Chapter 3: The Mirror of Betrayal
On the far outskirts of the city, hundreds of thousands of people have evacuated Seattle, abandoning their cars to the fires spreading out from the battleground.
Over the past few minutes Kairi has used her powers to create platform of aura capable of ferrying hundreds of people at a time. It was stressful to listen in as everyone before and below her panicked for dear life. In a way this reminded her of what everyone in Sancturia must've experienced when Gravitus unleashed his power.
Except now the threat was more familiar, and that made it scarier. Between worrying about Mew fighting this new adversary and saving the people, Kairi found time passing in the blink of an eye.
She dropped off one last batch of people on the rapidly filling hillsides and then quickly turned around to face the city. The once towering skyscrapers were now burning pyres of red and black, their materials exhausted for smoke that rose towards the clouds.
The fact that the skies were still somewhat clear and sunny provided a disturbing, discordant sight for all who had the courage to watch. No one would forget this day. Not even when they died.
Kairi clutched a fist before her chest and tossed the cloth hood off her head. "That should be everyone..." She told herself, trying to remain optimistic.
But it wasn't possible to have saved everyone. The fires had spread too strongly too fast. Kairi shook her head trying to dispel the images of the charred skeletons she saw in the Space Needle's wreckage, an effort aided by a growing pulse of power within the center of the city.
"This is..." The power was darkness incarnate, its presence here a bad omen of things to come, "Mew's...having to resort to that already?"
With his control over darkness, Mew made an utter fool out of Gravitus at the peak of his power. This battle had already set the whole city ablaze before escalating to this point.
"If Mew's having that much trouble..." Kairi closed her eyes for a moment to take a deep breath and calm down her fluttering heartbeat. She then flared her eyes open and flew straight for the city, her arms flung back behind her.
"Hold on Mew! I'm coming!" She proclaimed as she dared the raging inferno.
Meanwhile...
Alex rushed off his rocky perch towards Mew. Mew threw his right punch as he threw his left. Their clash of fists smashed a crater through the rocks beside them. They then swung their other fists together and caved through the bottom corner of a nearby building.
Alex widened his eyes and giggled with utter glee, then opened his hands to grab Mew's fists and push him forward. Stones rose from the ground as their clash of wills created a growing bubble of air pressure.
Mew firmly held his ground and darted his eyes around. The stones were being shaved down to make them sharper, and their points aimed towards Mew's head.
The moment the stones went flying Mew dropped back and pulled Alex down with him. He opened a dark rift, slipped through, timing it to the second so Alex wouldn't follow. The stones dug into Alex's back, dissolving to heal the wounds as he hunched upright.
Mew zipped out of a rift behind Alex and kicked him in the back. Alex spun around and lashed a gigantic wave of flame from his hand. Mew narrowly swung under the strike and punched Alex in the chin. The position he was in weakened the punch.
The flames cleaved a large gash through a couple buildings. The upper halves went crashing down, demolishing years of hard work in an instance. Mew grunted, the only saving grace of this destruction being that there was no longer anyone in the crossfire.
The building's collapse spread a massive wave of dirt and dust over the inflamed battleground. In that moment Alex slipped away, fading like his laughter. Mew kept his eyes wide-open for the slightest hint of Alex's power in use.
It was so wild and powerful that any attempt at stealth would be an utter joke at best. Mew yelled out to his foe, "I hope you're not planning on hiding Alex!"
Alex's answer lied in the form of a resounding kick to the back of Mew's neck. Mew almost toppled forward onto his face but landed on his palms in the nick of time. He then raised his legs and tried to grab Alex, but he had already vanished.
He got on all fours and hunched down like a lion on the prowl, "Alright Alex. What trick are you pulling this time?"
The memories of the past were still as dusty as the environment. There wasn't too much to rely on, as he never saw Alex fight. But if there was any safe bet to make...
"What would I do in this situation?" Alex had already attacked him from behind. So now he'd attack him...
"From the side!" 50-50 odds and Mew's intuition happened to get the correct result first try. He turned left and Alex suddenly was inches from kicking him in the face. He pulled his head right then thrust his left arm between Alex's legs to grab his stomach and pile drive him into the ground.
