"Cunt."
"Phahahahahaha..."
Eve starts to laugh. She can't control herself anymore and just keeps laughing. After the two had left Mount Rushmore, they went to buy some beer, and after several of those, Eve truly started talking. She told Mark about Rex and Kate and how she caught them during coitus under the Teen Team's hideout shower. Mark wasn't happy about what he heard, he wasn't angry or pissed either, but he didn't like it. He hated hypocrites and everything that came with it, and the breaking of trust in a relationship was a ginormous lie. Mark would protect what is his, and if someone were to break his trust or that of his family, he wouldn't react well to that.
He watches Eve laugh and can tell she has already had enough to drink. It seems like she's a lightweight, and while he hasn't even noticed that they were drinking an alcoholic beverage, she was already close to needing to lie down. How that worked from just beer... he wasn't certain.
"Ohh... haha. I needed that."
"I don't know what you're talking about. It wasn't meant to be funny."
"It's not what you said, but how you say it. You always manage to speak your mind and be so... free in the way you choose your words. You don't care about what others think about you and whether you might hurt their feelings. Your words could and most likely do hurt others, but at least you are like that to everyone. It's rather... refreshing."
"Aha. Well, whatever you say."
"..."
"..."
"So, what are you going to do now? Give him another chance?"
"No. He did it too many times now. I'm done."
"Makes sense. I'm surprised you didn't hurt him or something. Turn his trousers into air or make all his food taste like shit."
"Huh... you know what? That might not be a bad idea. Thank you."
"You're welcome."
*beep beep beep*
Mark's phone starts to vibrate and ring, alerting him. He takes it and looks at the message briefly before putting it back down.
"Do you need to go?"
"Indeed. How about I'll accompany you home?"
"Y-you don't have to do that. Truly."
"I don't have to do anything... unless my mother tells me to. But that has nothing to do with this. Come on, let's go."
Mark helps Eve stand and sees her stagger a bit. Thinking that this would take too long, he simply lifts her up and carries her.
"Uup!"
Mark walks into an alley and then takes flight, flying towards where Eve lives. They don't talk and Mark thinks about what he has to do now. The alarm had told him that something had happened. Something he had been waiting for for a while now. They arrive at Eve's house, and he helps her to her window.
"Ugh..."
"There you go."
"T-thank you, Mark. Truly."
"Sure. Well, I'll leave you to handle that problem on your own."
"What problem?"
Suddenly, the door to Eve's room opens, and her parents enter.
"Samantha Eve Wilkins! Where have you been? What is that smell?... Have you been drinking?!"
Mark watches for a second and then flies off. He wants nothing to do with that.
.
At the GDA, the alarms are ringing. The Mauler twins have just broken out of their cells and are making their way through the prison. They are confronted by GDA agents who shoot at them. But they are powerful individuals who are highly intelligent. They block the fire from the agents and start to punch them. But before they can shoot the guards with their own weapons, the metallic door closes behind the retreating guards and saves them. Then, a lock opens on the ceiling, and a ladder falls down, giving them a way of escape.
"We have a benefactor, it seems."
They make their way up the ladder and appear above ground in the desert. They look towards the city, but are alerted by a mechanical sound.
"Huh?"
"Multi-phased fusion generator in the 30-megawatt range."
From the ground, a powerful weapon rises up and aims at them.
"What now?"
"I'm surprised you don't see it, you being the original and all," one of them says and kicks the other one into the line of fire just as the fusion generator shoots.
*Zoooom*
"ARGH!"
The arm of the clone is sliced clean off, causing him to gasp in pain. His twin picks him up and runs towards the weapon, using him as a meat shield. The weapon fires hundreds of times, hitting his brother and doing major damage, cutting off other parts of his body. The other one lets go and jumps into the air, crashing into the weapon and taking it down.
The second clone breathes raspily. He has lost both his legs and arms. Has holes in his stomach and even missing minor parts of his skull.
"I'd say I'll miss you, brother... but I can always make another one."
After saying that, the clone leaves his brother to die. This scene didn't happen unnoticed. Two individuals have noticed what was going on, and one of them even orchestrated all of it. High in the sky, Mark is looking down at the scene and shakes his head.
"What do you know... fortune favours the bold."
Mark observes the small orange drone in the distance, observing the retreating clone, and knows who helped the twins escape. He never trusted the Robot anyway, but to think that he would go this far, he would have to find out what his reasons were, and now he had to make sure that his own plans weren't discovered by the machine.
Mark waits, and as he sees the drone follow the second clone, he shoots it down and lands next to the dying one. He is dressed completely differently, in armour he prepared a while ago. Well, a while is a bit much, but for him, it was a while. He prepared it in the Flaxxan dimension when he came up with the plan. He hears the clones breathing slow down and takes out an injection. He injects the clone with it, causing the bleeding to stop. He doesn't want him to die just yet. That will be important. Then, he picks up the stump and flies off.
