The pair’s journey had taken them over a large cluster of grassy knolls, gaps steeped in oppressive darkness, like the sky was made of many giant, but slander hands pressing deep crevices into the terrain. All of them featured a peculiar, and more importantly treacherous pattern, far unlike the lands Jack and Marco had grown accustomed to traversing-- namely, that the knoll groups presented the most danger just after passing the start of a new cluster, wherein adjacent entryways had a tendency of intersecting along various parallel paths.
Reaching the end of their most recent hike, Marco folded the flaps of his overcoat above his waist, procured an 8inch navaja from his pocket and slid it between the cuts he had poked through the corners of his coat’s fabric. He gave the knife of a firm squeeze, closing and infusing it with just enough foul lumos to keep the makeshift knot from loosening.
“A skirt to surpass Mado Queer!” Jack exclaimed in a loud, meaty voice.
“CALLATE ESTUPIDO!” Marco snapped back, squeezing the knife hard enough to shut the blade almost completely, if not for the thickness of his coat’s fabric.
Sighing, Marco decided (at his own peril) to have the Mad Man remind him what they were doing here.
He knew never to expect clear answers out of his friend, nor could he count on him to be anything more than cryptically obtuse, but this time his pal with the black suit vest, charcoal slacks, and finely polished leather shoes, spoke with ominous clarity.
“A…” Polo’s eyes near rolled back as Black’s voice dropped in-depth, whilst climbing in false, high-pitched sarcasm… ”puppet.”
Marco’s tiredness faded as trepidation consumed his stark white face, slowly looking down at Jack, whose own expression was just as colorless, like a man who had lost his soul. He hated dealing with puppets. They were gargantuan sky beasts, servant hunters to a much greater predator--not quite as old as time itself, but old enough to make the two adventurers appear infantile by comparison. The mere thought of having to fight one of those things brought a sag to his broad shoulders.
Yet they couldn’t remain in this place for much longer. Jack Black and Marco Polo could both sense the voracious desire of those bastards between the knolls. They wanted them both, like a bad man needs a gang of thugs.
Groaning quietly, the Spaniard bowed, slamming his forehead against Jack’s modest-sized skull, neither of them so much as flinching from the impact. Marco’s pitch, feline stare met his most trusted man’s cartoonishly wide roof holes, the latter whistling in mischievous approval, the twin arches that framed the sides of his skull flaring slightly--the short, fair hair of the disgustingly tall, and newly resolved primadonna spiked and fell gently back down to to the peak of his brows.
A grating squeal screeched its way out of the pseudo-labyrinth that was the second half of the abyssal knolls, as if some umbral monster, dwelling in the atramentous first section had become aware of the pair’s fresh set of balls.
Broad grins stretched across the pair’s alabaster faces as they turned to face the inevitable confrontation with the beasts that were now the whole damn network. Up until this point, Jack and Marco went over the gaps by leaping, only ever utilizing the entrance when they had to, hence the precautions taken by the Spaniard with his jacket to avoid all the grab and trip hazards of that wretched maze. Jack never truly looked down on him for it-- he was his friend after all, and making fun of this prideful dude meister never, ever failed to entertain.
But now they both had something to make fun of, now they both had a weakness to exploit.
Jack laughed and screamed hysterically on bolting feet, zigzagging his way passed the intersecting thumb and index walls, covered in vines, and whose thorns pistoned out in an attempt to impale the Mad Man. A strange, black wheel with a wide split in the center manifested before Jack, connected to his own index finger by a long string of darkness that he was quick to allow himself to be reeled in by. Shielded from the death-trap, his audacious defiance of the murderous environment rapidly accelerated into an axiomatic onslaught of absurdly agile turns and wall-riding via the mindlessly simplistic shape of a child’s juiced up yo-yo.
A trail of destruction, both human and inhuman, angelic and demonic, earthly, and alien littered the pathway. He ran over generals of armies from planets unheard of, simple tellers of strange food-based currency that could make a honey badger’s white blood cells commit suicide, six-eyed normies, dodecahedron professors who pushed political agendas. Not everything he ran over, sliced up, or scared badly enough for it to leave a brown trail for his wheel of carnage to pick up, and cut a septic infection into was a super sentient, down on their luck shmuck though. Or at least, they weren’t anymore.
