Marcus…
He wasn’t quite sure what to make of that woman who had punched him in the face, but it made him feel nervous.
The feeling of uneasiness that he had this morning hasn’t eased and seemed to have worsened since he came across that woman.
He had heard that some villages and small towns were hit by Malthael’s fire breath but Dean had assured both him and Selene that they shouldn’t have been held accountable for the collateral damage. Since they were obviously not the ones responsible for reviving him in the first place, and were simply doing their best to prevent an even greater tragedy from happening if Malthael were allowed to roam freely, none of the fault should rest on them.
However, the public opinion of the survivors was another matter.
As Layla made it very clear to him, there is no guarantee that those that survived the aftermath of Malthael’s destruction won’t be angry or downright hateful towards the ones that stopped him simply because they didn’t do it fast enough to keep their loved ones from dying.
He figured that he would allow Layla the opportunity to let her anger out on him as much as she wants to when their match comes up.
For now, he wanted to focus on what was in front of him.
Walking onto the arena floor for the first time was a rather surreal experience for him. It made him feel like he was walking into the roman coliseum like some kind of gladiator.
It felt awesome.
Upon seeing his face come into the sunlight, the crowd cheered.
At least these people are grateful that Malthael’s dead. Sort of…
As the announcer called out his name and started describing his heroic battle with the dragon, he watched as his first opponent walked forward to meet him.
As Marcus squinted his eyes to look at him, something felt off about him. For some reason, this man looked familiar to him, even though this had to have been the first time he had ever seen the man.
His was around the same height as Marcus with lightly tanned skin, short brown hair, green eyes, and looked to be in his thirties. If what Selene said about him was true, then this man was a lot older than he looked. She had told him that this man, ‘The Sword of Rain’ as he was called, fought back against the wraith outbreak that took place about sixty to seventy years ago.
The man’s eyes landed on him and even though his demeanor seemed rather calm and almost friendly, his eyes told him that there was a deep seated anger being directed at Marcus.
“Ha, wow. Its been over seventy years since I last saw you, yet it looks like you barely aged a day. Though that’s quite rich coming from me,” he laughed, talking as if they both knew each other.
Confused, Marcus replied, “You seem...strangely familiar, but I don’t think I know you. Mind telling me your name?”
“Ah...Yeah, I guess you don’t remember me that well. I was eleven years old when last we ran into each other. Of course, that was before I came into this world looking for you. You paid my parents a visit one night, remember?” he said.
Marcus’s eyes slowly widened in horror as he finally pieced everything together.
“Y-you’re… Cole Mohr?” he asked as he remembered that terrible night he killed his parents right in front of him.
Four years ago…
Ever since Marcus came back from Japan Romano had been working him non stop for over a year to get as much groundwork done as possible.
He had hoped that it would just be a handful of big jobs but no. Romano was being obsessively thorough with everything he asked.
This current job that he had been ordered to carry out was even more out there than usual.
He was supposed to kill a married couple that lived in a large mansion far from the city and burn down their house.
Confused about the obscure nature of this job, he asked Romano what the deal was but got shouted out of the room in response.
Rather than try and ask him for more information, he decided to look into it himself.
Apparently the married couple had inherited the mansion after an elderly family member of theirs had died. However, it seemed that the both of them were being crushed by a debt so large that even if they were to sell the mansion to pay some of it off, it would barely make a dent in it and would end up leaving them in a rough position.
Not wanting to waste the opportunity that was up for grabs, the Russian mob reached out and convinced them not to sell the mansion. They would provide the family with their own staff to maintain it and would help them pay off their debts so long as they let the Russians use their mansion as a base of operations to make advancements into New York.
So long as the two of them housed the Russians, their lifestyle would be maintained and their debts would be cleared over time.
Before he carried out the plan, he looked up when the house was built and looked at where it was getting its power from.
As far as he knew, all the power to that mansion was being fed in by a single power line along the road leading up to it. That would made it easy to cut off their power and cause a distraction without causing them to tighten their security too much if he was able to crash a car into the pole and draw them to it.
On the night that it happened, Lisa and Benjamin Mohr had gone out to a restaurant which gave him plenty of time to prepare.
He had stolen someone’s car and rammed it into the pole fast enough to make the crash believable. Unfortunately the shock of the crash left him dizzy for a moment and he needed about half an hour to recover before he started the next phase. He then brought out some plastique explosives and primed a detonator so that he could time it just right for the power to go out.
Once he was a close enough to the mansion without being seen, he detonated the explosives and waited until some of the guards came outside to see what the issue was and he snuck inside.
With the power out, he had to guess that any cameras or security system that was installed had to have been taken down with everything else.
For this job, he wore his usual enforcer gear that he put together when he came back from Japan. He had to use this gear now since all the jobs have become more and more dangerous.
