Mark 2.0: Book 4: Love

by Prax Venter

  She shrugged as she pulled his cock inside her. “We just sit here?”

  “Not just sit here,” he said and put his thumbs on her cheeks and her irresistible eyes locked on his. “Sasha, why haven’t I gotten anyone pregnant?”

  His Ex-AI assistant flashed a fanged grin. “Now, you’re asking? I suppose it speaks to your good-boy character that you thought of it at all- ah,” Sasha broke off as she realized he’d only thought about it because Amina asked about it before.

  “Well,” she said, drawing out the word as she turned back to him and put her hands on his hips, adjusting to settle into their interlocked position. “When I brought you here the first time, I set your ‘fertility’ slider to zero percent in your Player Preference interface before I hid it from you. I can only assume Jezebel did the same thing. That one option can make this a whole different game.”

  She squeezed his inflating flesh with her insides and despite just being rewarded by the new auxiliary harem team under his command, he felt his erection joyfully swell within his most loyal best friend.

  “So,” he grunted, “there is a universe out there where I get all of you girls pregnant? Yeah, that would be fucking dramatically different.” He laughed as he thought about it. “Wait, so you can set it to 100% fertility?”

  “Yup,” she said. “And the way you hurl that ropey white goo at everything, you’d have sired an army of human hybrids by now. Just so you know,” she grew serious, “any NPC that becomes a Collector or Enthralled gets their own personal option added to their interface, but it’s just a ‘possible/not possible’ type of deal.”

  “Okay, that makes a lot more sense,” Mark said.

  “This is kind of nice,” Sasha said, as she started gyrating her hips in minuscule circles. The movement made his cock an involuntary position inside her.

  “Be still, my love,” he whispered, and she obeyed. “You want bullshit magic powers, don’t you?”

  She nodded, her face taking on a far too convincing look of innocence.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Her hot vanilla breath worked into his brain as she tried to sit as motionless as possible for a sex demon built for constant fucking. Being wrapped around the throbbing cock she worshipped wasn’t helping either. As a compromise, Sasha started fanning her wings to dissipate the energy she was holding back, and the pulsing coolness on his face felt wonderful.

  Mark looked deep into her soul through a mental channel spread so incredibly wide for him, Sasha was almost hurting herself to give him as much access as he could take. Mark dove into that space, soaring above and beyond this bottom layer of simulated reality and-

  “Are you going to eat that meatball,” Sasha asked. He looked up from the sauce-covered orb on his plate to have the light glinting from her hoop earrings almost blind him.

  “Uh, s-sure,” Mark stammered, thinking he was forgetting something important. “You may have unrestricted access to my balls, my dear.”

  “Ha!” the blonde bombshell said, reaching across the table to shove her plastic fork into the greasy brown lump. He watched one of the tines bend under its congealed solidity. “Deal. I’ll take ‘em.”

  Mark looked up into her irresistible blue eyes sparkling at him and wondered what he’d done to get so lucky. The outgoing young woman had started taking over the redundant maintenance shift after his, and he’d taken a risk, asking her out for coffee. This was their third date and there was no way they weren’t banging at the end of this Wednesday’s Two Dinner Special. He wished he could treat her better, but Sasha seemed happy enough just to be near him. It was like she already knew all his favorite things.

  “I’m going to wash this shit off my face,” she said, standing abruptly and bending over. Her pink fuzzy sweater drooped low showing him her insane cleavage before she turned and sauntered away from their booth.

  Mark sighed. Something wasn’t quite right, but as he watched her jean-skirt snap back and forth while she walked through the cramped family diner he had to admit that things could be worse. The ambient noise of chatter and silverware scraping became overwhelming as it all shifted to a sprawling stage with a sea of shadowed people clapping and cheering.

  He snapped awake at the table to see he was sitting alone, and the leftover food was rotting and crawling with green aphid things. Mark stood and saw Sasha with her hand on another man’s chest and obviously flirting with him.

