Ruvick…
Marcus’s behavior changed so quickly that he wondered if Ender himself had switched with him.
His eyes flashed red for a brief moment before he asked, “What do you know about that name?”
Any fear or nervousness in his eyes vanished and was replaced by a more calculating demeanor.
Deciding to play along with this change in attitude, Ruvick answered, “Like you, I saw a dream. A dream of you walking through a building, naked but covered in ash and flames, with fresh blood on your hands. Later on, I see you talking to a different version of yourself in the mirror. This other version of you seemed more sinister and violent, and it called itself Ender.”
He expected Marcus to give some kind of reaction to hearing that information leave his mouth, but his expression did not change.
Perhaps he really did just switch…
“Are you...Ender right now?” Ruvick asked him.
Selene, who was confused by this conversation, blurted out, “Hold on, Ender? Like Enderman? I heard Marcus call himself that during his fight against Layla.”
Ruvick shook his head as he said, “No. Enderman was a title given to him. Ender is a name for something else, or someone else.”
He returned his attention to him and said, “I want to hear your answer.”
Marcus’s red eyes stared at Ruvick for a while before he blinked and they returned to their usual icy blue as he answered, “No, I’m still myself. I’m just angry that you would bring this up with Selene here. I’d rather that you kept this kind of conversation between you and I.”
Hearing that, Selene looked offended that he would prefer to keep her out of such an important discussion.
“But that is exactly why I asked her to come along. If I am to learn about it, then she has every right to know about it as well. Why would you prefer to talk about it with me but hide it from her?” he asked.
Selene looked back at Marcus and said, “I thought you trusted me enough to share your past with me. I trusted you with mine, so can’t you do the same now?”
“T-That was different. That was my past, not Ender’s. He’s done things to people that are so horrible that they are past the point of inhumane. Murder of children, torture, human experimentation…some of the things he did were so horrible that I can’t describe them without wanting to vomit,” he said, to which Selene looked like she wanted to say something but hesitated.
Then Ruvick asked, “But Ender is a part of you, right? Tell us, what exactly is Ender?”
Understanding that neither Selene nor Ruvick were going to back down for answers, Marcus sighed and explained what he knew about it.
He told them how the stress and pain he had to deal with for so many years as Romano’s enforcer took its toll on his psyche to the point that his mind had fractured to deal with it all.
In a sense, by making a secondary personality, he went insane to maintain his sanity, which sounded contradictory yet made sense. As Marcus, he could no longer bear the choices he was forced to make and made something else to cope with it for him.
“There’s something else that you should probably know about. While I was fighting Malthael and taking the brunt of his breath, the Arcanence from his flames began to overwhelm me to the point that I almost died. It was starting to encroach on my soul and turn me into an undead, but Ender stopped that from happening. He manifested the red lightning to keep me alive and took over towards the end of the fight. The strangest thing though was that when he manifested the right lightning, he reached into my chest and pulled out chains. It felt like he was reaching into my soul and breaking a limiter. After he did that, he was able to continue absorbing Malthael’s flames without any risk of the Arcanence encroaching on my soul.”
Selene seemed disturbed by that information and turned to look at Ruvick as she said, “I’ve met people who have split personalities and I have to be honest, Marcus doesn’t really seem to reflect that the same way. I’ve never seen him switch to this other personality, but whenever someone’s personality does switch, its not as if there are two people inhabiting the same body, ignoring Malthael of course.”
He nodded and said, “You’re right. This doesn’t fit the description of multiple personalities. To be honest, its as if Marcus manifested a separate entity from himself to exist within his own body. Multiple personality disorder is a mental thing and would not result in a stronger mental fortitude, especially if the person has to struggle over which personality gets control. In his case, Ender directly interacts with Marcus and asks him for permission to take over, or in extreme circumstances, manifests himself while Marcus is still in control. If Ender has strength and power of his own, then how could it be classified as multiple personality disorder?”
Shocked and confused by their calm analysis of the situation, Marcus stared at them with wide and bewildered eyes.
“For some reason I feel both relieved that I’m not insane, but at the same time, terrified that I don’t even know what Ender is anymore. You’re not bothered by this?” he asked them.