That first job he was asked to do when he came back still gave him nightmares…
He then shook his head to try and clear his mind so he could focus on the work in front of him.
He moved quietly in his enforcer gear as the souls on his shoes were designed to absorb shock and cancel out any noise his footsteps made. He wore black cargo pants to carry extra magazines and supplies, and had a titanium chest plate, shoulder guards, and arm bracers. He did not, however, wear a helmet and opted for a black neck gaiter and grease paint to hide his face.
It left his head exposed, that was for sure. However, wearing a helmet would make it muffle his hearing and make it difficult to breath and could also affect his peripheral vision.
At least with the set up he was going with now, his head would be just as difficult to hit as it would be for anyone trying to catch someone running really fast and blending in with a dark environment.
He reached a corner of the hall and froze as he heard two guards walking in his direction, one of which held a flashlight. He pressed himself firmly against the wall while he pulled out a knife. He wanted to make as little sound as possible.
As the guards turned the corner, the beam of light coming from the guard walking on the left barely missed him and they passed by him completely unaware.
They seemed so distracted by the inconvenience of the lack of power that they didn’t think to be worried about the possibility of someone breaking in.
“Man this is annoying. How long until the power is back on do you think?”
“I don’t know. Some guy crashed into the pole and knocked it down. It could be several hours or even longer before someone comes out here and fixes it.”
Marcus peeled himself from the wall and stalked behind the guy on the right and just as they were about to turn the corner.
The guard on the right walked a little too far forward and was hit by the beam of light coming from the flashlight and covered his eyes.
“Ah, dammit. Keep the light out of my eyes!” he complained.
“My bad…,” he said as the guard on the left took the lead.
Marcus then took this opportunity as he reached out from behind and stabbed the man in the jugular while putting his hand over his mouth and pulling him back swiftly back around the corner.
The guard on the left then said, “We should probably find some candles and start lighting them so we don’t have to stumble...whoa, where’d you go?”
He turned around and flashes his beam behind him just as the feet of the dead guard in Marcus’s arms were pulled around the corner of the room and vanished out of sight and into a separate room.
“John? Where the hell did you go?”
If Marcus didn’t shut the other guard up quickly, he’d start shouting and call attention to himself.
The guard walked back around the corner and started waving his flashlight from side to side as he tried to find his friend.
He then noticed the open door and flashed his light in the doorway. As he walked closer to it, he started raising his voice, “John? Come on, don’t pull this sneaky shit with-, Mmph!”
He moaned in pain as Marcus lunged towards him with his blade like a ghost and stabbed him in the heart. He pressed the palm of his hand over the guard’s mouth to keep him quiet while he drove the sword deeper into his chest. The guard tried to back step to get away but Marcus pushed him against the wall and pinned him there.
“You’re making too much noise, be quiet,” Marcus whispered to him, staring into his eyes and witnessing the look of terror in them before he quickly pulled the knife out of his gut and stabbed him in the neck to finish him off.
He then carried the other guard’s corpse into the room with the first and used the flashlight to see illuminate the blood on the wall so he could clean it up.
Over the next half an hour, he went around the mansion silently picking off the number of guards but not killing all of them. Leaving just enough of them left that when Lisa and Benjamin came back, they would be welcomed in by the guards and wouldn’t have any reason to feel something was off. If they asked about why there weren’t as many around, it would be because some left to figure out what was wrong.
The two of them would end up coming back to their bedroom without ever knowing that something was wrong and find him waiting there for them.
When the two of them did eventually come back home, the guards who remained had lit up candles to bring some light to the mansion and they even had some candles lit up in their bedroom where he was waiting for them. Marcus had put listening devices around the halls when he was picking off the guards so he knew when they would show up.
“Is it just me or does it feel a little bit more empty here?” Lisa asked as her voice played back to Marcus in his earpiece.
“Most of the guards went out to check out the power pole and the driver who crashed into it is still missing so they are looking for him to make sure he’s alright,” Ben said back to her.
“You don’t think they sent a little more than necessary? It looks like half of our whole staff is gone,” he heard her say both in the ear piece and in the hallway as she got closer to the bedroom. He heard three pairs of footsteps as they got closer, which meant there was likely a guard escorting them to their room.
He pulled his suppressed FNX-45 tactical pistol out of its holster and pulled back the hammer as he stood in the corner behind the door, waiting for them to enter.
The moment the door opened and the two of them walked inside, he aimed his revolver at Lisa who was behind Ben as he walked into the room and shot her in the head. Before Ben noticed what had happened as his wife was falling to the ground, Marcus instantly shot him right after.
They both died, probably before either of them had realized what had happened.
He then aimed his gun at the doorway to shoot down the guard who was with them only to look down and see...a child.