  “What-?” Mark blurted, jealousy bursting from his mind as he jumped to his feet. Then, looking around at the faceless families around him, he paused. They all had nightmarish smooth skin that vibrated under dark hair like black straw-

  And terror replaced all thought.

  He looked over to see Sasha now kissing this amorphous blob of a man. He knew that she wasn’t Sasha, and that he wasn’t Mark… And nothing made any sense?

  “Why is everything like this?” he screamed, balling his fists, and a bright flash of applause hit him again.

  “No, like this,” the ancient yoga instructor said as she pushed Mark’s leg down. “This is called Half Moon, not Full Handstand.”

  It had been fifteen minutes into his first lesson, and Mark’s limbs already felt stretched out beyond their limits. He was seriously out of shape. Pulling his black shirt back over the slight pudge before he nervously looked over toward the blond bombshell that talked him into this.

  Of course, her sensuous body was poised perfectly with one hand pointed straight at high noon. She had seen the whole exchange and her blue eyes flashed with glee. He was trying- legitimately trying, and that was all it took to melt her heart.

  There was no way they weren’t banging after this 3-hour course she’d signed them up for at the community college, but would his body be up to the challenge of… what was clearly visible under those shimmering black yoga pants?

  He would make it work.

  Mark blinked and found he was the only one in the gymnasium holding his forced position and others of the class were pointing and laughing at him. They were also now the mantis-type bugs with no faces.

  “Sasha-!” he said, standing straight again and turned to see her black yoga pants around her ankles as she rubbed her bare ass into the crotch of one of the more fit mantis humanoids. At a glance, Mark knew the monster had his own car, a nice home, a better job, and would take Sasha from him no matter how cute he looked trying to hold a beginner yoga pose.

  Helpless jealousy like a white-hot sun flared into existence- only to be snuffed out immediately.

  “Hold on,” Mark said, his brows coming down hard. The world around him spun for a moment, but then did freeze like a still image, obeying his will.

  “This was another girl… What was her name? She was into me, but I blew it later down the line when I got mad at her for not keeping some stupid secret. This is when I was barely out of high school.”

  He chuckled to himself as he snapped his focus on the mass of wild intelligence behind this nightmare. “You mindreading Crystal Heart AIs need to get some new material. He Who Judges did this particular mind-fuck way better.”

  Gritting his teeth, he ripped open that stinging extra connection linking to the outside systems and searched all of space and time until he found the pink cut-out shape of his real virtual girlfriend. Once he had her locked in, Mark tore open the universe to be by her side.

  One moment he was striding through digital galaxies, the next he was in some twisted physical landscape of burning bodies.

  “Is that finally the real fucking you?” a wild-eyed Techno Succubus screamed while holding up her palm to blast him in the face.

  Movement behind her caught his eye and instead of answering her nonsense question, Mark used his Mirror ability to copy her Arc Bolt once again. Without warning, Mark thrust out his own palms and discharged both of her copied attacks into the asshole demigod jerking them around.

  The thing froze, stunned, as Mark poured a constant stream of Arc Bolts into it. The real Sasha spun to see his target and added her
own Double Arc Bolt into its horrible vibrating mass. It was pulsing at exactly 256 beats, and it was at this moment Mark fully realized that this really was just a force of nature now. A demigod’s ghost.

  And as it was when he was on the plane of the gods, magic was different at this level. Abilities had no limits.

  Both he and his eternally bound sex demon pushed forward in unison while hurling biting, snapping arcs of raw electricity into the dreaming consciousness that lingered here, and it screamed with world-shaking rage.

  Then, ear-shattering silence struck Mark like a maglev hyper train.

  His senses swirled with chaos and a feeling of nausea on par with disembowelment twisted through his insides. He languished in this state for several insane seconds before a flutter of a particularly important person brushed against his scattered thoughts, and Mark remembered he was still inside Sasha’s mind. His consciousness reorientated inputs to accommodate for existence between a virtual person and the Crystal Heart World Shell. With his confidence returning, Mark altered his perspective, and Sasha’s spinning metal core came into focus below.