Selene then said, “Oh I am, but not by you. I want to figure out what the hell this thing is. How could you have manifested an entirely separate being to inhabit your body when Terra has little to no spiritual energy there?”
“No, its not that surprising actually,” Ruvick said as he explained it, “In the old days of Terra, there were gods that would manifest entirely new gods as another manifestation of themselves. For example, that Goddess Kali that Artemis fought is a manifestation of the now dead Goddess Sri Parvati. Even Artemis herself had an alternate version of herself named Diana, a roman counterpart created by a similar but separate culture and people. Ironically, Artemis killed Diana as well to avoid dealing with a second version of herself.”
“Does that mean he’s a god like me?” Selene asked, to which Marcus slowly turned his head to stare at her.
“I thought you were a demigod,” he said.
Ruvick shrugged and said, “It doesn’t really matter. The output of Marcus’s soul is far greater than Artemis’s even without Malthael. We can conclude that while he was in Terra, he managed to manifest a separate entity within himself called Ender, a version of himself that is more violent and ruthless. He is not in control unless Marcus allows it or its absolutely necessary.”
“Well, at least that gives me some peace of mind,” Marcus said.
“Right, well now that we’ve figured some of this out, lets move onto the training aspect of things. Before we get to manipulating and controlling Arcanence, I want you to understand the most important aspect of your sword.”
With the topic of Light Taker brought up again, Marcus looked nervous as he pulled it out of its sheathe once again and laid it on the ground.
“Do you remember how, during our fight on that one planet, how your ‘Void Blade’ attack split the earth and cut through me? I attempted to avoid it by warping the fabric of space to bend its path, yet it still hit me. If you tried to attack me that way with any other sword than it wouldn’t have worked. Its due to that sword. It has an innate ability that you haven’t yet figured out but have already used. As the power of Death permeates all existence, Light Taker uses the power of wielder and manifests a domain of control around it comparable to the strength of their soul. In a sense, it gives the user omnipresence to enact their will anywhere within their domain.”
Marcus and Selene both went silent as they stared at the sword as they started to grasp the insanity of the power it holds.
“Lets use me as an example. I have nine hundred and ninety nine abyssal seals on my body. The very last seal limits my strength to that of a galactic supercluster before my soul engulfs the entire universe. Using Light Taker, I could mold the shape of my domain into whatever I wanted. If we were to scale things accordingly, I could use Light Taker to reach out into the vastness of the universe and pull a planet from one end of it to the other. There is a great many things you could do with it, including teleportation. With Light Taker’s power, you already control a domain, but you could will your physical to exist anywhere within the domain that you choose.”
Hearing all of this, Marcus ran his fingers through his hair and took a deep breath as he said, “This might be a little too much for me to handle…”
“Agreed,” Selene said.
“If you think its too much to handle, then now is the time to get used to its power so you don’t have to worry over it.”
Marcus grumbled a bit but eventually relented and agreed to train.
Using his passive ability to scan and memorize matter, Marcus quickly adapted that method to Light Taker and learned to manifest a domain of control.
The first few tests he made, he used it to tap Selene on the shoulder from over a hundred feet away.
Ruvick even asked him to use Light Taker to cleave the planet’s moon in half to see if he could project his control that far.
“Really? You want me to cut a moon in half?” Marcus asked while Selene stared at Ruvick in disbelief.
“You can’t be serious!” she exclaimed.
“I am very serious. Marcus can reach out and touch you with Light Taker because he can properly gauge the distance between you and him. However, with the moon being a quarter of a million miles away, it becomes far more difficult to interact with it just based on sight alone. From what I can tell from your soul, while unaided by Malthael, can manifest a domain that encompasses a third of this solar system. You should be able to simply feel the moon’s presence and interact with it directly. If you can split the moon in half then you can prove that you have enough mastery of the sword that you won’t need my help anymore.
“If the moon comes crashing down on us as a result, you’ll be sure to make it disappear right?” Marcus asked nervously.
Ruvick folded his arms and frowned at him as if the answer weren’t obvious.
“Alright then…I’ll give it a shot. But uh, Selene, you might want to prepare yourself,” he warned her.
She took to warning to heart as her armor appeared and he could feel her power well up as she dug her feet into the ground to brace herself just in case.