Following a parallel cluster, Marco, still butthurt from his amigo’s earlier jab, undid his coat’s folds, turned it inside out, and ran his essence of sickly yellow lumos along what appeared to be hundreds of blades lining what was now the coat’s exterior. In his right hand, the navaja slit the throats of antennae-eyed rip-off merchants, gutted the abdomens of arachnid seductresses, blinded precognitive schemers. With his left hand, he pinned the reaching roots using the power of a kingly legion, each encrusted in hand-sized diamonds, slung from his favorite deck of playing cards.
As he unleashed hell, the threads of his jacket unwove with the firing of his knives, embedding into the bloodstained walls along his path of slaughter. He knew what was waiting for them at the end of the knolls, as did Jack, who had deliberately let himself get punched in the face by a very muscular ogre that had to move about sideways in order to not get stuck.
Jack’s head shot up like a pez dispenser, yo-yo shrinking back to normal size, but not before being flung over the ogre’s head, deploying a circular saw made of energized will, and pulled it back through brute’s occipital lobe, splitting his head in two. Unlike a pez dispenser, but far more useful than the ogre’s split skull, Jack’s head enlarged to three times its normal size, making it just under the size of two basketballs, and began tauntingly repeating a phrase that, to modern generations might just be prehistoric. To those pathetic wretches who couldn’t even succeed at being life-hacking scumbags, and sought to assimilate whoever so happened to enter their un-humble abode of corruption, it was a foreshadowing of their final failure: to escape the hellish escalation about to be wrought by two men who had learned to harness the whimsical chaos that permeated the Darkness.
“NUH UH UH!”
A violent downswing, head encased in a sheen of dark energy, Jack’s face hammered the knolls, releasing tremendous explosions that upended dirt, ripped apart roots, and crushed the spines of all who were in the way. A carnivorous mastodon with stumpy feet, that once used its thick, but not quite long enough trunk to beg apes to hand it fruit, instead used its extendable teeth to skewer and eat them right before receiving its “meal” felt the pez dispenser that was Jack break its skull, bite off its tusks, and launch them at exit ways like miniature warheads. Like the other oversized freak, he also had a purpose, enabling the Mad Man’s bizarre method of delivering justice to victims that would likely never see or hear of their uncanny avengers.
“NUH UH UH!”
Mayhem. Monsters. Carnage. Demons. Panic. Liars. Misfortune. Thieves. Oblivion. Predators.
All of them.
“NUH UH UH!”
He swung everywhere. He hit everything. Nothing survived. Nothing was allowed to escape, and the nothingness that comprised the worth of the countless dead souls of the knolls would come together to make one last stand.
Spilled blood and mashed bone, crushed flesh, and scattered shit, flowed to the sealed exit, soaked through the soil and started to congeal into an unholy mass. The clouds parted, revealing a castle that, while appearing up close, used a maleficent force to non-locally project and cast its magic through a bolt of arcane lightning, empowering the mass to transform itself into an abomination capable of withstanding the duo’s relentless killing spree.
Eight elephantine legs burst from the side, venom soaked tusks protruded from the front, curving like meathooks set to stab deep, narrow pits into the earth. Spiked shoulder pads grew over its knees, silken spinners growing atop sprouted trunks emitting a seducing sound, meant to lure their killers into a fatal embrace before tying them up. A final pair of fleshy arms grew from the monstrosity’s rear, wielding two giant clubs wrapped in thorns that ended in root tips meant for sucking the life out of whatever it could manage to impale.
“NUH UH UH!” Jack shouted with a vibrato capable of shattering that abomination’s big dumbo ears had it been smart enough to grow any.
“You did not say the magic word!” Marco shouted in plain English.
Enraged, the monstrosity fired its tusks at the pair, only for Jack to launch two spheres of condensed darkness from his mouth, engulfing and incinerating ivory projectiles before blowing up its two front legs, fissuring the ground as it fell forward. His taunt came once again. Marco raged back at the beast, the buttons of his white dress shirt resembling coins for just a moment as he furiously tugged on the threads of his overcoat, pulling the terrain he had hooked his knives into up and overhead in the shape of a colossal, diamond strewn dome.