He made certain to hit hard and fast to push the cloud of dust away. Alex kicked the flames around his body into overdrive, burning away at the darkness surrounding Mew's arm. Mew grit his teeth, doubled down on the darkness, and growled at Alex.
"My turn..." Mew looked at the building straight ahead and barreled right towards it, dragging Alex through the rubble. Not even hundreds of pounds of concrete to the head could shut him up.
"Is this the best you've got, replica?!" Alex threw his hands up and tightly dug his fingernails through the darkness and into Mew's skin.
"Not! Even!" Before they reached the building Mew casually tossed Alex over his head and started bashing him into the ground all-around him. And yet even still, the stubborn bastard held on like some demonic crab.
For the final swing Mew threw Alex straight into the side of the building, smashing him against a still stable steel beam, a description that would prove just as fleeting as the look of pain on Alex's face.
Mew pounded Alex in the gut and the shockwave smashed the bent steel beam apart. He then pile-drove both his fists into his chin and sent him hurtling up through the entire building side in seconds.
Mew then dove into a rift to catch right up with Alex before he tried anything funny. But that's the scary thing about insanity. It does a good job of dulling the pain.
Alex instantly widened his eyes and thrust his arms out the moment he passed the rooftop. He took all the broken bits of glass and metal below him and commanded it to fly straight towards him. As Mew emerged from the rift behind him, he saw what was happening and assumed Alex planned to heal up.
But then both the Phoenix's hands went towards his pockets, and he disappeared in the blink of an eye. Mew could perceive a distortion of time and space, throwing him for a ride. And from there the glass and metal shards easily made their mark across his body.
Even at this level of battle a thousand paper cuts is still cause for a grunt of pain or two. But Mew then quickly spun around a few times, deflecting the remainder of them. On the last length of his spin, Mew saw Alex hovering over him, struggling to contain an orb of flame the size of his head between his hands.
"Got you!" Alex hissed with glee as the enraged flames spiraled out of control from within the orb.
Mew crossed his arms for defense and summoned a few dark phantom limbs to pound away at the cusp of the beam with a frenzied flurry of blows. As it appeared he was making progress, Alex applied more pressure by thrusting his hands all the way out and doubling the size of the beam.
Mew hastily summoned more limbs and refused to back away. He closed his eyes and concentrated deep on the power within, reminding himself of what's at stake, "I can't give an inch! Alex's got enough power to cause irreversible damage to the entire planet!"
Mew squinted to the left and got an idea. He mustered up a lot of his strength entirely within his arms as he crash landed on the ground. His kneecaps cobbled under pressure for a bit as the ground started breaking apart, and molten magma spat out from beneath.
"Go go go!" Mew stretched his arms out and grabbed the sides of the beam. He pushed hard as he could to the left while opening up a dark rift large enough to hold this thing. With every last bit of strain burning his brain like a computer on overload, Mew lost track of his surroundings until the beam escaped his grasp and fired forth into the rift, its direction diverted.
From there snapping his fingers and redirecting the beam into Alex's face was a pleasant walk in the park. The Phoenix of Destruction took the beam head-on, with Mew filling in the blanks by imagining him wide-eyed with surprise.
Mew then followed the beam's destructive path through the rift. On the other side, Alex had already started absorbing the flames into his body. This was ended with a harrowing blow to his skull that sent him hurtling out of the sky and towards the bayside.
His body made a hard series of bounces like a skipping stone but stopped just short of making it to the other side. Mew grimaced and quickly thought to himself, "Ok that might not have been a good idea-"
A fiery eruption of smoldering trees and dirt hundreds of feet tall tore aside the land over there for a good half a mile around. The upside was that that side of the state was relatively unoccupied. The downside being that Mew quickly lost track of where Alex was right after.
He dove towards the waters, assuming his foe was hauling ass over the surface and the ripples just hadn't quite caught up. But the surface was docile, relatively speaking, and that left Mew feeling a mild sense of paranoia.
"How does he keep doing that?!" Mew wracked his mind for answers as he swerved his head around, where he suddenly found Alex standing right behind him.
Mew's heart threatened to jump out of his chest until Alex pressed his hand around his mouth and bashed his skull into the hard pavement. Alex knelt down and repeatedly hammered Mew's head in deeper, the utter savagery of this act leaving "D." feeling a little envious.