  He’d been here before. It was by a campfire with Loa and Jezebel, and back when he hadn’t really met Abby yet.

  Fixing Sasha’s post-orgasm blackouts by adjusting how these virtual metal shafts interacted with the rest of the digital world around her was the first higher-level magic he’d ever attempted, and where once he saw only sprawling madness, Mark’s expanded mind witnessed the perfect sum of his lover’s soul.

  This was everything that made Sasha who she was.

  He’d only just locked in his perception to start getting to work on extra abilities when eyes in the darkness began to open. Mark’s True Sight sense of an impending attack blared in his mind like a demonic air raid siren, but he was now operating at a higher level than even the banished entity that dwelt here. He had a few minutes to think.

  It was far too dangerous for both of them to stay, but he was going to be pissed if this was all for nothing. Mark watched the spinning towers of Sasha’s lightning-infused core and how their tips sent minute packets of communication hurtling into the World Shell beyond. Out there were the dormant abilities he needed to get connected…

  And then an alternative made itself known.

  With renewed purpose and dwindling time to pull it off, Mark thrust his nonexistent arms to his sides as he plunged toward a clump of medium-sized metal shafts connected to Sasha’s core. His corrupted eye drilled into each virtual pylon as his perspective swooped deftly around extremely important parts of someone he loved.

  The alarm blaring in his head became too loud to ignore. It was time to go.

  Mark knew the one component he was following wasn’t Sasha’s heart or anything critical, and he’d narrowed this group down to abilities she already had. So, hoping it was something useful, Mark grabbed it with both hands and channeled as much bullshit magic as he could into power-leveling the fuck out of it. All he had to do was ask the Crystal Heart system to allow him to blast it with unending bliss.

  Sasha screamed in pain, then terrible pleasure, and he felt her sopping wet insides gobble the throbbing rod of steel attached to the bottom of his torso. A bursting release cascaded out of him as Mark fell fully back into his own mind once again.

  Immediately the alarms in his skull shifted away at lightspeed as he was no longer in-phase with the nightmare dreamscape layered above this strange world. Amina and Learis stood over them in an instant, but nothing came to attack. Mark’s protective shield was still in place around the area, and after he and Sasha’s panting and moaning wound down, there was only silence.

  “What the fuck was that?” Sasha asked, pressing her sweaty breasts into his bare chest, pulling him in tightly. “Horrible mindfuck bullshit, first. Nothing like the mental massage Abby told me about. Then, at the end, it was…”

  “Was what?” Learis asked when Sasha trailed off. “You were both glowing. It was beautiful.”

  “And terrifying,” Amina said.

  Sasha and Mark untangled from each other while what exactly did happen settled into his normal-sized brain. Before he could form what he’d learned into words, a swirl of amusement and disappointment spun out from the AI tied to his heart.

  Naked, she put her fist into her curved hip as she thrust it sideways. “You have to be kidding me- this is what you chose to enhance?”

  Mark brushed off some of the remaining rust flakes sticking to his ass before he looked over at her.

  “Okay, well, that first part was the dreaming remains of that jerkass Runic Bard shoving his nose where it doesn’t belong, and the second part… was kind of rushed.”

  Sasha narrowed her eyes at him and then nodded.

  “We were in your apartment, but it was in a void. You were constantly telling me to order products for delivery- things like lingerie for myself… Creepy, detached nonsense. It was so bizarre. I know my Mark when I see him, and I burned a hundred doppelgangers to ash before you found me. They just kept popping back up. What did you see in there?”

  “You as a human, sticking your fork into my Italian food while wearing hoop earrings and a short, tight jean skirt.”

  Mark sent her copies of the image buffer that still held data and although it was a faded memory altered and brought to life by a dreaming half-god then transferred to her using virtual magic, she got the gist. Any thoughts Sasha had of her upgraded skill drained from her as she vicariously lived the brief time she was a real girl in the real world. Mark never saw how strongly the concept would hit her until her eyes filled with tears. This was Sasha’s impossible ultimate fantasy.

