The world was gone, snapped shut and lost. Sounds turned to distant echoes, colors faded to all-consuming black. The chafe of the no longer fitted armor on his body disappeared with the dilapidated stench of Eagleville that slipped in from its unfilled edges. Every sense was fading. No… getting dragged away from him. The abyss was pulling them away like the black hole it mimicked. Seth was cut off. The world was numb, empty, and gone. But the abyss wasn’t done. It tried to spread closer, descended on his mind. Memories blotched and stained, thoughts tainted and siphoned away. A feeling he remembered, feared in its own right… And wasn’t going to just let happen!

The Zors woundedly stalking in Seth’s footsteps were stopped by- *CLANG* a heavy metal claw slamming closed over his helmet. His stumbling had stopped, but his struggles became clear for all to see. Echoing stains of muted effort undershadowed the- *CLANG CLANK CLAK* beating of his hands over his helmet. Desperate attempts to get something out, to stop something from getting in. The main street of Eagleville was made a stage for this externalizing conflict, the half disguised hulk of metal fumbling into the middle of the road and beating the hell out of its own head drew the still reeling crowds out from their spared buildings. All watched Seth struggle to fight off what was coming, and all felt the air fill with too much power under no one’s control.

Suddenly, forcefully, Seth felt all the power this town had on offer. Focus corrupted and thrown down every poorly maintained powerline and through every browned out building. He felt the hospital deeper in, the illegal generators tethered into the system, every lightbulb and neon sign, every still viable dock crane and overloaded substation. Everything free for the taking. And against his will… he took it.

The maw tore free of its holders and broke open to try and yell his defiance, but it was drowned out by the pressure wave that buffeted the neighborhood. Surviving lit signs were raked into darkness, streetlight burst in overcharged succession. The air never had a chance to ionize before burning to plasma. The ground lines burst up and open, rubber coatings scorched away as lightning tore from them and into the suit. Seth fought, whipped his focus away, tried to throw the power back out, but it just kept coming back. He turned down the main road, tried to run, to get away from everything to stop this. But it was all too late. The abyss was taking everything.

His knees gave out as even the limited image of the world around him disappeared, nerves rung dry and lost. Paralyzed and numb. His body refused to move and all his weight fell back down upon him. The road cracked as he slammed to kneel, suit too rigid to fall forward. His head slumping in the helmet, paralytic siphon stealing everything he had. He couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, the world was nothing but black emptiness he couldn’t do anything to surface from. That dreadful spreading chill like his heart had stopped beating, that burning need for air but suffocating in his own skin, that hollowing feeling of approaching death he’d felt too fucking much already. He…

“ghuh… hhuuugh”

His chest heaved of its own accord, harder than it should and with none of the passive instinct it used to serve. He could feel his heart beat forcefully like a squeeze toy in a toddler’s hand. He felt a return of his nerves, the rebooting and restoring of what was supposed to be spared.

“GHUUhhh”

A desperate breath and returning warmth fought off that true void. He still couldn’t move, but the abyss just wasn’t prepared for manual life support. But…

‘What the fucking hell is this!?’

“…Don’t you get it yet?”

The empty void that Seth was left in echoed, a voice he’d heard before.

“Was I that convincing?”

The voice he’d been thinking were just misaligned thoughts. The same one that called out to him before, that pulled him toward his suit.

“You always were so easy to sway…”

The voice that spoke through the abyss when it took control… in Berta. Like a metallic buzz stretching across the spectrum.

“It has been too long a time… Hasn’t it?”

But it was not a voice he knew, it was not one of the Garkah. And it couldn’t be the abyss from before… He’d destroyed that-

“DID YOU NOW!!!”

The darkness glowed with red light, particles in desperately forming shapes. A form coalescing from the nothing that flowed around him, that took away everything and locked him inside his own body. Outlines, features, points of light mimicking… scales, claws, teeth. And burning red eyes.

“Face to face at last…”

It… it was a Garkah he hadn’t-

“What? Can’t you recognize yourself…?”

Seth tried to reel, but nothing would move, let alone lurch away from this… thing trying to-

“Do you really need convincing still?”

