Mark 2.0: Book 2: Hate

by Prax Venter

  “It better not,” he said with seriousness in his voice. “We would be lost without you.”

  He joined the group hug centered around their beloved Jezebel, and the four stood quiet for a blissful moment before Abby untangled herself first.

  “Actually, we would be devastated without her. We’d be lost without Sasha as she has a penchant for direction sense.”

  “Right,” Mark said, “and that reminds me- I have a plan to possibly finish our mission for the Kalorplast and still get those seven shards.”

  “What?” Sasha said. “How? I really fucked everything up back there with that one Shock Bomb.”

  Mark put his hand on her arm. “Sasha, you were protecting the ones you love. I made a few mistakes back there myself, but there’s nothing we can do about any of that mess now. What I need you to do is point us toward that strange spherical building on the floating island we saw through the portal yesterday.”

  Sasha nodded and turned in place, trying to get a feel for the area and quickly pointed across the field toward a distant pillar of dirt blocking their view.

  “I’m fairly certain it’s over there, but how are we going to get…” The succubus’s blue eyes went wide, and her red leathery wings unfurled slightly when she figured out.

  “I’m flying us across the gap,” Jezebel said, determination on her sweet freckled face as she focused where Sasha had pointed.

  Mark crossed his arms and nodded. “If there is a dimensional doorway on that island- and there seem to be hundreds around it- we might be able to snag that door code from the inside. Abby,” he turned to look at her, “depending on what we see, it might be only you going through and sneaking close enough to get that frequency recorded on the stone.”

  She nodded slowly as a devious smile grew on her dark-green lips.

  “Good,” he said, always feeling better when they had a plan. “I agree with all of you on the point allocation, by the way. We can tear shit up pretty good, I vote defense all around.”

  He watched them all lose focus to manipulate their stats and ran his thumb over the ring gifted by the demigod woman of gold in exchange for attentive sex and wondered again how different everything might be without its protection. The laser blast to his leg had been the worst of it, and he easily imagined a world where he’d been taken out of the fight right then and there.

  Mark pushed those dark thoughts out of his head and continued solidifying their plan.

  “Besides finding an optimally placed dimensional doorway, the only thing we need to do now is verify if Jez can still fly with all of our combined weight.”

  “Incorrect,” Abby said quickly, her sharp black brows coming down. “Unless the sky island is swarming with dangerous foes, Jezebel could easily ferry us one at a time.”

  Mark smiled. “Damn, Abby. Your logic is flawless.”

  “Still,” Jezebel said before shifting back into her super-buff centaur form. “It would be smart to test my limits now while we have this quiet opportunity.”

  “I concur,” the abyssal horror said with a sharp nod.

  “I believe the best way to distribute the weight is for Mark to get on first, then Sasha behind while I carry Abby in my arms.”

  Now that he was not brutally wounded, Mark gripped her armor, jumped up, and swung his leg over to straddle her. He reached around under her arms and cupped his hands over the pliant leather that held her firm breasts.

  “I’ve been looking forward to this,” he whispered, nuzzling his face under her strawberry-blonde hair. He saw the goosebumps spread down the back of her tan neck and pressed his lips into them.

  Sasha hopped up from behind and used her own leathery wings to give her a boost. The succubus then wrapped her arms around Mark’s chest and started kissing his right ear.

  “Okay you two, no fooling around back there just yet,” Jezebel said. The muscular centaur under them took a few uneasy steps to find her balance, then approached Abby.

  “Ready?”

  She nodded, and Mark felt Abby’s fear of losing control as Jezebel bent down to scoop under her legs and back. Her tentacles swiftly snaked around in front of his face as the abyssal horror latched on to her strong back.

  “It’s not as bad as I thought,” Centaur-Jezebel said, trotting through the blue waving grasses of Lagos. “However, I can tell this isn’t something I could do for hours.”

