Chapter 4
Marcus knew that Liz was still somewhat human in terms of her habits. She still breathed, she still blinked, and she still suffered from her reflexes, which were all but useless. He wanted her to learn how to overcome these obstacles as they wasted more willpower than they gave. He also wanted to show her how strong she really was; he wanted to show her just how far her body could go.
Marcus climbed higher into the sky and leveled off at the point where he could throw her off and make her hit a target accurately. He circled the city until he found a large area of cement pavement. Marcus refused to listen to Liz’s questioning as he tilted to the side and let her slide off his plated back. He looked down and watched her decent with pride. Marcus was not worried for her safety; nothing short of entering a star could kill her. Marcus remembered Isaac saying that once the Titanstone was active, one could come into direct contact with a nuke and, despite the fact that one was hit by both a fifty ton pointed weight and a twenty thousand degree ball of fire, be completely unharmed. Despite that, Liz still felt pain like a human. She needed to learn to control her pain. About three seconds after he let her drop, she received a crash course in pain management. She hit home in the center of the square and a satisfying Crack! reverberated over the area.
Marcus dropped out of the sky to inspect the damage. Liz was nowhere to be seen, but the area where she landed was filled with signs that she was, at one point, there; the ground was riddled with cracks that extended from one edge to the other and a twenty foot wide crater dug a dozen feet into the ground.
He knew that Liz was still around the area somewhere, but where?
Marcus’s memory flashed to when they were in the water of the Great Lakes, and Liz was positioned…
Marcus pulled his head back and threw it forward a split second faster than gravity, throwing Liz from his forehead to his maw. One fact stayed in his head the entire time he did this; Liz was going to be in a very bad mood when all was said and done.
Marcus closed his mouth before she could get out. He tried to crush her, but she slipped to the center of his maw. Liz jumped forward and tried to force his maw open; she was much stronger now, but her tiny figure was a tenth the size of a single of Marcus’s jaw muscles. She yelled, “What exactly are you trying to teach me? Most teachers don’t do this kind of thing to a student.”
“I’m a unique teacher,” Marcus said in a booming voice, “and you are still a human by my standards. You still feel pain; I can help you with that.”
Marcus moved his tongue around to try and grab her. She put up a strong fight, but quickly realized that size does matter to some degree. Liz relaxed her muscles and let Marcus do as he wished, even though her mind was still plagued with the memories of before.
Marcus moved his tongue and pushed her to the left side of his mouth, where every increment of her body had another tooth above and below it. Then Marcus pressed his jaws together hard enough to break a solid block of steel. This was when Liz started to scream.
It was not a scream of fear or pain or anger, but something far more sinister that lied dormant in a human until the end. It was the scream of loss, when one loses something they hold dear; like sanity. Liz lost her trust for Marcus, her will to live, and her sanity. Marcus heard these screams and had to fight the urge to let her out. The screaming turned to a loud sobbing the likes of which Marcus did not try to understand. Two hours into it, her sobbing stopped and changed to cursing. She yelled in anger, fear, and hate. Liz used his name in creatively and poetically obscene ways the author does not wish to repeat. It took five hours of tedious work on both sides, but she eventually stopped crying.
When she was silent for another ten minutes, Marcus threw her out at too high a speed for her to recover. She hit the wall on one side of a large brick building and passed through the thick wall as if it were paper. Liz eventually landed and skidded for a solid hundred feet before her deceleration made it possible for the wall opposite her to stay standing. She looked around and discovered that she was in an old weapons museum. The importance of her location was nil at the time; she only wanted to hide from her so-called teacher.
The pain nearly drove her insane, and she began to wish she had never taken the stone Isaac had handed to her. Humanity was a secondary thought net to her pain; Liz did not care for her own life. Her mind was filled with ideas to stop the pain that stole her will away. Liz came up with suicide, but she could not die, running away, but she had nowhere to go, and violence, but she did not want to become a killer. Her prayers were answered when she heard footfall down a hallway to her left. She turned to look into the gift shop, where the reflection off the dust in the room was more than enough to cover the room in gold light.