“NUH UH UH UH, CABRON!”
“They didn’t rub their magic wand enough!”
Struggling already, Jack and Marco delighted in the creature’s futile acts. Did those worms think for even a moment they could defeat the psychotic best friends!? The difference was never a matter of strength or power, it was of conviction, of desire: a lowly desire for wealth, for influence, for status, authority, and a million slave wives to pass on their lineage could never hope to kill them. These beings wanted to preserve themselves, their livings, and all it would ever lead to was maybe a slightly larger knoll, for the Darkness, despite all its whimsical glory, knew from their past collective failings, that it would all eventually fail once again-- infighting, greed, power mongers, warmongers, harbingers of chaos and discord.
It all fell apart so easily, because it had all been built and established on weak morals, held together with glue that could be dissolved with a baby’s toothless saliva.
The nameless abomination hurled its clubs at Jack, and this time Marco yanked hard enough to rip his knives free, shredding the weapons to wood chips with a flurry of daggers. Then it tried to charge on its four remaining legs, trunks emitting spineless words for the weak, that for a moment, might have reached the ears of a lesser region, but those miscreants were few and far between, for the wall of diamonds caught and reflected the sound using the dome an orpheum sound echoer.
This counter-strategy led to the monster’s undoing as it heard its own message of “JOIN THE KNOLL, BUT FIRST PAY THE TOLL!” being driven back into its own ears. Stupid as it was, easily seduced as it was, the moronic colossus actually started begging to join its killers, believing them to be their ticket to the big leagues. The absurdity of how fast it was all happening would have astonished Jack and Marco, had they not seen acts like this play out a million times over. Normally they wouldn’t even bother giving these jerks the time of day, but knowing that they had to face a puppet spurred their need to seek and destroy it, and if engaging a cluster of nobodies in a fight meant achieving that goal faster then so be it.
“LET US JOIN THE KNOLL!” It cried again, web spinnerettes attempting to entangle and pull the duo closer, who only kept repeating their phrase of “NUH UH UH!” back at the imbeciles, who just couldn’t seem to get it through their head.
The skin on Jack’s face disintegrated its way up the entirety of his face, incinerating his hair, and leaving naught but a plain, bald head that appeared to be made of dark-gray onyx with a vague, sandpaper texture. Transparent smoke wafted off his cranium, teeth white as snow bared in an emotionless stare that made him ditch the taunt he and Marco had been repeating for a full five minutes now. His hysterical laughter took on a smooth, velvety gutteralness, his real voice a far more masculine thing than the post-pubescent mockery of a clever and affable late teen male, eyes downcast on the worthless being he and Marco were about to reduce to cinders.
“WHY!” It pleaded, its voice almost sounding innocent despite how malicious it had proved itself to be.
“Because that thing in the sky,” Jack said, looking up, “deserves to die.”
“Just like you, puto.” Marco complimented.
Marco’s blades aligned together in front of Jack, assuming a broad cone formation, spinning so quickly as to blur the blades into a drill that glistened and sparkled what little light managed to pierce the clouds. The ashen shadows rising off Jack’s head flowed into the cone, imbuing them with the aspect of darkness that made the Mad Man unique among the various inhabitants roaming this strange universe: deterioration, not too unlike Marco’s aspect of denigration that sought to weaken through disparaging ridicule, a trait as of late unseen, and likely the very reason he had reacted so loudly to Jack’s meaningless insult.
Regardless of who they were, and what their abilities represented, what this thing was, and what it represented were being slowly eradicated as the darkness wielded by the two travelers perforated its physical essence with a hundred skewering stabs. Flesh and bone received narrow, diamond holes, quickly filling up with atomizing dust that spread and aged the lethargic chimera to crumbling particles, which themselves decayed the nothingness they were born of, lived as, and died as.
The remnants of their petty existences weren't even fit to float on the wind, for their toxic stench might have choked the life out of a more promising villain.
Once it was all over, Jack emerged, back to his good old funny self, the mask he used to filter his true nature through and served as his face resumed its cartoonish facade. Marco turned his overcoat outside in, the legion of diamond-encrusted kings returned to their master’s playing cards, and he could finally walk without having to worry about his friend’s stupid little jabs.