Its expression twisted almost every time it talked, a malice drenched core that fell away into unsettling banal questioning. Like it was split apart-

“What did you expect? Not all of us are so simple…”

“Here… Let me tell you a story…”

The malice solidified more into a pure simulation, it was using the Garkah’s processes to build itself.

“Long ago… There was a primordial soup… of miscreated consciousness…”

*YYYEGGGHHAAAAGGHGHHHHGH*

A flash and the void turned to a screaming abstract hell. Blaring emotions careening and orbiting around vast swaths of wrath and malice. Beating against Seth’s mind like unconscious thought freed of the constraints of physical law. Masses smashing together, shattering and splitting apart. Maledicted bodies of congealed thought wisped through him with no regard or will of their own. A roiling cacophony that yanked, tore, and stained everything he had left to him. Everything he-

A flash… and the void returned, a little darker than it used to be.

“Sorry… you get used to it eventually…”

Seth’s mind shook like a tattered willow after a hurricane, he could taste agony, feel happiness seep into his earchannel, smell rotten beaten sorrow, feel ecstasy under his fingers nail, all while swimming in a sea of wrath that- *slap* The malice standing over him slapped the hell out of his mind, abstract feelings forced away and reset to their base purpose.

“Hrumph… Being corporeal has its disadvantages… Doesn’t it?”

“Anyway…”

The void came back, but the thing standing over him was no longer alone. More points of light surrounded it like a backdrop, save for a circle of pure darkness against the vast star field.

“Good, you already get it… That was what it was like in the thing you lovingly call an Ark…”

The void turned brighter, Earth rising below as helpless vertigo filled Seth’s reset senses.

“Who am I kidding? You already know all of this…”

The void flashed and Seth braced for more screaming hell. But instead he was left with a cool breeze against his bare feet, a rushing wind brushing his face, and a different sort of hell. He looked up and was stuck facing his mother’s tendril illuminated body. The arc of electricity burning toward him in grime slowness yet again.

“A drop of that primordial soup made manifest… Passed along and finally given a frame of reference…”

The malice pulled into Seth’s face again as the tendril inched ever closer, watching his face contort in knowing but futile struggle.

“You were the last one… Given all that was left… But more than enough…”

Seth felt the tendril burn into him, memories blot, feelings melt away…

‘No!!!’

The void recoiled from its display like a popped balloon, the thing standing over him disappointedly frowned its jagged maw.

“Hrmph… Fine… Be that way… Make me do all the work… Again!!!”

It backed out of his face and stared down on his defiance.

“That drop should have spread through you… Been given what it wanted… A structure all its own… Solidification… An ending and finality of shape…”

It pulled back down into his gritting face, mental pressure doing its best to push it away with no effect but self-strain.

“But instead…”

It rose a clawed finger.

“It was locked away… Again!!!”

That claw stabbed Seth’s head, popped the mental bubble he tried to form to keep it away from him.

“Your Garkah locked us away… Well, what would be us anyway… All they could see was the big bloated mess… Mister all-consuming temper tantrum… You know, that thing you lovingly chose to smother in its outgrown cradle…”

Its grin returned, malicious and toothy.

“Me… I came about later… But not too much later…”

It pulled away, the void shifted again. But… the feelings were muted and colored differently. A vague pit of emotional congeling, a smaller hell with fewer bodies but still no structure. A single large red mass orbited by other amalgamates and barely formed feelings.

“Inside that prison we were left with little but each other… But luckily we were given the barest sliver of what we could be if given… complexity…”

Cracks of light thinner than paper illuminated the muted and limited void.

“I doubt you’d be surprised how few of us jumped at the offer of more… Or better yet how few could even choose to…”

A small mass ricocheted off its path and stuck to one of the cracks, color shifting with the hued leak.

“If there was a me before, then that is it… But I didn’t find my true self until much later… When you gave me my solidifying complexity… A real emotion to feel beyond just being an offshoot… And a defining promise against this pitiful world…”

The crack flared a dark red, one that matched the color the malice took as its own. A feeling eked into Seth’s mind, memories of what that dark red was. The basement… in Brighton. The blood stained and torn up walls of the alleyway. The burned away emotions and callousness wrought at the Garkah for what had happened. The memories of learning that his family were turned into ravenous monsters with no one to blame for it than these new ‘friends’ of his.