Liz smelt the undead and heard its wailing long before she saw it. She jumped away from it as the mutated beast twice her size smashed away the stone floors where she once stood. Liz instantly forgot her pain and reached for one of the blades that sat on the wall beside her. The sleek samurai blade was rusted and dull, but it was enough. She swung with all the energy she had left and the beast was ripped in half. Time seemed to slow down and she seemed to speed up. Liz used the strange time laps to swing the blade first around to separate each individual limb, and then in a diagonal arc to further divide each individual limb.
Liz looked at the room ahead of her; blood covered every inch of the wall, ceiling, and floors. All of this was created in under a second and from a single undead. Liz only just then remembered her pain; it was now a memory, nothing more. She walked around the museum and tried to find the perfect weapon. Her current sword was fine, but it was rusted and probably brittle. As she examined another blade, Marcus’s head came through the large hallway she skidded through less than a minute ago. He said to her, “You do not show fear or anger, and that either means you are cured of your lesser senses, or my lessons have driven you completely insane. Which is it?”
“I was insane, but a stray undead helped me relieve my stress.”
“Do not find too much pleasure in this violence, for if you stay in an aggressive state for too long, you may forget who are your friends and enemies. When that happens, I will show no mercy.”
“I thought we couldn’t be killed.”
“True, but you can be imprisoned. That is why the dome I was trapped in was such a threat. Could you imagine being buried for a millennia and having only yourself for company? Even I would have gone insane. The reason I am telling you this is because I do not want you to take advantage of others solely because you are stronger than them. Treat others the way you would like to be treated by one of greater strength than you.”
“Like you?”
“Yes, like me.”
Liz smiled and turned around. Her hunt for a weapon was not over. Liz looked around and eventually found a blade that was not rusty. She picked it up and frowned at the blades condition. Her eyes could see every detail of the blade; it was covered in scratches and dents. Marcus seemed to read her mind and said, “What you see are the wounds this blade sustained from being made, transported, and set to rest in its glass casing.”
“All of them have the same problem; I cant even touch them without causing some kind of damage to it.”
“Then I will give you a blade that is neither forgeable nor destructible. It is a perfect blade that I made when I finished my design. It will never scratch and never dent. You should never hold another weapon as long as you live.”
“And this blade would be…”
“Inside me.”
Marcus climbed higher into the sky and leveled off at the point where he could throw her off and make her hit a target accurately. He circled the city until he found a large area of cement pavement. Marcus refused to listen to Liz’s questioning as he tilted to the side and let her slide off his plated back. He looked down and watched her decent with pride. Marcus was not worried for her safety; nothing short of entering a star could kill her. Marcus remembered Isaac saying that once the Titanstone was active, one could come into direct contact with a nuke and, despite the fact that one was hit by both a fifty ton pointed weight and a twenty thousand degree ball of fire, be completely unharmed. Despite that, Liz still felt pain like a human. She needed to learn to control her pain. About three seconds after he let her drop, she received a crash course in pain management. She hit home in the center of the square and a satisfying Crack! reverberated over the area.
Marcus dropped out of the sky to inspect the damage. Liz was nowhere to be seen, but the area where she landed was filled with signs that she was, at one point, there; the ground was riddled with cracks that extended from one edge to the other and a twenty foot wide crater dug a dozen feet into the ground.
He knew that Liz was still around the area somewhere, but where?
Marcus’s memory flashed to when they were in the water of the Great Lakes, and Liz was positioned…
Marcus pulled his head back and threw it forward a split second faster than gravity, throwing Liz from his forehead to his maw. One fact stayed in his head the entire time he did this; Liz was going to be in a very bad mood when all was said and done.
Marcus closed his mouth before she could get out. He tried to crush her, but she slipped to the center of his maw. Liz jumped forward and tried to force his maw open; she was much stronger now, but her tiny figure was a tenth the size of a single of Marcus’s jaw muscles. She yelled, “What exactly are you trying to teach me? Most teachers don’t do this kind of thing to a student.”
“I’m a unique teacher,” Marcus said in a booming voice, “and you are still a human by my standards. You still feel pain; I can help you with that.”