The castle in the sky disappeared, the clouds closed up, and as the light began to fade, and the Darkness returned to its normal state, the two pals could see marshlands dotted with enormous pines, and two figures waiting in a meadow.
Reaching the end of their most recent hike, Marco folded the flaps of his overcoat above his waist, procured an 8inch navaja from his pocket and slid it between the cuts he had poked through the corners of his coat’s fabric. He gave the knife of a firm squeeze, closing and infusing it with just enough foul lumos to keep the makeshift knot from loosening.
“A skirt to surpass Mado Queer!” Jack exclaimed in a loud, meaty voice.
“CALLATE ESTUPIDO!” Marco snapped back, squeezing the knife hard enough to shut the blade almost completely, if not for the thickness of his coat’s fabric.
Sighing, Marco decided (at his own peril) to have the Mad Man remind him what they were doing here.
He knew never to expect clear answers out of his friend, nor could he count on him to be anything more than cryptically obtuse, but this time his pal with the black suit vest, charcoal slacks, and finely polished leather shoes, spoke with ominous clarity.
“A…” Polo’s eyes near rolled back as Black’s voice dropped in-depth, whilst climbing in false, high-pitched sarcasm… ”puppet.”
Marco’s tiredness faded as trepidation consumed his stark white face, slowly looking down at Jack, whose own expression was just as colorless, like a man who had lost his soul. He hated dealing with puppets. They were gargantuan sky beasts, servant hunters to a much greater predator--not quite as old as time itself, but old enough to make the two adventurers appear infantile by comparison. The mere thought of having to fight one of those things brought a sag to his broad shoulders.
Yet they couldn’t remain in this place for much longer. Jack Black and Marco Polo could both sense the voracious desire of those bastards between the knolls. They wanted them both, like a bad man needs a gang of thugs.
Groaning quietly, the Spaniard bowed, slamming his forehead against Jack’s modest-sized skull, neither of them so much as flinching from the impact. Marco’s pitch, feline stare met his most trusted man’s cartoonishly wide roof holes, the latter whistling in mischievous approval, the twin arches that framed the sides of his skull flaring slightly--the short, fair hair of the disgustingly tall, and newly resolved primadonna spiked and fell gently back down to to the peak of his brows.
A grating squeal screeched its way out of the pseudo-labyrinth that was the second half of the abyssal knolls, as if some umbral monster, dwelling in the atramentous first section had become aware of the pair’s fresh set of balls.
Broad grins stretched across the pair’s alabaster faces as they turned to face the inevitable confrontation with the beasts that were now the whole damn network. Up until this point, Jack and Marco went over the gaps by leaping, only ever utilizing the entrance when they had to, hence the precautions taken by the Spaniard with his jacket to avoid all the grab and trip hazards of that wretched maze. Jack never truly looked down on him for it-- he was his friend after all, and making fun of this prideful dude meister never, ever failed to entertain.
But now they both had something to make fun of, now they both had a weakness to exploit.
Jack laughed and screamed hysterically on bolting feet, zigzagging his way passed the intersecting thumb and index walls, covered in vines, and whose thorns pistoned out in an attempt to impale the Mad Man. A strange, black wheel with a wide split in the center manifested before Jack, connected to his own index finger by a long string of darkness that he was quick to allow himself to be reeled in by. Shielded from the death-trap, his audacious defiance of the murderous environment rapidly accelerated into an axiomatic onslaught of absurdly agile turns and wall-riding via the mindlessly simplistic shape of a child’s juiced up yo-yo.
A trail of destruction, both human and inhuman, angelic and demonic, earthly, and alien littered the pathway. He ran over generals of armies from planets unheard of, simple tellers of strange food-based currency that could make a honey badger’s white blood cells commit suicide, six-eyed normies, dodecahedron professors who pushed political agendas. Not everything he ran over, sliced up, or scared badly enough for it to leave a brown trail for his wheel of carnage to pick up, and cut a septic infection into was a super sentient, down on their luck shmuck though. Or at least, they weren’t anymore.