There was an eleven year old boy who had fallen backwards in shock and fear at the man who had just gunned down the man and woman in the room so quickly as if it were second nature to him. The boy looked up at Marcus, staring at the piercing murderous look in his eyes as he aimed his gun at the boy’s face.
Once he realized that there weren’t any guard’s that had followed the couple into the room, he pressed the hammer back into the gun and pointed it at the floor as he looked at the kid.
Well shit…
Cole…
The boy on the floor was still frozen with fear and horror and didn’t know what to do other than sit there and hope the man wouldn’t kill him too. He had just killed his parents in cold blood like it was nothing but now he had his gun trained on him instead. However, instead of pulling the trigger, he aimed the gun down and gave him a quick look before cursing and pulling out his phone.
“No service? Goddammit, no one told me they had a kid too. Now what the hell do I do?”
The man in black then looked back at the kid with his gun still aimed at the floor. The man then looked at his gun, then at the kid, and back again to his gun before he put it into its holster and knelt down in front of him.
“Hey kid, tell me. What’s your name?” he asked.
“C-c-Cole. Cole Mohr,” he stammered.
“Cole then, okay,” he said before he went eerily silent. Likely thinking of ways to kill him and hide his body.
“A-are you going to kill me too?” he asked.
The man in the terrifying armor looked down at him and remained silent as he tapped the barrel of his gun against his hip nervously.
Then, as if talking to himself, he pointed the gun at Cole’s head again as he said, “Maybe I should put you out of your misery. At least that way you won’t have to live with your parents deaths haunting you.”
Cole stared up at the gun aimed at him, waiting for the bullet to kill him only for the man to never take the shot.
What is he waiting for…?
The wait for his death was torture.
The gun in the man’s hands began to tremble as he failed to take the shot and simply walked right past him.
Cole’s head turned to watch his parent’s murderer as he disappeared into the hallway and didn’t come back for him.
He then looked back at the bodies of his mother and father and every horrible emotion of grief hit him all at once as he crawled towards them and cried over them.
Marcus…
What the FUCK was he thinking?
Leaving behind a witness?
Was he an idiot?
He should have just snuffed that kid and been done with it. He SHOULD have, but the better part of him, what little of it was still left, told him to leave that kid alone. The sins of the parents were not the sins of the child.
Just because they got tied up with the Russian mob doesn’t mean that the kid had to inherit those problems.
Just as Marcus was making his way through the hallways of the mansion on his way out, the power turned back on suddenly.
He then heard the voice of a guard call out as he said, “Hey guys! Turns out they had a back up-”
With all the lights on, Marcus was exposed and the guard spotted him right away.
“Oh shit!” Marcus spat out as he was caught off guard.
Without wasting any time, the guard reached for his gun but Marcus’s draw was faster as he shot him in the head in a split second.
The next sound that came out was that of a bullet ricocheting from his shoulder guard as it narrowly missed his head.
Someone tried to land a head shot from behind!
He dove out of the way and out of sight just as he heard the guard around the corner speak into his mic, “He’s here! The Enderman is here! Everyone get back to the-”
His voice was cut short as he turned the corner and found Marcus’s blade shoved into his throat.
He looked down at the mic that the guard dropped and picked it up.
He didn’t know if he said it because of the adrenaline running through his veins, or the anger and shock he was feeling after he had killed a boy’s parents right in front of him, but he spoke into that mic with as much venom as his voice would allow.
“I’m only going to say this once. If you want to live, then do not return to this place, because every single person that gets in my way is gonna die.”
He then dropped the mic and stomped on it before running down the hall.
He then took off running and continued building momentum like a juggernaut, refusing to let anything stop his charge.
As he kept running, another guard ran up the stairs on the left side of the hallway and spotted him immediately. He tried to land a get off a few shots, and while one bounced off of Marcus’s chest plate, the other whizzed past his head as he strafed to the right.
With his right hand tightly gripping the handle, he swung his blade in a back handed slash and from the nose up, cleaved the entire top half of the man’s skull from his body.
The stairway was the fastest path out of the mansion, but there many more guards making their way up the steps, all of which were equipped with guns.
Rather than allow them any time to think or react, Marcus threw himself into the mix as he jumped over the guard rail and down into the lower set of stairs.
While in midair, he fire off a shot, hitting a guard in the throat while plunging his knife into the eye of another. When his feet hit the ground, he switched the grip on the handle and held his corpse in front of his chest as a shield. He then fired off two more shots at the guards below before the guards still climbing the stairs could react in time.
As soon as Marcus raised his gun to kill the guards above him, he felt a sharp pain as a bullet grazed the side of his skull. That happened after the fact that the head he was holding onto with his knife exploded like a bloody, chunky water balloon all over his face. Bits of shredded skin, skull fragments, and brain matter clung to his face and neck.