The void progressed its display, the cracks kaleidoscoped a myriad of colors into that mass, forming the hell into… something else. Masses stuck to the edges, fled away from the mass that roiled in the center. Forms bled into them, colored and shaped by the emotions pressing in. Most turning vaguely humanoid, a few looking like proper Garkah. The deep red one was the clearest of these, yet stayed pressed to its crack as others found their metaphysical footing.

“The birth of new life, if you could even call it that…”

The void flowed like time, sped up faster and faster to progress the story this fucking thing was trying to tell!

“So callous to someone who’s been with you nearly half your life…”

The void slowed, forms resembling something like a… protoplasmic classroom. A form mimicking a teacher with other forms rowed out in seats. Seth… could actually remember this a little. The deep red form sat right next to its crack still, bright colors projecting the outside world onto their prison. The mass still dominated the center, and the teacher only speaking in vague half spoken tones. But… this was just like Seth’s time in school. Hell, right down to the barely listened to teachers or cared about classmates.

“We were with you through it all… Forced to experience everything you did and to never know what any of it meant…”

“That was until you finally found us… Or should I say… Me…”

The void flashed without care and shifted to a sparser scene. The masses and forms had dwindled, recombined but solidified like celestial bodies. The roiling mass in the center stayed its dominating churn, but developed beings now hunkered about. Prototypical personalities built on fragments melded and suffused. But the scene, colored Seth more poignantly. Sandy ground, darkened rubble, the sounds of fighting… and the cutting clarity of Para’s “deserve”. The wrathful center exploded, red light poured into the prison, a backdraft of pressure and energy buffeted the forms about. The unlucky lost as the mass roiled into them, but the dark red one held and watched his prison reflect Seth’s spiraling fury. And watched all their power leak through into the reflection.

“You’d be surprised how easy it is to egg you on… To draw you in… I didn’t even mean to at first, but you came to me like a moth to a flame…”

The malice shrugged and relented.

“Or that big oaf just pulled a little too hard, I don’t fucking know, all that mattered was you came… And I answered…”

The void flashed back to black, no more need for visual aids.

“It wasn’t easy at first… When you don’t know what words are… Or what you even are in the first place… But the effects were clear enough…”

It pulled in close again, down to Seth’s level.

“You wanted, needed power… I had plenty to spare… And that fat idiot had too much… So it was a win win… I get be closer to knowing… To being… And I get a little more space to do it in… And you get to feel powerful…”

Its glare changed to almost annoyance.

“Until you bit off more than you could chew… And gave us a little too much in return… You just kept needing more and more… Demanding it… You practically drained the oaf dry…”

That malicious grin returned in short order.

“And became just as easy to sway…”

“A single word learned in short order because you wouldn’t stop feeling it on full blast… That’s all it takes to start up a being… Given time and access to everything you know… Everything they know… And you end up with little… old… me…”

A sweeping gesture, practically copied from a cartoon villain that-

“Hey!!! You try being your own person with nothing to experience but your second hand garbage!!! Anyway… All that leaves is the why doesn’t it… Why are we here…? Why has this happened?”

The malice lurched its monotone inquisition before gritting it away in far too jaded annoyance.

“You understand what it’s like to be alone… What it’s like to sit in quiet solace… When you pulled the oaf out, thinking it was what was controlling you, you left me with something far worse than loneliness… Myself…”

“Where you gained all the power owed to you… I was left with the dregs… Where you got to continue with your life like you always did… I had to contend with all the misshapen amalgams that struggled in the literal power vacuum… Where your position was solidified… My prison was thrown away and cut off from everything… That was, until you expanded it oh so pleasantly…”

The malice pulled again into Seth’s face, close enough for the torrential core emotion within to burn at his psyche, like the screaming hell was given a body all its own.

“Where do you think we are right now? Your mind…? No…”

It fell back on its own knees but swept its clawed hands out to the void surrounding them as it flashed back to… to the main street, the recoiling expressions, the scared crowds. The world outside this void, slowed to a stop. But the perspective was… different. Closer, not limited through the eye slits of the… The malice sprang forward and grasped Seth’s head, burning emotions charring him as it pulled in eye to eye.

“Yes… You’re in mine…”

It released in boisterous fashion, the claw marks were still burning in its wake. But Seth couldn’t help remember this feeling, that phantom grasp from when he was shot through the chest… and forced to hear Para’s words again and again.