He then took a deep breath before changing Light Taker’s form into a katana and sheathed it. Given how massive of an object the moon was, he decided to release fifty percent of his soul’s restraints.
“Remember Marcus, you’re not trying to release your energy from here in the hope that it will reach the moon. You’re trying to cut it in half to show you can feel for it as if it were only a few feet away. If I see energy fly from your sword on its way to go to the moon, that means you messed up,” Ruvick chastised him.
“I know, I know! Just let me figure this out!”
Soon after, he gathered as much energy into the sheathed blade as he could, compressing it more and more until finally, he unsheathed it and said, “χάος ξίφος (Void Blade).“
Unfortunately, it did not work as intended as the energy left his sword as it quickly rose into the atmosphere and became a bright streak in the sky.
“Shit…,” Marcus cursed.
“Its a good thing that your magic is only as fast as lighting at the moment. It’ll take almost an hour for your attack to reach it, but an instant for me to erase it before it can get there,” Ruvick said as he waved his hand and the streak of light vanished.
“Selene, are you okay?” he asked her as he turned to look at her as she was holding her hands up in front of her.
“Y-Yeah, I’m fine…but wow, I wasn’t expecting that much energy to be released at once. That was… a little intense,” she said.
Ruvick then waved his hand through the air impatiently as he said, “Yeah, alright. Enough procrastinating. Try again.”
Marcus stared at him like he was out of his mind as he replied, “You must be joking. Trying to do that over and over is exhausting.”
“If you need some more energy, just tap into Malthael’s soul and absorb from him what you need into your own soul. Now come on then!” he said impatiently.
He tried again at least a dozen times until finally…
“This better be the last time I have to do this. My arms ache from doing this too much,” Marcus complained as he began to pull his sword from its sheathe.
As he did, he decided to try something new.
He slowed down his perception of time but not the passage of time around his body to allow himself some more time to feel for the moon.
He then closed his eyes and shut off all of his senses except for his sense of touch. Doing this allowed his sense for spiritual energy, one that was not a physical sense, to become heightened even further.
Not only could he feel the presence of Selene and Ruvick so well that he could map out the outline of their bodies based off of his spiritual energy colliding with there’s, but he could even begin to feel his spiritual energy colliding with objects that would ordinarily be far out of his view. His energy quickly expanded and swept over the entire surface of the planet until he could feel the entirety of it at once and was shocked by its smoothness. Yet he did not stop there as he expanded beyond the planet until he could feel a distant heaviness passing through his domain.
It was the moon.
He could finally feel its presence all the way from down here on the planet. It really did feel as if he was reaching out his arms to grasp it. It felt so close that it was as if it was in arm’s reach.
When he brought back all of his remaining senses and returned time to its normal flow, he opened his eyes and swung his sword through the air.
Rather than the energy leave his sword, it appeared on the surface of the moon as it cut it clean in half.
What surprised him the most however was that it did it so well that both halves of the moon began to glow in the sky as they heated up and shattered.
“It seems that you figured it out,” Ruvick said with an approving nod.
“Is it just me, or did I swing the sword way faster when it collided with the moon?” he asked.
“Yes, it seems so. I think you just shattered the light barrier,” Ruvick said with an impressed look on his face.
“But I know for a fact that you can move faster than light, right?” he asked.
Ruvick smirked and said, “Speed is an irrelevant concept to me. If I want to travel to anywhere in the universe instantly without teleporting, I can do it.”
“That just sounds like another form of manifestation to me. You are manifesting your will so you can move faster than light. Can you do it with the applications of science?” he asked.
Hearing that, Ruvick frowned as he hadn’t thought of it in that way.
“As a matter of fact, I haven’t tried it in that manner before. Any time I tried to accelerate my body close to the speed of light, my body starts to disintegrate into particles of matter before I explode. I never quite reach it that way. Even attempting to reach that speed in the Shadow Realm is impossible as the matter in my body becomes excited to the point my body bursts. I cannot convert my body into spiritual energy because my curse won’t allow it to be anything other than a living corpse, so I guess I am stuck this way. Sadly this also prevents me from accessing a Seraphic Form, which is a bit of a nuisance,” he said, of which the last bit caught Marcus’s attention.
