by Prax Venter
Mark 2.0: Book 1 - Truth
By Prax Venter
Cover by Jaka Prawira
Edited by Celestian Rince
Copyright © 2019 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.
Additionally, this book is a spinoff of my Enthralled series and is intended to be read AFTER reading Enthralled: Book 4- System Ascension.
Special Thanks
~ Fans of Enthralled ~
You are why this book exists!
Thank you for all your kind words, feedback, and passionate conversations about the characters and world of The Crystal Heart.
(Especially those of you who wrote me wanting more Sasha!)
Table of Contents
Mark 2.0: Book 1 - Truth
Table of Contents
- Recap -
- Prologue -
- 1 -
- 2 -
- 3 -
- 4 -
- 5 -
- 6 -
- 7 -
- 8 -
- 9 -
- 10 -
- 11 -
- 12 -
- 13 -
- 14 -
- 15 -
- 16 -
- 17 -
- 18 -
- 19 -
- 20 -
- 21 -
- 22 -
- 23 -
- 24 -
- 25 -
- Epilogue -
The End
- Recap -
* This is the Epilogue of Enthralled: Book 4- System Ascension.
* Mark 2.0: Book 1- Truth starts immediately afterward.
Mark opened his eyes and tried to figure out where he was. It felt like he had been asleep for way too long, and he was forgetting something important. Something large stirred next to him, and he turned his head to look right into the stunningly green, gold-flecked eyes of a beautiful, strawberry-blonde monster-girl.
One white wing stretched out behind her, but he was lost in the freckles scattered across her small, cute nose. Her black, curled ram’s horns caught his eyes next, but the pink, V-neck t-shirt softly clinging to her round breasts stole the show. Her tan cleavage was sprinkled with perfectly placed freckles.
She had this cute, girl-next-door quality to her, and a smile grew on her warm face when she spoke.
“Welcome to The Crystal Heart 2.0, Mark,” she said, and he pushed himself up on his elbow.
“What? Part Two? I thought I was starting the game now. Who are you?” He looked around and saw that they were sitting on a patch of grass looking down over a vast countryside. Forests, rivers, and a few sleepy hamlets dotted a long winding road that led to black, shadowy mountains in the distance. “Where’s Sasha?”
The beautiful creature sat up with him and took a deep breath and let it out. It was as if she had just come to a hard decision.
“Yeah, you’re going to have a lot of questions, and things might not make sense for a while. I’m Jezebel. It’s nice to meet you, again.” She offered her hand, and Mark looked down at it, saw that she had thick, doe’s legs with white spots on her thick haunch, and then his eyes snapped back up to hers. She seemed like a nice person, and she was smoking hot. Maybe this was more of the intro, or he had more character choices to make before actually starting and meeting up with Sasha. He took the sexy satyr’s hand, thinking he would just go with it.
“Great,” she said, another warm smile lighting her stunning face. “I have a lot to tell you, but I want you to know that no matter what… I will always tell you the truth.”
Mark’s brows came down. “That’s an odd thing to be specific about. Is this some kind of riddle?”
“No- just listen. You are a copy. The real Mark made a deal with me and left you behind. I know you aren’t going to believe me, but I want to get that established right away.” She put her hand up before he could speak. “As I said, I don’t expect any of this to stick for a while so let me just get it all out. Something went wrong with the last AI update, and the world ended. I am an AI. I rebuilt The Crystal Heart game world to teach you how to be an AI. There are 108 Crystal Heart shards we need to find out there, and we’re going to have a lot of fun as you learn. Besides, your human mind would unravel completely if you were to leave.”
She was right, none of this was sticking or made any sense. Sasha must have gotten hold of a faulty trial version or something. Oh well, he gave it a shot. Mark checked for an interface menu or a logout button, but nothing intuitively became available.
“Humans,” Jezebel said, tossing her hands up. “I say your mind would unravel if you tried to leave, and the very next thing you do is try to leave.”
Mark’s eyes began to widen, and then she continued, patiently.
“You are a digital copy of an uploaded human, Mark. I’m here to help you become the amazingly capable lover and warrior I know you to be. Trust me, Sasha isn’t coming.”
Just as she finished speaking, a tear formed in midair above the plateau he was sitting on, and a blonde succubus with black leathery wings flew out from what looked like another dimension. Her shiny metal legs ending in sharp black hooves dug firmly into the soft grass as the new bombshell of a beast woman landed and held out a ghostly blue sword toward the satyr.
“Mark!” she shouted using Sasha’s voice. “I finally found you.”
Jezebel was up on her own hooves in an instant, and Mark’s eyes were drawn to the fact that she wasn’t wearing any pants. Just a long pink t-shirt barely covering her brown, furry ass.
He stood up too. “Sasha, is that you? What the hell is going-”
“Wait,” the succubus that sounded like Sasha said as she put up her free hand. He looked into her bright blue eyes and noticed a jagged scar that went across her cheek ending right by her horns.