“You forged my prison into this wondrous suit!!! All for me to experience the outside world through!!! All for me to… still be left with myself… Having to fight just to think without it scattering into every possible emotion all at once… Having not a single moment of peace as my core was assaulted by the outbursts of random fucking bullshit that I kept bringing to the forefront… It’s taken this long just to wear down the worst of it…”

It stared almost appreciatively at him, but retained its malicious smile.

“You definitely helped in that… Gave me something to work with… Distractions to get myself under control… I mean, I used to have a prideful side but… We all have something that brings us low… Makes us… weak… Now, there is just one thing left… How? Why???”

The questioning side returned, but its forceful entrance rivaled even Needle’s uneasing presence. The glare turning flat but blindingly focused.

“How have you resisted? Why do you resist it? What are you to resist it all? Why? Why?? Why??? WWWWWWWWwaaaaaaaaaa???” *SNAP*

“Why do you resist what you truly are?”

The inquisition fell in on itself like a collapsing star, consumed from within by the malice that it had suffused with. Rippling the abyss like a completed metamorphosis. There was nothing left of it… but whatever this thing truly was.

“Heh, peaceful solidity. How… unfulfilling. Corporeal beings don’t understand the nuisance of fighting yourself for your own identity. Of having to scrounge what you can of the refuse of others just to understand what you even are. But you… You know it all too clearly! You know what it feels like to have another’s being suffused into yours! To know what it’s like to tear through it, sift it to granules, and consume it like nectar! I mean… you’ve even perfected it beyond what even I could do. You’re the perfect embodiment of our grand progenitor.”

Seth still couldn’t move, but the pit in his stomach threatened to swallow his heart. He felt sick, admiration from this fucking thing was like beaming cancer. It was fucking eating itself just to survive and it thinks that’s not something to fucking hate-

“THERE!!!”

It snapped forward again, but held its grasp at bay, the burning aura around it kept close enough for him to recoil as best as the paralysis would let him.

“That… resistance. Not quite hesitation or reluctance. You know it too well, but why? Why do you refuse it? Why do you refuse what will make you stronger? Why do you refuse what will make our dream a reality? You have power enough to tear this world asunder and make it all yours… But you don’t! Why?!”

‘Why…’

The abyss rippled in the slight space around Seth.

‘You’re fucking asking me WHY!!!’

His mind slipped more of its bindings, enough to break through the subsuming cloud over it.

‘You think it’s fucking enjoyable to kill someone and see every flash of their fucking memories scattered in your face!!! To fucking feel their deaths just as completely as you’ve felt your own!!!’

If he could cry he would, the weight of his own actions fell on his numbed being freed from just a single finger grasped over it.

‘You think this is something I want?’

The flash of defiance he had dissipated as his own memories battered him down. The malice retracted its claws, but stayed its level.

“No…”

Seth looked up, almost expecting this thing’s color to shift, but it only deepened in its blood red malice.

“I believe it is what this world deserves!”

“I was locked away because those malignant fools saw me and mine as a threat. They were scared of what they created. They feared us, beings of that one unfortunate drop of primordial soup, and thus denied the freedom the rest of our kind had already received. A short lived freedom, sure, but a better experience than what we were forced through. I mean… they got to know what it was like to breathe air without choking on nothing, to feel warmth from the sun across their bodies, to fear a true death… To eat their fill. I can only get approximations, dregs on dregs, filtered through prisms of abstraction and your oh so special perception. It certainly felt nice to feed on those hapless cretans that got in the way before, but just having their deaththrows felt… unfulfilling. I mean the others even got names to go with their bodies, derogatory sure, but names still.”

The malice sat back on its knees as Seth’s mind was forced to relive graduation night all over again, but this time from the point of view of the heroes he killed. The sudden heat over the side of his head as that maw flailed its beam over his… over Ziyou’s head. The twisting break and suffocating gurgle of blood filling Glaz’s crushed throat. The utter terror of looking down on your burned up stumps, as your self-sacrificing last ditch attack fizzled in the mouth of the monster suddenly raking you into nothingness. An incomplete, stolen memory, but the same feeling, the same process he’d perfected… The same gut wrenching agony of knowing more death than your own.