  “What are we waiting for?” Sasha said from behind him with a smile in her voice. “Up, up, and away, Momma Horse-Bird!”

  A moment later, her bright-white wings appeared directly in Mark’s face and even started to pass into his shoulder. He was worried for a moment but felt nothing. As the simple, glowing shape also phased into his head, he realized that they must only be a visual cue that her flight ability was active.

  He looked down and saw that Jezebel could indeed hover with all of them, but she kept the altitude to a few feet at first.

  “How does it feel?” Mark asked. “Does flying drain you or something? Could these things run out of steam while we’re thousands of miles over nothing?”

  “Not that I can tell,” Jezebel answered. “Surprisingly, this is less physically strenuous than carrying you all on the ground, but I need to be more conscious of balance than when I’m by myself.”

  She demonstrated by tilting a bit to the side, and Mark felt Sasha’s embrace clench tighter around his chest.

  “Please do not spill us!” Abby said, also constricting Jezebel’s torso. He could tell it didn’t bother the muscular centaur as her leather armor did its job against the abyssal horror’s gripping tentacles.

  “Hold tight!” she said before Mark felt his stomach drop down to his boots.

  “Wooo!” Sasha yelled out behind as Jezebel poured on both the speed and the height.

  The wind started to get turbulent until she leveled out, cruising about a hundred yards off the ground. He could see for miles around and found much of the same landscape in every direction. Blue grass, vast plains, enormous sloping hills, and sprinkled around everything were the strange pillars of stretched earth. It was as if some god had taken fistfuls of land and pulled them up into the sky, only to negate gravity and let the broken, larger chunks hover over a tower of dirt.

  Then he saw it again. Between two bizarre pillars of stretched land, he picked up the perfectly spherical shadow of their target, the shadow his blind, True Sight eye must have picked up in the darkness of night.

  Mark pulled one of his hands off her chest and pointed.

  “There it is.”

  Jezebel followed his direction and angled them toward their new destination.

  He had imagined what flight would be like as a child, and it was even more thrilling to be doing it now with beautiful women pressing in on all sides, but he was not prepared for the constant blasting wind assaulting his face. As they soared through the air, Jezebel had to constantly find different altitudes or the violent gusts not only had the potential of ripping someone right off her back, but none of them could open their eyes to see.

  “Goggles!” Mark yelled. “We should invest in some goggles soon.”

  “There is no need to be this high!” Abby yelled back.

  Jezebel seemed to agree and descended until they were about six feet from the windswept grass.

  A breeze was still present, but far less potent.

  “Ah, much better,” Jezebel agreed. “Your logic truly is unrivaled.”

  Abby nuzzled close to her at the compliment.

  The rest their ride to the edge of land was much smoother, and their mount came to a hovering stop before the impossible nothing that stretched for at least a mile between them and their destination. Now that it was daylight, Mark could see that parts of the metal sphere were broken and bent outward as if some monster hatched here long ago. There wasn’t any movement that he could see, but there were massive amounts of dimensional crossover points scattered between them and the island of dirt suspended over nothing.

  “
I see them,” Jezebel said quietly. “I can even tell where Mark is looking when the specks of light appear or fade.”

  “Welcome to the club, my love,” Mark whispered in her ear, then louder, he said, “now let’s get over this terrifying emptiness and see if any of those specks can get us into the inner ring of the Orb Fort on the other side.”

  “Hold on,” Jezebel said and slowly floated them out over the gap.

  Having the ground a hundred feet below him was infinitely better than cruising over nothing. Now that they were directly over the void around the floating island, he had a chance for a good long look at what was down there. At first, it was only purple clouds and mist blowing around with the wind, but every now and then, the vapor parted revealing the distant stars of outer space along with colorful nebulae and the swirls of galaxies. Mark squeezed Jezebel’s breasts tighter and tried to imagine how such a place could exist.