Following a parallel cluster, Marco, still butthurt from his amigo’s earlier jab, undid his coat’s folds, turned it inside out, and ran his essence of sickly yellow lumos along what appeared to be hundreds of blades lining what was now the coat’s exterior. In his right hand, the navaja slit the throats of antennae-eyed rip-off merchants, gutted the abdomens of arachnid seductresses, blinded precognitive schemers. With his left hand, he pinned the reaching roots using the power of a kingly legion, each encrusted in hand-sized diamonds, slung from his favorite deck of playing cards.
As he unleashed hell, the threads of his jacket unwove with the firing of his knives, embedding into the bloodstained walls along his path of slaughter. He knew what was waiting for them at the end of the knolls, as did Jack, who had deliberately let himself get punched in the face by a very muscular ogre that had to move about sideways in order to not get stuck.
Jack’s head shot up like a pez dispenser, yo-yo shrinking back to normal size, but not before being flung over the ogre’s head, deploying a circular saw made of energized will, and pulled it back through brute’s occipital lobe, splitting his head in two. Unlike a pez dispenser, but far more useful than the ogre’s split skull, Jack’s head enlarged to three times its normal size, making it just under the size of two basketballs, and began tauntingly repeating a phrase that, to modern generations might just be prehistoric. To those pathetic wretches who couldn’t even succeed at being life-hacking scumbags, and sought to assimilate whoever so happened to enter their un-humble abode of corruption, it was a foreshadowing of their final failure: to escape the hellish escalation about to be wrought by two men who had learned to harness the whimsical chaos that permeated the Darkness.
“NUH UH UH!”
A violent downswing, head encased in a sheen of dark energy, Jack’s face hammered the knolls, releasing tremendous explosions that upended dirt, ripped apart roots, and crushed the spines of all who were in the way. A carnivorous mastodon with stumpy feet, that once used its thick, but not quite long enough trunk to beg apes to hand it fruit, instead used its extendable teeth to skewer and eat them right before receiving its “meal” felt the pez dispenser that was Jack break its skull, bite off its tusks, and launch them at exit ways like miniature warheads. Like the other oversized freak, he also had a purpose, enabling the Mad Man’s bizarre method of delivering justice to victims that would likely never see or hear of their uncanny avengers.
“NUH UH UH!”
Mayhem. Monsters. Carnage. Demons. Panic. Liars. Misfortune. Thieves. Oblivion. Predators.
All of them.
“NUH UH UH!”
He swung everywhere. He hit everything. Nothing survived. Nothing was allowed to escape, and the nothingness that comprised the worth of the countless dead souls of the knolls would come together to make one last stand.
Spilled blood and mashed bone, crushed flesh, and scattered shit, flowed to the sealed exit, soaked through the soil and started to congeal into an unholy mass. The clouds parted, revealing a castle that, while appearing up close, used a maleficent force to non-locally project and cast its magic through a bolt of arcane lightning, empowering the mass to transform itself into an abomination capable of withstanding the duo’s relentless killing spree.
Eight elephantine legs burst from the side, venom soaked tusks protruded from the front, curving like meathooks set to stab deep, narrow pits into the earth. Spiked shoulder pads grew over its knees, silken spinners growing atop sprouted trunks emitting a seducing sound, meant to lure their killers into a fatal embrace before tying them up. A final pair of fleshy arms grew from the monstrosity’s rear, wielding two giant clubs wrapped in thorns that ended in root tips meant for sucking the life out of whatever it could manage to impale.
“NUH UH UH!” Jack shouted with a vibrato capable of shattering that abomination’s big dumbo ears had it been smart enough to grow any.
“You did not say the magic word!” Marco shouted in plain English.
Enraged, the monstrosity fired its tusks at the pair, only for Jack to launch two spheres of condensed darkness from his mouth, engulfing and incinerating ivory projectiles before blowing up its two front legs, fissuring the ground as it fell forward. His taunt came once again. Marco raged back at the beast, the buttons of his white dress shirt resembling coins for just a moment as he furiously tugged on the threads of his overcoat, pulling the terrain he had hooked his knives into up and overhead in the shape of a colossal, diamond strewn dome.
“NUH UH UH UH, CABRON!”
“They didn’t rub their magic wand enough!”