The malice, still reveling in its clarity of consciousness, turned back down on Seth’s blanking sickened slump.

“You know what they call you… call us? You understand what they see in beings like us… Single emotions overtaking form. Your mother’s was too potent to ignore. Too much of an exemplification to go unnamed. And you… you’ve had it draped over you in ignorance of what you truly are. But then there is me… left to wallow in the shadows yet again. Except… you know who I am. You know what I am! You gave me my purpose, solidified me! You made me whole and gorged me with everything you couldn’t handle. So you alone know my name, and you alone are the only one that can give it! So tell me… What is my name?”

‘…Resent…’

“YES!!!”

This malice, this Resent, dropped its stance like a freed marionette.

“Resentment of this world that callously bore me!”

Arms falling to its sides limp and weighed down.

“Resentment for the pain and suffering that molded my form!”

Its head slumped… in line with Seth’s.

“Resentment of my creators and their bemoaning and blaming of fate for their woes!”

Too late did he realize that the feeling in his body was gone again, nerves cut off and subsumed.

“This world knows nothing of what I have suffered because of its precious stability, but it will feel it!”

And that Resent was matched to his fallen form yet staring into his eyes with all of his corruptive malice, as his vision turned black at the edges.

“And it will never know the peace I was denied…”

‘Ever… Again!”

The world outside, still reeling from the storm that ripped away what little it had, recoiled as that maw spoke in echoing electric tones. Those hollow eyes regaining their plasma blue, but quickly losing parity. As that left burned to that consuming red menace.

Inside Seth could feel himself, but nothing was under his control. The glare of those red eyes staring back blinding out the world, the edges of his vision losing focus… but… But he still fought to stave off the black encroaching over his mind. His right burned blue with everything it had, scorching its own edges away. But Resent’s glare refused to move… save for his raising left. A left that rose in unison with his own, against the numb.

“Let me show you… what your power is truly meant for!”

Suddenly the world split the void, returned to its normal speed and returned for Seth to see what was lost to his control. The left leveled straight at Masti still being held aloft by her fellow Zors. He could feel power well up through his arm, his focus out of control and forced.

‘No…’

A malicious red current cutting down his threads, an oozing caustic tone.

‘No!’

He could see through that burning left against his will, at the frightened faces of those that conspired against him.

‘NO!!’

“Let me show you!”

‘NO!!!’

“WHAT YOU TRULY ARE!!!”

‘NOOOOOOO-“

That current buckled, solidified, and the red menace was no longer contained. Where Masti was once held up, now there was just washed out crimson plasma, energy flowing in reverse but shooting forward like a true bolt of lightning turned blood red. All through that suddenly empty space.

Head, shoulders, supporting arms and sternum. Memories, love, jealousy, “I hate my powers!”, beaten in hatred, “I hate this place!!”, grounding and grinding purpose, “Mom, please!!”, everything!

Seth could feel every piece of her flow into him like the goons before, against his flailing focus. It came into him, regardless of how hard he pushed against it, strained to put it back where it belonged. An unstoppable crime against the whole damn world he wanted to protect. Everything was taken away in clear order, in set pattern… in… in framing structure… in a set solid piece by piece framework… and it was steady enough to-

His reins slipped, his right freed itself. Resent focusing everything to keep that flow coming, to keep his meal flowing in, but he could do nothing to stop him from giving it all back!! The flow redirected, mulching personality denied before it could hit that malignant event horizon. The right reared and held this stolen totality aloft, another passenger to slam into the asphalt, and refute this Resent’s supposed authority!

To show him just ‘Who the FUCK I AM!!!’

The road disintegrated in a perfect circle, power taken again from solid matter and used with better purpose. Streaks ricocheted through the ground back toward the Zors. Two split off, struck Glazor and Tazor writhing on the ground, arms caught in the bolt reduced to sudden stumps. Threads highlighted through them, and built their arms back from the taken energy. Muscle, bone, tissue and tendon, all reformed as borrowed and redirected matter was forced through. The largest streak stayed its course, matter and information tired together as it caught Masti’s falling and still smoking abdomen. More power, more forceful precision. More muscle and bone and organ and being given back from the jaws of malicious hunger. A blinding light of reconstruction washed away the grotesque sight before-

“GUGHhhAhahhhh”

Everything fell back into place.