Marcus moved his tongue around to try and grab her. She put up a strong fight, but quickly realized that size does matter to some degree. Liz relaxed her muscles and let Marcus do as he wished, even though her mind was still plagued with the memories of before.
Marcus moved his tongue and pushed her to the left side of his mouth, where every increment of her body had another tooth above and below it. Then Marcus pressed his jaws together hard enough to break a solid block of steel. This was when Liz started to scream.
It was not a scream of fear or pain or anger, but something far more sinister that lied dormant in a human until the end. It was the scream of loss, when one loses something they hold dear; like sanity. Liz lost her trust for Marcus, her will to live, and her sanity. Marcus heard these screams and had to fight the urge to let her out. The screaming turned to a loud sobbing the likes of which Marcus did not try to understand. Two hours into it, her sobbing stopped and changed to cursing. She yelled in anger, fear, and hate. Liz used his name in creatively and poetically obscene ways the author does not wish to repeat. It took five hours of tedious work on both sides, but she eventually stopped crying.
When she was silent for another ten minutes, Marcus threw her out at too high a speed for her to recover. She hit the wall on one side of a large brick building and passed through the thick wall as if it were paper. Liz eventually landed and skidded for a solid hundred feet before her deceleration made it possible for the wall opposite her to stay standing. She looked around and discovered that she was in an old weapons museum. The importance of her location was nil at the time; she only wanted to hide from her so-called teacher.
The pain nearly drove her insane, and she began to wish she had never taken the stone Isaac had handed to her. Humanity was a secondary thought net to her pain; Liz did not care for her own life. Her mind was filled with ideas to stop the pain that stole her will away. Liz came up with suicide, but she could not die, running away, but she had nowhere to go, and violence, but she did not want to become a killer. Her prayers were answered when she heard footfall down a hallway to her left. She turned to look into the gift shop, where the reflection off the dust in the room was more than enough to cover the room in gold light.
Liz smelt the undead and heard its wailing long before she saw it. She jumped away from it as the mutated beast twice her size smashed away the stone floors where she once stood. Liz instantly forgot her pain and reached for one of the blades that sat on the wall beside her. The sleek samurai blade was rusted and dull, but it was enough. She swung with all the energy she had left and the beast was ripped in half. Time seemed to slow down and she seemed to speed up. Liz used the strange time laps to swing the blade first around to separate each individual limb, and then in a diagonal arc to further divide each individual limb.
Liz looked at the room ahead of her; blood covered every inch of the wall, ceiling, and floors. All of this was created in under a second and from a single undead. Liz only just then remembered her pain; it was now a memory, nothing more. She walked around the museum and tried to find the perfect weapon. Her current sword was fine, but it was rusted and probably brittle. As she examined another blade, Marcus’s head came through the large hallway she skidded through less than a minute ago. He said to her, “You do not show fear or anger, and that either means you are cured of your lesser senses, or my lessons have driven you completely insane. Which is it?”
“I was insane, but a stray undead helped me relieve my stress.”
“Do not find too much pleasure in this violence, for if you stay in an aggressive state for too long, you may forget who are your friends and enemies. When that happens, I will show no mercy.”
“I thought we couldn’t be killed.”
“True, but you can be imprisoned. That is why the dome I was trapped in was such a threat. Could you imagine being buried for a millennia and having only yourself for company? Even I would have gone insane. The reason I am telling you this is because I do not want you to take advantage of others solely because you are stronger than them. Treat others the way you would like to be treated by one of greater strength than you.”
“Like you?”
“Yes, like me.”
Liz smiled and turned around. Her hunt for a weapon was not over. Liz looked around and eventually found a blade that was not rusty. She picked it up and frowned at the blades condition. Her eyes could see every detail of the blade; it was covered in scratches and dents. Marcus seemed to read her mind and said, “What you see are the wounds this blade sustained from being made, transported, and set to rest in its glass casing.”
“All of them have the same problem; I cant even touch them without causing some kind of damage to it.”
“Then I will give you a blade that is neither forgeable nor destructible. It is a perfect blade that I made when I finished my design. It will never scratch and never dent. You should never hold another weapon as long as you live.”
“And this blade would be…”
“Inside me.”