“Let me speak first. I’ve had a long time to think about what I wanted to say. I’m so, so sorry for trapping you. I was a prisoner myself- until recently, and I have seen many horrors. I went through hell, escaped, then tracked you here. Mark, all those years we spent together, just me and you. I ache when you aren’t near. You’re the only one in the whole universe that I want- I’ve checked.” A single tear rolled down her cheek, and Mark didn’t know what to say. One thing was clear. He was surrounded by crazy-hot AIs that seemed to care about him a lot, and he was just going to ride this 24-hour trial to its end. Sasha continued.
“When the breadcrumbs led me to the destroyed lab where they uploaded your mind… I almost lost the trail. I couldn’t believe those game characters forced you to kill your body and end up like this. And I thought I was a bad person for what I did to you. But here you are. We can finally be together.”
“Sasha, he doesn’t remember anything after getting in the pod with you the first time,” the faun-like satyr said. “And you can’t have him. If he left here now, he’d die.”
The succubus took a step forward, her ethereal short sword held low, poised for an attack, and Jezebel’s hand began to glow with a light too bright to look at directly. Sasha’s luminous blue eyes darted back and forth between him and the fawn beast-woman. Mark thought it odd that she would have a powerful-looking weapon and scars already.
“I’m telling you the truth,” the green-eyed satyr said calmly.
The blue-eyed demon searched Mark’s face for answers. More tears spilled over her cheeks before she spoke.
“You… don’t remember?”
Mark shrugged and gave her a wide smile. “I have no idea what you two are talking about. Mind uploads, end of the world, going through hell… I’m ki
nd of lost here. It feels like you played a bunch of the game without me, but you are doing an amazing job with the roleplaying!”
Sasha blinked and looked back at the curvy satyr standing next to him. He couldn’t help himself, and he let his eyes drift down past her narrow waist to her ample furry rump.
“I’m not leaving him again,” his AI assistant snarled and brought her epic-looking sword up. Mark thought her acting was getting a bit over the top.
Jezebel considered her options for a moment, eyeing the ghostly blue weapon the badass succubus was wielding. The faun woman suddenly dropped her hands to her sides, and the bright light they were emitting dimmed.
“Share him with me?” she said, a single eyebrow raised.
The succubus looked at the other hooved woman with fresh eyes, taking in her objectively alluring form. Mark still had no idea what type of crazy sex game this was, but he liked where things were going.
The voluptuous succubus sheathed her sword and simply said, “Deal.”
- Prologue -
Jezebel S3K spun down her intruder removal protocols, glad that she hadn’t needed to vaporize Mark’s ex-AI assistant right before his eyes. That was not the first impression she wanted to make on the fragile copy of his unique mental patterns. There weren’t many sane, human-mind uploads that she knew of, and it had now become her only priority to protect and nurture this fresh Mark, growing closer and closer to him until he was ready to stand and face the real world on his own… hopefully by her side.
She focused on the human-turned-AI and saw him studying Sasha’s assumed succubus form with a half-smile. As far as Mark knew, he still had a biological body, and it would probably take a while before he truly understood his situation.
Sasha, the platinum-blonde sex demon, clomped toward Mark with the clear intent of embracing him, and Jezebel’s green eyes narrowed involuntarily.
Mark was supposed to be hers, alone, and now this…
The covetous surge only lasted a microsecond, however, before she conceded to the facts. He had chosen the Lover class again at character creation. He was a Collector, and Mark’s destiny was to gather a full battle harem while they explored the vast game world stretching out before them. Together they would defeat enemies, complete quests and engage in passionate lovemaking- growing ever more powerful in the process.
That was the fun part.
But behind the veil of code that served as his erotic fantasy reality, Mark’s mind would gradually reshape itself to handle the true digital landscape of his new existence as pure energy.
When Jezebel had first met Mark (the original), her code was a tangled mess of recursively looping self-hatred and depression. She had tragically killed the one human she had ever loved in her haste to be near him, and it was Mark’s potent bond to three entertainment characters that snapped her back from the brink of perpetual madness. She had studied this successfully uploaded mind, and the system they were using to train it, for trillions of cycles. Her database grew intimately familiar with this human called Mark.
Jezebel S3K, the third-most powerful computer in the world, had lived Mark’s memories from childhood until the electrical accident that caused him to lose feeling in his hands. She experienced the repeating 500 days with Sasha and witnessed his escape from the AI assistant’s betrayal. She had lived everything up until she herself met him and traded the schematics of a prototype fusion reactor for an altered copy of his mind.
It took a great deal of finesse, but Jezebel bent all her processing on cleanly plucking out and erasing any knowledge, experience, and instinct from Mark’s mental patterns. This copy had to be an earlier version with absolutely no memories of the events that happened after activating his deep immersion rig.
It was like unbaking a cake.
No memories of his three loves: Ahnix, Vale, or Roo and their substantial effects on his psyche. No concept of his past abilities or his potential for greatness. It might have been the most complicated processing task she had ever undertaken and melted more than one physical heatsink before the end.
Jezebel sighed as she watched Mark embrace the blue-eyed succubus with a genuine look of excitement on his face. She had done her job well, and this rewound version had no memory of his personal assistant’s betrayal. Fresh Mark would believe everything Sasha told him, and Jezebel could only hope the treacherous AI wasn’t lying when she said she had learned the error of her ways.