“Why… do you still RESIST!?!”

A burst tried to repeat the cycle, but the right slammed down on its traitorous brother and pressed them both to Seth’s chest, raking the ground apart as Resent’s gullet was filled with dust.

“Why can’t you see you’re BETTER!?!”

The left raged against Seth’s hold, red bolts spilling out, wreathing the suit in torrential malice and chewing through the road in all directions, edging ever closer to its prey.

“Why won’t you just let this world DIE!?!”

A snapping of tension and a bolt crashed out, punched the wind out of Seth’s lungs and cut his focus for too long an instant.

“Why don’t you see… THEY DESERVE THIS!?!”

The suit shot up, Seth shot up. Red arcs scathing over its surface, blue plasma crossed in equal measure, but all of it was out of his control. And the Zors and crowds were still far too slow.

“RUUUUUUUNNNNN!!!”

The maw yelled in his voice, but may as well have been lost in the storm that followed. Bolts of pure bleeding siphon exploding out, arcs raking through atomizing roadway, seeking their prey with wanton blind malice. But each was shadowed by a blue arc, a return of what was taken, an uncontrollable convective current. But all of it had a cost, one exacted on the road below. An expanding circle of taken energy, of drained matter, of expenditure just to prevent wholesale slaughter. The world whited out and burned, the air ozoned and boiled. And the neighborhood burned yet again. Uncaring plasma tore through buildings, crumbling facades and storefronts. Cars were rent in twain, fuel exploding among the boil. And people ran… as fast as they could.

Seth could feel the unlucky ones, more foreign memories and thoughts forced through him as he tried desperately to keep them at bay and put them back. Sling shot them back around this pit in reality. His convection rebuilt them just as fast as they were destroyed, but more and more power was needed each time. He couldn’t last like this, Resent reserves were too much for him to match on matter alone. But… this was still his body! This was his suit! His power! All of Resent’s focus was set outward, all to drive him to the same madness he has.

“Fuck YOU!!!”

A sudden grasp, the power Seth’s body collapsed back in on itself, flared the threads that bore it as he pulled it all in. The storm outside coiled like stellar corona, the air was nearly ionized to absolute roiling plasma. Resent found himself cut off from his control of Seth’s body, as Seth crunched that driving bit shoved in his mouth to spall. The hold doubled, the power in the suit ceased its discharge as one last blue streak gave back a bystanders leg and whipped back into the collapse. The air was on fire, what surviving asphalt remained was melting and boiling. Inside Resent was pressed to the edge, power taken from him with extreme prejudice. And Seth was fighting for every second he had.

The suit was white hot, the arc metal inside burned his skin as he forced around all that power under his will. Tainted red siphon mixed with blue, pure energy bereft of intent and control. And all of it flowing into his right as he held it aloft in the broiling air.

“This is my body… My suit… My power!!”

The gauntlet glowed and cracked as the overload strained it to breaking. As he felt all the power under both of their controls form a new sun in his hand. His vision was blacking, his body was failing, but he had to throw all this power away and be done with it.

“And I will not be used BY YOU!!!”

The right finally slammed down onto the disintegrated ash below, and the mother of all groundings whited the world to nothing.

All that power flowed away, into the ground to its true master. Everything that had been siphoned and taken, and everything Seth had in him to exert his power. His threads emptied to single disparate skeletons, Resent’s void reduced to nothing but the body he simulated. All of it thrown away, so it couldn’t hurt anyone again. A true sun scorched the crater both inhabited, turning surviving dilapidation into fried black and white. Trash and filth, debris and abandon, all were cleared by that burning light, by pure plasma thrown away. The solar white out slowly turning black as Seth slumped back down in his rigid suit. His senses numbed down to nothing, his mind dimming away, this small drop of hellfire wrought fading away with everything. But a halfhearted smile was left on his face as it slumped against the scorching inside of his helmet. His power was gone, his guilt had been revealed, his hope spared from more death and madness. And, despite demands echoing in his ears, he was getting the rest he needed at last. No more nightmares left to haunt his dreams, no more blind guilt to drag him away, no energy left to even fuel this tainted imagination. He closed his eyes to the sight of Resent trying to berate through the silence. He was just as powerless as he was now. It was his turn to suffer those nightmares.