Struggling already, Jack and Marco delighted in the creature’s futile acts. Did those worms think for even a moment they could defeat the psychotic best friends!? The difference was never a matter of strength or power, it was of conviction, of desire: a lowly desire for wealth, for influence, for status, authority, and a million slave wives to pass on their lineage could never hope to kill them. These beings wanted to preserve themselves, their livings, and all it would ever lead to was maybe a slightly larger knoll, for the Darkness, despite all its whimsical glory, knew from their past collective failings, that it would all eventually fail once again-- infighting, greed, power mongers, warmongers, harbingers of chaos and discord.
It all fell apart so easily, because it had all been built and established on weak morals, held together with glue that could be dissolved with a baby’s toothless saliva.
The nameless abomination hurled its clubs at Jack, and this time Marco yanked hard enough to rip his knives free, shredding the weapons to wood chips with a flurry of daggers. Then it tried to charge on its four remaining legs, trunks emitting spineless words for the weak, that for a moment, might have reached the ears of a lesser region, but those miscreants were few and far between, for the wall of diamonds caught and reflected the sound using the dome an orpheum sound echoer.
This counter-strategy led to the monster’s undoing as it heard its own message of “JOIN THE KNOLL, BUT FIRST PAY THE TOLL!” being driven back into its own ears. Stupid as it was, easily seduced as it was, the moronic colossus actually started begging to join its killers, believing them to be their ticket to the big leagues. The absurdity of how fast it was all happening would have astonished Jack and Marco, had they not seen acts like this play out a million times over. Normally they wouldn’t even bother giving these jerks the time of day, but knowing that they had to face a puppet spurred their need to seek and destroy it, and if engaging a cluster of nobodies in a fight meant achieving that goal faster then so be it.
“LET US JOIN THE KNOLL!” It cried again, web spinnerettes attempting to entangle and pull the duo closer, who only kept repeating their phrase of “NUH UH UH!” back at the imbeciles, who just couldn’t seem to get it through their head.
The skin on Jack’s face disintegrated its way up the entirety of his face, incinerating his hair, and leaving naught but a plain, bald head that appeared to be made of dark-gray onyx with a vague, sandpaper texture. Transparent smoke wafted off his cranium, teeth white as snow bared in an emotionless stare that made him ditch the taunt he and Marco had been repeating for a full five minutes now. His hysterical laughter took on a smooth, velvety gutteralness, his real voice a far more masculine thing than the post-pubescent mockery of a clever and affable late teen male, eyes downcast on the worthless being he and Marco were about to reduce to cinders.
“WHY!” It pleaded, its voice almost sounding innocent despite how malicious it had proved itself to be.
“Because that thing in the sky,” Jack said, looking up, “deserves to die.”
“Just like you, puto.” Marco complimented.
Marco’s blades aligned together in front of Jack, assuming a broad cone formation, spinning so quickly as to blur the blades into a drill that glistened and sparkled what little light managed to pierce the clouds. The ashen shadows rising off Jack’s head flowed into the cone, imbuing them with the aspect of darkness that made the Mad Man unique among the various inhabitants roaming this strange universe: deterioration, not too unlike Marco’s aspect of denigration that sought to weaken through disparaging ridicule, a trait as of late unseen, and likely the very reason he had reacted so loudly to Jack’s meaningless insult.
Regardless of who they were, and what their abilities represented, what this thing was, and what it represented were being slowly eradicated as the darkness wielded by the two travelers perforated its physical essence with a hundred skewering stabs. Flesh and bone received narrow, diamond holes, quickly filling up with atomizing dust that spread and aged the lethargic chimera to crumbling particles, which themselves decayed the nothingness they were born of, lived as, and died as.
The remnants of their petty existences weren't even fit to float on the wind, for their toxic stench might have choked the life out of a more promising villain.
Once it was all over, Jack emerged, back to his good old funny self, the mask he used to filter his true nature through and served as his face resumed its cartoonish facade. Marco turned his overcoat outside in, the legion of diamond-encrusted kings returned to their master’s playing cards, and he could finally walk without having to worry about his friend’s stupid little jabs.
The castle in the sky disappeared, the clouds closed up, and as the light began to fade, and the Darkness returned to its normal state, the two pals could see marshlands dotted with enormous pines, and two figures waiting in a meadow.