Mew's brain was rattled, dulling his sense of hearing and sight. He could feel lots of blood leaving through his nose, and what sounded like the back of his skull cracking opening. Eventually the sea waters started flooding in, making it hard to breathe.
Mew closed his eyes and mouth and made a last-second call to throw his legs up and twisted them around Alex's waist. He didn't really know what the hell he was doing now, but there was no point in complaining about it when his life was on the line.
He pushed his arms out of this relentless beating and successfully wrapped them around Alex's neck. He was so lucid from this pain and pleasure that it took him a second to register that Mew was even fighting back. Mew caught a glimpse of his shock and this sparked enough energy for him to break his self-preservation and smirk.
He then flipped Alex over so that he was on the bottom. While catching his breath Mew wound up a punch with his arm stretched ten feet back and then hammered it down onto Alex's head. He got plenty of blood from the first blow, but that was a mortal wound that wasn't meant to last.
Alex was a natural bred berserker. He sucked in the deep sea waters through his skin to heal any damage Mew was pounding into him and just kept laughing, laughing, laughing. His levels of aggression were also far beyond any foe Mew had faced before now.
When he had dried the pool enough Alex threw Mew off by letting off an explosion of raw chaotic flames. Mew didn't let himself get pushed back more than a few inches and swung his hands out to grab Alex by the shoulders and pull him in.
Alex's face shone with a mad grin as he slammed his bare red knuckles right across Mew's left cheek. The shockwave from the blow decimated the row of small buildings behind them and nearly dislodged Mew's jaw from its socket.
Mew staggered back, letting go despite his best intentions. Alex then pounded his fists against the empty air and struck him with a series of large, highly combustible fireballs. The explosions tore apart even more of their surroundings, and as Alex walked through the smoldering ashes of his world his head was held high and the delight on his face was palpable.
"You try so hard to defend this world. And for what? What has humanity ever done for you?!" Alex clapped his hands down around Mew's head and pounded his eardrums with compressed blasts of air.
Through the agonizing ringing assaulting his brain, Mew grit his teeth and grabbed Alex by his face. At point-blank he blasted him with darkness three times in growing strength all while dragging his body to the ground. He then spun around and threw Alex through a few skyscrapers, bringing them closer to the center of the city.
Alex didn't require sight to plague Mew. With a mere snap of his fingers Alex set the ground ablaze where he stood and towering explosions soon followed. Alex reared his head back and his laughter filled the skies.
Mew ripped his way through the darkness and got behind Alex, the scent of smoke from his body giving his presence away. Alex leaned his head all the way back and widened his eyes with an excited grunt before tucking his hands into his pockets and vanishing from sight.
He left for but a nanosecond, reappearing above Mew upside-down mid-flip to deliver a kick to the back of his head. Mew spun around and lashed his arms towards the nearest desecrated building, latching on to a beam and using it as a means to slingshot around it and rocket back towards Alex.
Alex threw his arms up and surrounding himself in a sphere of fire, which sufficed in stopping Mew's straightforward punch. The flames grew hotter and melt down the darkness protecting Mew's hands. But if there was any fire greater than his, it was the one burning bright in Mew's heart.
He went from glaring Alex down to rising above him, his other fist vigorously shining black with darkness. He brought his fist pounding down onto the sphere before Alex's face and the darkness rippled throughout, tearing the flames to ribbons.
He then swung his hands back and dragged the lingering embers between his palms, turning them as pitch black as the smoke in the sky.
"Its not about what humanity's done for me! I've never thought that selfishly about it!" He thrust his hands forward and pounding Alex across the body with a dark fireball. Alex took it head-on. A big mistake. The black flames lingered, burning into his skin, and distracting him for Mew's next assault both physically and verbally.
Mew punched Alex square in the jaw and dragged them both into the side of a building. Their collision bent the upper half back, where in its weakened state it snapped off and knocked down a couple smaller towers like dominos.
"I believe in what humanity's capable of! Even you have to admit they've done much more good for the world than they have bad!"
Alex grit his teeth in a scowl and dragged himself free from the pressure of Mew's fist through sheer force of will. His eyes inflamed with searing red, he threw Mew off with a blast of raw flame from his body and staggered forth like a rickety marionette.
