"How dare you repeat the same mistake?" Henry seethed, his voice low and menacing.
"I am not Henry!" He paused, then burst forth with a shout:
"I am the God Seen!!"
Mark deftly parried away some of the rocks hurtling towards him with his scythe.
"Is that supposed to scare me?" he asked, his expression straight.
"No, this should," Seen spoke, his voice low and ominous. After his words multiple hundreds of fiends and beasts rose from the ground like a dark, churning sea. And Surrounded Mark, they all stopped moving with an unnerving synchrony, as if awaiting a command.
"Put his head down to my feet," Seen intoned, his words dripping with malevolence. A chair materialized behind him, its presence seeming to draw the shadows closer. he sat down, his movements deliberate. Immediately after sitting, the beasts and friends attacked Mark simultaneously, a frenzy of teeth and claws unleashed.
The first fiend to reach Mark was cleaved in two by his scythe, but the next one proved more formidable. It parried Mark's scythe with ease, leaving him off balance. As he spun to regain his footing, more fiends closed in. Mark leapt into the air, soared a few meters above the ground, but another fiend was already waiting in the sky. It slapped him down to the earth with a bone crushing blow. The ground dwelling fiends swarmed over him, but Mark burst forth like a rocket, his scythe transforming into a sword in mid air.
As he was falling back to the ground, four figures fell through one of the portals, the figures descended from the sky, their arrival a whirlwind of steel and fury. They landed and sliced through the fiends, clearing a path to Mark.
Mark landed hard on the ground, stunned, and gazed up at the four figures in wonder:
«They're human,» he thought, his mind reeling with surprise.
"It's been a while, Mark," Ariana said, her voice a brief respite from the chaos before she charged back into battle alongside the others. Mark, still stunned, struggled to recognize any of them, not just due to the hair that now shrouded his face, but also because their auras seemed... Familiar but yet different. As he grappled with this revelation, the fight around him reached its climax. The last beast fell to Asami's blade, and she nodded to Ariana
"You can have your reunion, Emily." Asami and Ariana approached Seen, who remained seated, an enigmatic figure amidst the carnage.
Emily, however, lingered behind, her gaze fixated on Mark, who stared back at her with a mixture of confusion and wariness, his eyes clouded by the suspicion that these people, despite their familiar faces, seemed like strangers to him now.
"Mark," Emily whispered, her voice trembling with longing, as if the weight of a thousand unspoken moments had finally found release. She stepped closer, her eyes brimming with tears, and lowered herself to his level. Mark, entranced by the familiar cadence of her voice, felt the world around him melt away. He opened his arms, and Emily fell into his embrace like a leaf returning to its branch. He held her with a ferocity that bordered on desperation, as if he feared that letting go would unravel the very fabric of his existence.
Four months, of wondering if she still lived, of feeling his soul wither away like a flower deprived of sunlight, all came flooding back. The memories of their laughter, all crashed against the shores of his heart like a tidal wave. Mark's grip tightened, his fingers intertwining with her hair as if he sought to merge their very essence. The death and destruction surrounding them faded into the background.
Mark's whisper:
"I missed you," was a gentle breeze on a summer's day, but his voice quickly turned into a distant echo:
"But I'm not the same person you once knew." His words hung in the air, as he stood up straight to leave, he let Emily's hand to fall like a petal from a flower. She quickly grasped for his hand, her tears falling:
"You have some guts, you know."
Asami and Ariana danced with death, their movements a blur as they fought off Seen's dark fiends. The air was heavy with the weight of their struggle, but Seen remained unmoved, his throne a monument to his malevolence. His voice was a viper's hiss:
"I gave you time to prepare, and yet you succumb to emotional weakness!"
The words had barely left his lips when the gravitational pressure slammed down, a titan's fist crushing everything in its path. A sickening uppercut connected with Marks jaw, the sound of shattering bone echoed through the desolate landscape. with that blow mark was shooting upward like a comet, but before he could reach the stars, seen appeared behind him and punched him back to the ground.
Mark plummeted toward the ground, his speed a blur, like an asteroid falling from the heavens. The impact was a cataclysm, a massive crater erupting from the earth, the ground shattered and broken.
Seen's rage was a maelstrom, his power trembling the very fabric of reality.
Emily, Asami, Zico, and Ariana, Mark lay half dead, their bodies broken and battered, rocks piled upon them. Seen's dominance was absolute, his power unrivaled, but in the ruins, Mark got up and tried to stand straight
Seen's voice was a death knell:
"I allowed you a chance to reunite, but your team isn't good enough!" He vanished from the sky, reappearing in front of Mark with a malevolent grin, his fist a blur as he delivered another crushing blow. Mark's body was a ragdoll, his fall a mere whisper of its former speed, as Seen's gravity pulled him down like an anchor.
Mark hit the ground in less than a second. He lay there, a crumpled shadow of his former self, unable to stand, unable to move, his vision a blurry haze of agony and defeat. Seen's power had reduced him to a mere Ant, , a fragile thing, if that wasn't an overstatement.
Mark's mind, a haze of pain and confusion, suddenly sparked, as if he had finally caught up to the situation:
«Wasn't I with Emily?» he thought, his consciousness wavering like a flame in the wind, as his body succumbed to the darkness. With a faint whisper, he fell unconscious, his thoughts extinguished like a candle snuffed out.
Seen, gazed upon mark with a calculating gaze:
"Was that too much?" he pondered, a hint of curiosity in his tone.