  “You,” Mark said fiercely, as he stepped in close to pull her bare flesh back against his. “You are my ultimate fantasy just as you are. Now, your Primary User demands to know what power I gave a boost to. By your reaction, I’m guessing it’s something you don’t use a lot like Static Escape.”

  She grabbed his shoulders and pressed her forehead into his, enjoying his closeness for a moment before she answered.

  “You enhanced my direction sense, you dork.”

  - 20 -

  “So- what…” Mark began as he wiggled back into his relic-tier, ruby red pants, “you really know where you’re going now?”

  “I have no idea how this new stuff works,” Sasha said and then stepped a few yards to the edge of his protective bubble. She then turned her blue eyes upward and said, “Show me the best way to the man I love more than life itself.”

  A dotted white line appeared on the rusted metal plating from under her leading hoof that connected to his closest foot, and slowly started sliding forward like a conveyor belt. He lifted it off the ground, and the line snapped to his other foot. The ambient light of the strange dimension made it hard to tell, but Mark’s cheating eye saw the substantial aura her new ability emitted.

  “You got magic genie fucking GPS routing?” he said. “This could be huge!”

  “I suppose,” she said. “I want to be your hot little ass kicker, not your damn dashboard navigation again.”

  “Could the new power take us anywhere? To Maliah’s lair?” Amina asked. Mark loved her goal-orientated focus, yet he held his hand up for a stop.

  “Good thinking,” he said, “but let’s not try that just yet. Wouldn’t she be able to follow the line back to us?”

  “Maybe.” Sasha shrugged as she followed the line toward him, but walked past to start getting dressed.

  Mark shot a glance over to Learis who was stunned once more by how casually they were unlocking potently overpowered abilities. That, and she wanted to ask more about what they saw in relation to the Runic Bard, but she was waiting until it felt right interrupting these unfathomable otherworldly beings.

  “I keep saying this, but we’re way more like you than you think, Learis…” He paused to pull his still-buttoned vest back over his head. “You should have seen me flailing around in her skull. I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  “Untrue,�
� Amina said. “You have the best ideas, for an outsider.”

  He looked over into her glowing purple eyes and saw no fear. There was no doubt there, only comradery and family. After everything they’d been through, this Awysai Warrior would follow him anywhere. So would Learis, despite her lingering instinctual fear of their power. The two women weren’t his Enthralled, but he was their Commander.

  “Sometimes I do,” Mark said and pointed out through the tunnel. “Sasha, my curvy meatball, why don’t you to take us on a speed run through the rest of these god-whiskers with your new ability to get us home as quickly as possible.”

  The knockout succubus wrinkled her perfect nose. “Yeah, no. Meatball’s not going to work for me.” She finished adjusting the ring that bravely held the stretchy blue top around her heavy breasts, shook out her wrists, and then addressed the shadows of the metal ceiling.

  “Take us to the quest objective closest to our entry point in this damp-ass dimension.”

  Mark felt a perceivable hitch in the code behind the virtual facade of the Crystal Heart multiverse before a dotted white line started marqueeing out of the dead-end hallway and back the way they’d come.

  Amina shook her head and then walked up to Sasha. “This is invaluable,” she said, squeezing her shoulder. “You are invaluable, Sasha.”

  Sasha blinked at her and had a sultry quip on the tip of her pink tongue, but there was something in the tranquility of Amina’s tone that gave her pause.

  “New destination,” Sasha said, her eyes still locked on Amina. “Take me to the closest thing that has the power to save these people from deletion by Maliah.”

  If there was a hitch before, reality now was made of rolling blackouts. Whole swaths of the world around them phased in and out of existence, and the horror of raw blazing data hitting his exposed brain both stretched on for infinity and was over in an instant.

  “Fuck,” Sasha said, holding her head. Mark instinctually searched for something to heal, but there was no physical damage to anyone in the room.