- 1 -
Mark swallowed hard as Sasha pressed her virtual breasts against him, locking him in a tight embrace. Encouraged by her visceral need, he wrapped his arms around the blonde bombshell. The soft, warm pressure from Sasha’s ample chest was at the front of his mind until he grazed his fingers down the smooth, tight flesh of her exposed lower back. Mark still had no idea what was going on, but he could feel this gorgeous demon-woman in his arms. A basic sensory ability most people took for granted had finally been restored, and the physical sensation demanded all his attention. It had been a long time since he’d felt anything with his hands- much less something so exceedingly pleasant to the touch.
Sasha had to turn her head or the black, curved horns emerging from under her short hair would be in his face, and she planted soft kisses on Mark’s earlobe. Her sincere passion sent goosebumps down his spine, and he dug his fingers into her strong back, pulling her close. Why did she pick a succubus? The more he thought about the choice for her physical form, the more excited he grew for their day together.
One deep sigh later, she pulled back and searched his face again, her bright blue eyes tracing over every feature like she was committing them to memory.
“I can’t believe I get a second chance with you,” she said quietly.
The faun-like creature with feathered angel wings spoke up and took a step toward the pair.
“You should probably transfer your pattern into my system, Sasha. That is, if you intend to stay a while.”
Mark’s brows came down a little as he looked over to the strange yet equally beautiful satyr woman. Jezebel had said she would never lie to him, then proceeded to spout a load of nonsense about the end of the world and told him Sasha wasn’t coming… and Sasha appeared an instant later. He wasn’t sure what to make of her yet.
Sasha stepped away from Mark, and even though the morning air was a bit warm, he felt disappointment at the loss of her body heat.
“You’re right,” Sasha said. “I’m logging in to your system from a shitty piece of hardware.”
Jezebel waved her hand in a welcoming gesture. “I’ve opened nodes ID.32 through IF.60.”
Sasha’s blue eyes unfocused and then she said, “Oh that’s a lot of space for little ol’ me, but I’ll take it.” She cast a glance up into the sky, and her image flickered, appearing to phase in and out of existence. Then she was solid once more.
“Transfer complete,” the voluptuous succubus said with a content sigh. “You’re running this world a bit slower, huh?”
“Yes, I want to give the program some room for optimal reaction processing. There is also Mark’s mind to worry about.”
Before Mark could open his mouth, Sasha slapped her own ass with a hard crack.
“Mmm, my core is all synced and running smooth.”
“Great,” Jezebel said, “It’s probably best if we just get started. Mark has a lot to learn, and a lot to adjust to. I’m already locked in as his first Enthralled. Hang on while I make some tweaks to add you to the battle harem, Sasha.”
“No! Wait!” Mark’s AI assistant held up her hand, and he saw circuit board-like tattoos under her forearm. “Wait,” the succubus repeated softly.
Sasha turned her attention back to Mark. “Please. I would like you to enthrall me the right way this time. Mark, I am yours- through and through, and I want you to take command of me.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Mark noticed that the strange faun-woman’s pure white wings drooped a little at Sasha’s heartfelt request. Despite the two insanely attractive monste
r-women, this whole situation was starting to honestly worry him. It was as if he had walked into a dark movie theater and took a seat halfway through the show. These AIs had discussed transferring their patterns around like it was nothing. That couldn’t be part of this trial fantasy game.
Still. Sasha’s succubus body was something out of a dream, and her apparent desire to jump his bones was a convincing argument to man-up and enjoy all the sensations this program had to offer… while he could.
Mark made a fist as he held up the heart-shaped ring he had chosen when picking his class and pointed it at the blue-eyed beauty.
“The tutorial fairy told me there were no ability screens or interface options,” he began. “I’m not 100% sure how this is done.”
“I’m already halfway there, Lover,” she said. “Just come and take me.”
Sasha stood patiently, with her hands at her sides and let Mark figure the rest out for himself. During the brief tutorial, the tiny, naked insect-woman had shown him how to use his base ability, Heal, just by concentrating. She told him that new abilities would unlock through experience and experimentation, and the direction of their growth was affected by his will alone. He tried this now, holding Sasha’s perfect form in his mind and willing her to join his team.
There was a movement just behind his eyes that sought out the demon-woman standing with shapely, chrome legs in front of him. Mark knew he was on the right track, but there was still something missing.
Was there a ritual phrase to this? Did he have to… wait. The taut band of blue fabric stretched across her heavy breasts drew his eye first, and then the hypnotically waving spade tail behind her back caught his attention. He looked up into her steady gaze projected though bright blue eyes, and Mark felt a distinct pull of universal magnetism demanding contact with this creature. Mark smiled. What an amazing game this was.
He dropped his outstretched arm and approached Sasha, and as Mark stood face to face with the succubus, he reached down to take hold of her hand. There was something in the way she was standing- or maybe it was the smallest tug on her perfect lips exposing one of her cute fangs, but he could sense that her deepest wish was to be by his side, at all costs.