“What is a Seraphic Form?” he and Selene asked at the same time.
“A Seraphic Form is a state of being that can only be accessed when having an overwhelming excess amount of energy beyond your released state. While in that state, you release what is essentially all of your combined spiritual energy at once, while extremely compressed as it flows through your body, at a constant rate. Its incredibly difficult for the average person to accomplish because getting access to the necessary energy to fuel that consistently is very hard to contain. Even more so, its very difficult to stabilize. During the Mordrinite War, a man by the name of Alan Mercer was able to achieve this by sheer luck when fighting against Lysandra Vulcara. She detonated his body with so much force that it would have been impossible for him to survive by absorbing it or by using the excess to slow down time. His survival instincts took over and allowed him to access a Seraphic Form temporarily and he diverted the energy away and killed millions of people in the process,” he explained, to which Selene’s eyes widened as she seemed to know something about it.
“I read about that in the history books of that war. The force from his strike was so great that a disc shape piece of Erebus’s surface rose off of the ground for a moment before falling back down. A wave of darkness then swept over it before it made contact with the planet and then reappeared back in its place. Was that you?” she asked, amazed as she already knew the answer.
He nodded as he said, “Yes, that was me. If I hadn’t done that, then all life on Erebus would have been wiped out from that attack. Alan Mercer nearly destroyed your entire world just to survive Lysandra’s attack.”
“T-Thank you for that,” she said gratefully.
He smiled and replied, “Oh, you are very welcome.”
“Since I have Malthael’s soul in me, does that mean I have more than enough excess energy to achieve a Seraphic Form if I wanted to?” Marcus asked.
Ruvick frowned as he said, “Yes, but I would not recommend it. What you said earlier about Ender reaching into you and grabbing chains before breaking them bothers me. I have a feeling that if you tried to achieve a Seraphic Form now, you might destroy yourself accidentally. Not from attempting to control the energy itself, but by burning yourself out. Malthael’s soul has energy comparable to my final abyssal seal limit, so if you managed to control it, then it wouldn’t be an issue. The problem however would lie in the nature of those chains. I have a pretty good idea of what they are but I won’t tell you until I’m absolutely sure of their existence. Those chains seem to be limiting the output of your soul, as with Ender breaking them caused your overall capacity to grow significantly. If you find yourself in a situation where you have to use a Seraphic Form and are still being defeated, then your red lightning will look for a way to break those chains on its own. Since we have no idea what your true limit is, if you break enough of them to the point your capacity reaches Malthael’s level, then you could burn yourself out very quickly.”
“Okay, I’ll keep that in mind.”
“There is, however, a way to mitigate that risk so that you have a limitless supply of energy to pull from to preform a Seraphic Form without burning out. Its one you already have easy access to,” he said helpfully.
Selene and Marcus both had an excited expression on their face as they said, “There is? What is it?”
He then pointed to Light Taker and said, “Death. The power of Death permeates all of existence in the form of Arcanence. The only reason that living things don’t succumb to it immediately is either due to a lack of concentration of it, or that our souls are strong enough to ignore it and keep it from affecting us.”
“But I don’t know how to sense Arcanence and you told me a while back that you can’t use it because your body is cursed to never die. How are you going to teach me?”
“I’m not. Malthael can sense it and provide it for you until you become used to it and can do it yourself. Convincing him to help you will be your problem to deal with,” he said as he snapped his fingers and the three of them reappeared in Selene’s apartment.
“What are we doing back here? I thought I was going to train to use the Seraphic Form,” Marcus asked.
“We can do that another day. You’ve already spent quite a bit of time learning how to use Light Taker’s omnipresence ability and I think you should get some rest in the meantime,” Ruvick said.
“If that’s the case then why didn’t you just tell us that and send me home?” Marcus asked.
He then smiled at him and Selene and said, “Are you sure about that? I’ve already cut into the time that you two lovebirds have for the day.”
Hearing that, Selene blushed and looked away while Marcus said, “Well that’s...considerate of you.”
He nodded and said, “Your next fight is tomorrow and you need to preserve your strength for it, so overexerting yourself in training would be an issue, especially against Raime. Just rest and recuperate for now and I’ll look forward to seeing how you fare against the Dragon God of Madness.”