!” Sasha yelled, but he’d already felt the sickening sensation of gravity yanking his whole body downward.

  He almost swallowed his tongue as he turned to face the vast empty space beyond the cliff he’d just sprinted over. Flashes from the clouds reflected off a distant basin of water with some broken structure in the middle, but most of the ground within the hidden valley below him that gouged through the dry landscape was cloaked in darkness.

  Panicking, Mark instinctively activated his protective bubble, yet as soon as the red magic sphere expanded around him, it locked in place and zipped away as he continued to plummet down into the shadows.

  Above, he noticed Jezebel’s small bright wings burst into existence as she streaked downward after him. Mark held his breath and tried to calm his mind while every muscle clenched against the tumbling freefall. He was able to glimpse the receding cliff edge as Sasha’s cutout shape flared out her leathery wings. By the green blob wrapped around her center, she must have jumped off after them with Abby clinging tightly around her body.

  Jezebel was gaining on him slowly, her flapping wild hair and horns backlit by her new ability. She looked like a demonic angel. Mark knew there only had to be a few seconds left before his new, strange, wonderful existence came to an abrupt end and tried to burn the image of the one who had brought him here into his mind as the last thing he saw.

  A burst of violent disagreement radiated outward from System Host Jezebel S3K through their bond, and she surged forward to snag his ankle with a solid grip.

  His momentum pulled them both downward, and the flying satyr roared as she asserted her own upward resistance. He could feel his boot slipping off, and the primal terror of falling gripped his mind again.

  Mark clenched his stomach muscles hard to try and grasp onto anything and found his strawberry scented monster-woman also bending to embrace him. They met in the middle, and he wrapped his arms around her as Jezebel stabilized their trajectory. With the center of mass between their two bodies combined, she was able to quickly wrestle aerial control back from gravity and held them stationary against the fat drops of warm rain soaking them from above.

  Mark blinked up into the flashing clouds and during that moment he paused to take a breath, he heard the roars of belligerent monsters echoing down at them between the rolling thunder.

  “Where are the others?” Jezebel asked, twisting them in the air to get her bearings.

  “Over there,” Mark said, finding Sasha and Abby’s colored silhouettes much further away from the outward-flaring cliff face. They were still gliding down using the succubus’s wings, but both Sasha’s and Abby’s minds were tight with panic. They were falling too fast. “Go, quickly!” he yelled in Jezebel’s face and pried his fingers away from a death grip on the leather plates covering her back to point into the darkness.

  “I can see the colors!” she said, wrapping her arms around his back and fawn legs around his ass before zipping off after them. Inspired by her new ability to see through Mark’s True Sight and with the wind drastically reduced, Jezebel barreled through the rain toward the rest of their team at breakneck speed. He knew she wouldn’t drop him, but his body gradually slid down his curvy satyr from the drag until his chin was tucked into her freckle-splattered cleavage. He craned his neck to keep the others in sight and decided that being able to always know where his three loves were at any time might be his most underrated ability. Nothing else would ever truly matter if he lost them.

  Sharp agony from Sasha’s bond pulled his mind back into focus and he saw the blue and green shapes of his succubus and abyssal horror tumble into the ground.

  Jezebel put on her physics-defying air brakes, but they were flying too fast and overshot the two below. Mark pushed off the satyr into the open air and dropped the last eight feet or so to the sopping muddy ground. His magic eye scanned Sasha as he fought the sucking muck around his boots, trying to get to her. Sparks of sick, aching pain lit up in his mind, and he located several snapped bones in her right wing.

  Abby sat kneeling in the mud gently caressing the succubus’s metal thigh and looked up at Mark as he approached. He gave her a quick nod and turned to focus on Sasha- but before he began, the small green woman jerked forward, her hair falling over her face. A new blossom of unfathomable agony pierced his mind from her direction, and the abyssal horror’s throat closed off as she tried to scream.

  Jezebel landed near Mark, and her glowing wings illuminated the red, fang-filled worm creature that had completely impaled Abby’s smooth stomach by way of her back.

  Rage consumed Mark as he dove toward the disgusting hissing thing. Wielding his True Sight clarity, he shoved his palm forward while extending a solid cylindrical shaft of ethereal energy straight into the creature’s mouth.

  In one motion, he violently forced the terrible worm through Abby’s slender body back the way it came. His hand pressed firm against her ragged wound, and she locked her liquid yellow eyes on his as she gently laid her hand over his. Her well-ordered mind began to overload with pain and confusion and her hand quickly fell limp- she was completely shutting down.

  Sasha was hurt, but she wasn’t anywhere close to death. The interconnected bond between his Enthralled thrummed with wordless communication, and the Techno Succubus wasted no time frying a second emerging worm monster with a point-blank Arc Bolt.

  The soft illumination from Jezebel’s virtual wings became replaced with a blinding flash from the close attack, but he’d known to expect it, so Mark closed his good eye directly before the attack. During this microsecond, he cursed his stupidity for blowing his protective bubble in the air.

  Sasha sucked in a gasp of pain as she forced herself up into her hooves, and he was vaguely aware of both her and bear Jezebel fighting off additional foes emerging from the mud, but his focus was now solely on closing the two-inch hole passing through his dying abyssal horror.

  As he bent his mind on this helpless creature so new to the world and its ways, images of the sun-bleached doll from the Lagomorph village flashed in his mind, distracting his focus. He’d seen something similar to this exact situation with icy blue lasers… and security bots?

  He shook it off, anger flashing away the intruding bits of what had to be someone else’s memories. Abby was fucking slipping away from him and-

  “She is mine!” Mark finished out loud at the top of his lungs as he banished the blue cylinder of solid energy currently holding in Abby’s internal organs. Then, with both of his eyes radiating gentle white light, he absolutely annihilated the abyssal horror’s body with healing energy.

  Mark was intimate with her on many levels. They’d had formative roles on each oth
er’s current virtual bodies, and there were several special connections as a result. Beyond her skin secreting what had to be an addictive chemical, he knew her inside and out.

  The petite green woman’s head snapped back, and she began twitching slightly, the tips of her tentacles coiling as she gargled weakly through the bliss of Mark’s healing light. Her gaping, bloody wound began to close, but there was something different about… everything.

  He could see the individual strands of her silky black hair slowly dipping in and out of the mud as she writhed, despite being hidden behind her back. He felt Sasha’s small broken bones scrape against the torn nerves in her wings as she stomped her hoof down on a foe trying to bite her metallic leg. He heard the wind whistle around Jezebel’s iron-coated claws tearing into the ground, rooting for the creatures under the mud drawn to their location. Fat drops of liquid plummeted from the clouds far above and his blown-out levels of unprecedented perception allowed him to know and update the exact number of discrete droplets currently in the air.

  Filling the sky were also dimensional crossover points into countless worlds he’d never seen before. He was certain that some led to the planes of the four prime elements of Fire, Water, Earth, and Wind, but among them were others he recognized as Light, Shadow, Pain, and Pleasure. Scattered among them were a few for the familiar worlds he knew as Wrongside and Lagos, but also other unique openings leading to a multitude of other unimagined worlds and exotic existences.

  This calm stillness born from the unfettered anger at Other Mark’s foreign memories seemed to have cracked open a new level of universal awareness… but the moment he began to understand how everything fit together in utter, terrible clarity, he felt a growing heat in the center of his brainstem.

  Either this needed to stop, or his head was going to pop like an overclocked pressure cooker.

  Abby was fully healed, and her large eyes began to flutter open, so Mark turned away and focused everything he had left on the fourteen remaining worms in the area about to overwhelm them from below.