The body of the guard he shot before he landed fell onto one of the guards above him and pinned him to the ground.
Marcus then kicked the corpse of the man he was using as a shield at the guards below him and dove at the floor to avoid more bullets.
He felt one of them hit his right calf but he gritted his teeth to fight through the pain.
He then raised his gun and fired off two more shots and the last two guards above him died within seconds.
The guards below him were still pinned under the body he kicked onto them as he jumped down and stabbed them both.
There were now only two guards left, one running in from the left hallway, and one on the right.
Marcus rolled over to the right and threw his blade at him, to which the guard dove at the ground to avoid.
Marcus then switched his gun to the other hand and raised his left arm up to guard against incoming bullets from the right as he aimed his gun to the left and shot the other guard in the chest twice.
The ping of a bullet hitting his left arm guard rang loudly in his ear before he swung his right arm over his chest and fired wildly until his magazine was empty.
He did not hear any more gunshots as the chaos came to a bloody and violent end.
Out of breath, sore, and exhausted, he pulled himself back to his feet and started limping out of the mansion.
He managed to break into one of the guard’s cars and drove it all the way back to Romano’s estate.
Before getting out of the car, he turned off the engine and sat in the car in silence.
After a little while, someone came to the car, knocked on the window, and asked, “What the hell are you doing on Romano’s property? Open up!”
Marcus slowly turned his head to look at him and realized that the windows were tinted and it was still night time, making it difficult for him to see whose inside.
He opened the door and stepped out.
As soon as the man laid eyes on him, he fell to the ground screaming in fear at the sight of him. He started crawling on the ground as he tried to get away from him before he got back to his feet and ran off.
Yet Marcus was too lethargic to give it any further thought.
The only thing on his mind was reporting back to Romano about the job.
Every step he took was painful as the bullet in his calf and the one that grazed the side of his head still bled, yet he kept walking.
He opened the front door, expecting to be welcomed in by the greeter only to be met by a look of pure horror as he backed away and avoided looking him in the eyes.
Every person he met in the hallway went deathly silent and avoided his path as he walked to Romano’s office.
He raised his arm and knocked on the door.
“Yeah? What is it?” Romano said from inside.
Marcus’s voice was coarse, rough, and his throat was dry as he said, “Its me. I’m back from the job.”
“Well then, come in and give me your report,” he said and he opened the door.
As Marcus stepped inside, Romano spoke to him absentmindedly as he poured over his papers.
“Alright, so how’d it go?” he asked, still not looking up from his papers.
“I...I got rid of the Mohr couple but...ran into some complications. Couldn’t burn the house down. I’ll try again...tomorrow.”
“Nah, don’t worry about it. I’ll send some guys to finish that up...what the hell is that smell?” he asked as he tilted his head up and looked Marcus in the eyes.
He jumped from his desk and shouted, “Jesus fucking Christ! Marcus...is that...you?”
“Yeah...its me.”
“What the...fuck happened to you?”
Then Romano shook his head and said, “No. Never mind that. You need to go clean yourself up right now before too many people see you like this. Also, get yourself treated for any injuries. Now!”
“Yes sir…,” he replied as he left the room and went to one of the bathrooms separate from the one in his bedroom.
His mind was so hazy that he didn’t think about what might happen if his sister happened to see him like this as he was walking through the hall. Better to use a different bathroom to avoid that.
He closed and locked the door behind him as he flipped on the light. When he looked at himself in the mirror, he was haunted by what he saw in himself.
He looked like death.
He pulled his gaiter off of his chin and nearly puked when he found that it was filthy with so much dried blood and gore that he had to peel it off of his skin.
A feeling of overwhelming nausea came over him as he bent over the toilet bowl and vomited everything in his stomach.
The taste of skin, blood, and hair was still on his mouth even after he had finished throwing up that he knew he wasn’t going to eat for days.
He took off his armor and peeled off his clothes and set them on the floor with a disgusting wet squish.
Drawing the shower, get stepped inside and let the water wash away all the blood and gore on his body.
As the blood drained with the water, he looked down at his hands and noticed them shaking with fear.
Maybe Lucas was right.
Working for Romano wasn’t sustainable. Its taking way too much out of him trying to do everything on his own.
Something has to change.
Now…
The announcer’s voice broke him out of his shock as he said, “Let the final match of this bracket begin!”
“What?! No!” Marcus shouted as he took a step back.
Cole looked at Marcus and asked, “What’s wrong? Are you getting cold feet? Maybe all those stories I heard of you in The Bronx were all bullshit after all.”
“Cole, I do NOT want to fight you!” Marcus shouted as he held up his hand as if to compel him to stop.
Cole pulled his sword from its sheathe as he shouted back, “Well that’s TOO DAMN BAD! I really want to fight you!”