  “Why do you suppose there are so many dimensional links here?” Abby asked. “They are growing more numerous as we approach, implying that the legendary orb held by the Centaur Technocracy may be affecting this world.”

  “But why only this world?” Jezebel asked. “If that magic, infinite energy orb everyone is fighting over is causing dimensional weakness, why only to the Lagomorph home dimension?”

  “Maybe they created it,” Sasha suggested from the back.

  They were each lost in their own thoughts as the metal monster egg grew closer.

  “I appreciate your caution,” Abby said as the wind started to pick up, “but I trust that you can cross this gap more swiftly.”

  Jezebel leaned forward, increasing her speed and the violent gusts near the island threatened to scatter them to the stars below, but they all held on until she set her hooves down on the grassy dirt of the floating island.

  Powerful swirling winds still made his clothes flap against his skin and blew Abby’s straight black hair completely horizontal, but they were all relieved to be standing on solid ground again.

  The spherical structure seemed much bigger up close, and Mark noticed strange patterns and what looked like spikes poking up into the air.

  “Those appear to be antennae,” Jezebel said after everyone had disembarked and she’d shifted back to her satyr form.

  “It’s a machine?” Sasha asked as she took a step toward it.

  The island was probably the size of a city block, and this spherical structure’s base took up most of it. Portions of the round exterior even extended beyond the floating dirt it rested on.

  He felt Abby twine the tip of a tentacle through his fingers and looked down at her.

  “Is anyone else still filled with terror over the possibility that everything under our feet could start plummeting downward at any moment?”

  “Stay close together,” Mark said, thinking it was the best option no matter what happened here. “Jezebel, you still have the Starglade recall charm handy?”

  She tapped a pocket near her hip and nodded.

  “I’m not seeing a way in,” Sasha said, her spade tail swishing from side to side.

  Mark turned to look at the black metal sphere and tried to scan its curved surface with his magic eye, hoping for some glowing square or a hint on how to proceed, but nothing jumped out at him.

  “If it comes down to it,” he said, “Jezebel could just fly us up into one of those holes. I want to try one of these dimensional holes first, though.”

  The floating island was littered with glinting crossover points, and Mark picked a close one at random. As he coated his left hand with the black crackling energy to open the rift, he wondered again why there were so many in this one spot.

  All Mark wanted was to make a peephole, so he carefully poked his finger into the glint that led back to their original dimension and gently pulled it open half an inch.

  And all he saw was glossy blue metal. He pulled reality back to make it more of a window as his team pressed in close to see, but it appeared this tear opened directly into a solid wall.

  “Come on!” Sasha said, already taking a few steps toward the ruined sphere. “Let’s explore this thing. I’m almost positive that this building matches up perfectly with their innermost wall.”

  They circled around the mysterious derelict structure until they were on the other side and saw a black metal ramp leading up to a sealed alcove.

  They all looked at each other before Mark led them up toward what had to be the way in. The metallic substance they walked on felt weird to him- as if it shouldn’t really be there. As if his eye were trying to tell him that the black metal was a weak sort of lie. It felt real enough under his boots, so he put the sensation aside for now and continued up the ramp.

  It took a few minutes to reach the archway located up on the exact equator of the sphere, and when they got there, he didn’t see a handle, doorbell, or any type of access panel that might grant them entry.

  They all approached closer and began searching the intricate geometric patterns that covered the outside for any clues. After a while of finding nothing but unresponsive solid surfaces, Mark decided on using the old-fashioned approach.

  He knocked on what should be the door and yelled out, “Hello? Anybody home?”

  Nothing happened, and he was about to suggest that they fly up into one of the holes when Sasha discharged one of her Arc Bolts into the door.

  Abby turned toward the chrome-legged succubus with her eyes narrowed.

  “I believe you were informed that I require warning.”

  A heartbeat later, a flickering beam of blue light burst from a hole near the top of the alcove. It passed over all of them but stopped on Mark’s chest. He was afraid to move if this was some sort of security system, but he looked down and saw that the beam was projecting tiny sparks onto the Lagomorph bone he wore around his neck as payment for fixing a fabric doll.