He arrives at an abandoned warehouse he scouted a while ago and set up shop. It becomes clear that Mark wasn't the purely fighter-oriented young man, at least for now. When he was in the Flaxxan dimension, he used the time there to take something with him, and that was their technological knowledge. He saw that they were rather advanced and thought to himself that it would be most useful to have that knowledge for himself. Not because he wanted to start on the science path but because he didn't like to go to school. He realised that school would mess up his life one way or the other, and if he didn't like something, it was to be stressed because he had to go to school.
Mark isn't a genius. He is smart and can study well enough if he puts his mind to it, but that was it. He would have to invest quite some time if he wanted to get through college, which was just a no go for him.
When Mark was in the Flaxxan dimension, he pushed his body to the limits. Not because he encountered an enemy who was stronger than him or he trained, but because he was awake for almost the entire time, with very few hours of sleep between the bloodbaths. Until he finally found the Emperor and killed the royal family, he had to truly push himself. He came to a fascinating conclusion. All this time, he hadn't ever fallen asleep unwillingly. It was as if his narcolepsy was gone. But that made no sense, right? Was that possible? The truth was that it was not possible and yet still was.
As Mark grew stronger through training, his body became less challenged, and instead of putting on weight in the form of fat, which was impossible, Mark's body started to enter a form of stand-by mode. His body entered a lower gear, which caused him to fall asleep at random moments. In a way, one could say that his body was sassy and didn't want to do boring work. After his Viltrumite powers set in, this changed. He started to fight other people who were stronger than him, and he started to train harder with his father and other objects. When he was in the fight against the Flaxxans the first time, he fell asleep towards the end, but that was the last time that happened. His body had been warming up again and was now running on full efficiency again.
To make sure he wouldn't go back to that, which was inevitable should he go back to such a lifestyle, he wanted to take out the one thing that could do that. That variable was school and later college.
Mark places the Mauler twin on a metallic table and gets to work. He has observed these two idiots for a while now and knows their process of cloning. But what he's interested in isn't cloning. One of the Mauler's most important inventions is a device that can copy the entirety of someone's memory and transfer it inside a nascent body, such as that of their clones. After a new clone body has been completed, the currently living Mauler uses this device to copy the entirety of his mind and then places it inside the clone's brain. In doing so, the clone typically awakens fully believing himself to be the original, hosting the latter's duplicated recollection, while the original cannot physically differentiate himself from his creation.
That was what Mark had observed them create and added his own findings from the time in the Flaxxan dimension. He didn't want to believe that he was a Mauler Twin; he simply wanted all their knowledge. Why would he want that? because it would help him pass the tests in high school and later college and maybe open a business for himself to earn enough money. He also had other plans and knew that with the Universe being bigger than just Earth, he would eventually want to leave, and for that, he would need as much knowledge as he could acquire.
.
Mark gets to work. He places the remaining body of the Mauler Twin on a table and walks over to the screens he set up. He can tell that the body is slowly dying and he wouldn't have much time anymore. The medical knowledge of the Flaxxans was good enough for him to create a fast-working injection to stop the bleeding and speed up the healing process. But he was still missing pieces of his organs, and that would be a problem. He starts to type on the keyboard really fast and enters the different parameters he notices. The program he created to archive, categorise and then organise the knowledge of the Mauler is up and running.
He moves over to the bigger machine and moves around several cables and changes their docking stations. After moving the big parts and finishing the final touches to the program, he takes a specially designed helmet and puts it on the Mauler Twin. He can still hear the raspy breaths and the slowly decreasing heartbeat. All he needs now is to start the machine. The helmet is set, and he moves over to the machine, observing the vital signs of the Mauler. This will hurt, and he may die in the process, but he has gotten this one chance, and he won't waste it.
*beep*
He starts the process. Lightning courses through the generator and through the helmet, shocking the Mauler and putting him through a lot of pain. Mark looks at the progress bar and sees it filling up slowly.
{...39%...52%...75%...93%...95%...99%...100%}
The machine stops. Mark looks at the Mauler Twin and notices that he has passed away. He won't lose any sleep over that and will use him for something else later on. Even his 'sciency ways' were barbaric.
After going through the data, he lies on the second table himself and places a helmet on himself. Then he presses a button on the helmet and activates the transfer.
*Zzzzzzzzzz*
Mark feels the electricity course through his body and clenches his teeth. He has already created a training program named Elimination of Weaknesses. After a moment, the process is finished, and the machine turns off.
Mark opens his eyes and sits upright. After a few seconds... a savage smile splits his face in two.
He did it.