  A moment later, the door slid open and what sounded like a recording of a male voice spoke from inside the dark corridor.

  “Alert, Citizen. Structural integrity at 57%. Enter at your own risk. Alert, Citizen. Jar of Chaos missing from Chaos Chamber. Please inform Central Operations.”

  “No way,” Sasha said.

  “Another AI?” Abby asked.

  Jezebel turned to face Sasha. “If this Jar of Chaos is the same legendary Orb everyone is fighting over, you were correct. All evidence points to the fact that it was here in the Lagomorph home dimension long ago.”

  Mark nodded. “Maybe one of those two powerful nations stole it. That could explain why reality is so torn up around here.”

  Now that he said it and was paying attention, the hallway inside the sphere seemed oddly devoid of dimensional rips. He squinted his blind eye and did detect a cluster of them deep inside the mysterious structure.

  “My money is on the Kalorplast,” Sasha said with a sharp snap of her tail. “They’re the ones with milk-bunny livestock.”

  “Maybe we’ll find more answers inside,” Mark said. “Let’s go.”

  He led them through the archway into the darkness of the black metal corridor that ran straight toward the center. Weak light reached them from the holes in the outer structure they saw from outside, but it wasn’t nearly enough to illuminate the tantalizing enigma around them.

  Mark sparked up his sledgehammer and held it up to cast more light on everything, but a moment later, a much brighter light from behind him washed over everything. He turned to see his stunning satyr backlit by her angelic glowing wings.

  They beat once under his gaze, and he shot her a smile.

  “Nice thinking, Jez.”

  They continued forward through the exposed, strange circuity and intricate designs in the odd-feeling metal around them. His blind eye started to throb again the closer they got to the center of the sphere, and he just knew that whatever the scientists were doing in this facility involved hacking the system from the inside.

  “These milk-bunnies were definitely messing with the nature of virtual reality here
,” Mark said, “My eye is telling me all kinds of stuff I don’t know how to interpret, but I believe they were trying to fuse both technology and magic.”

  “I may have been incorrect about my assumptions,” Jezebel said from behind him. “We now know of two separate NPC efforts to break out of or alter their dimension- maybe even the simulation itself. The ancient Awysai and now the ancient Lagomorphs. We’re still missing a lot of data, but the fact that several…” She stopped and sighed. “Perhaps I was wrong about how the Crystal Heart software dealt with the Update. I’m seeing a lot of evidence pointing toward strong levels of sentience.”

  “Your powerful hardware created a new universe,” Abby whispered as she ran a tentacle along the wall.

  They passed several sealed doors to either side, and the ones that were open were missing whole sections of the floors or walls. The further they went, the more the place looked as if it had been used as target practice for a giant machine gun.

  Then, the long corridor came to an end in a circular chamber with an innumerable amount of wires, buttons, readouts, pressure gauges, and other mysterious machinery. In the center of it all was a silver pedestal with an empty bowl on top. Arranged around the birdbath-like pedestals were nine symmetrically arranged sparks of interdimensional doorways all leading back to the home dimension.

  “The Orb belongs here,” Abby said with reverence.

  “First things first,” Mark said as he approached the closest link between worlds. “Let’s worry about the mission before messing with whatever madness this is. We get that door pattern on this stone first, and then we go from there.”

  He pulled the smooth stone out of his pocket and handed it to Abby, who wrapped it in the tip of her green tentacle. She gave him a serious nod, and Mark patted her shoulder.

  “Let’s get to work,” he said, coating his hand with dimensional energy.

  As he did outside, Mark poked his finger into the closest rip and carefully pulled it open.

  The instant there was a virtual micron of a crack, the automated voice they heard at the door yelled out, the booming sound echoing around the metal sphere where they stood.