"And what is the cost of their achievements?! Electricity inspired technology, which in turn created those toxin spewing cars and planes and along with faster means of harvesting resources from the planet! They've set themselves on the course of annihilation all for the sake of allowing themselves a few more precious seconds of self-indulgent luxury!"
Alex drew his sword in his left hand and sliced up towards Mew's face. He dodged out of the way and kicked Alex hard in the hip. Alex threw his free hand down, grabbed Mew by the ankles, then swung him back into the building.
Mew bounced off it only for Alex to try and impale him through the gut. Mew hastily slashed his right claw up to deflect the blade, then crossed his other arm past it to grab Alex by the neck.
"We make mistakes and learn from them! That's what makes us human!" Mew threw Alex over his head into the building then pulled himself above him. He drove both his feet down into Alex's head, grinding him down the side of the building until they neared the ground.
Alex then set loose a raging inferno, throwing Mew higher up until he spread his demonic wings to stall in place. Mew then spun his head around and saw that Alex had vanished...again.
Shattering glass from behind was an alert too little too late. Alex's gloved hand clawed out into view then grappled Mew around his neck, pulling him in dangerously close.
Alex hung his head over Mew's head and slowly choked the life out of him. Alex then spoke a deathly whisper into his ear, "Strip away what makes humanity unique and what are you left with? A bunch of savage, bloodthirsty beasts!"
Mew stretched his arms back and coiled them under and around Alex's shoulders. He first got him off his neck then flung him overhead towards the ground. He quickly dove straight at him before he could recover and drove both his fists into his gut, slamming him through a couple tons worth of broken up roadway.
"That doesn't give you or anyone else the right to slaughter them like animals! Are you even listening to yourself speak Alex?!"
Alex blistered the skin right off his palms by slamming them against the ground. He then wildly flung his feet into Mew's stomach to knock him off. After absorbing bits of the environment to heal his hands Alex jumped and pounded both his fists into Mew's back. A large shockwave then cut through whatever buildings happened to still stand.
With Mew down on the ground Alex happily pressed his feet down onto his back as hard as he could, all without looking directly at him. Alex alternated what foot smashed down while looking up at the sky with a lucid look in his eye. With a single whiff he enjoyed the scent of burning that permanently dirtied the atmosphere.
"The same could be said of you, you worthless replica...You scream and yell in humanity's defense yet all you offer is the same tired dribble we've heard time and time and irritating time again!"
Mew dug his hands into the ground and pushed Alex up. The Phoenix hopped right off and Mew attacked him with an extended, backhanded punch. Alex tucked one hand in his pockets and blocked the punch with his wrist, flashing a grin as wide as his face.
"And I'll keep saying it time and time and time again! It doesn't matter what you think! I choose to believe in humanity!" Mew said with his eyes firmly set upon Alex's face.
Alex squeezed Mew's blackened wrist and narrowed his gaze, "Your feelings are as fake as your life. These words of yours are just the remnants of the optimism we cast aside long ago."
With a short, malicious smirk, Alex bore down his clone's spirits with a gaze of crimson red, "And the only reason you can't admit that is because deep down you know that all it'd take is one bad day...For you to end up just like me."
Mew softened up and his eyes and mouth widened. His heartbeat slowed to a crawl, depriving him of most of his strength. And in that fleeting moment of weakness, Alex pulled him right in and clocked him in the neck with his arm.
Mew choked, lost his breath, upon which Alex suddenly dropped from the sky and hammered his feet into Mew's stomach. Alex wiggled one foot around as he stepped off and held his palm down towards his body.
"Now as fun as this has been, its time for you to do the one thing you're worth for...And get...ANGRY!" Alex's hand exploded with bright flames dead set on incinerating Mew down to ash.
He was hyperfocused on Mew and was thus entirely unaware of a certain bo-staff flying at his face until it dented his nose and sent him hurtling through yards of debris.
Mew stiffly raised his head and watched as Kairi gracefully planted her feet on the ground in front of him and swung her elongated weapon behind her back. She then looked over her shoulder, panting faintly for air, and exclaimed in concern, "Are you ok Mew?!"
Mew pressed his palms against the ground to prop himself back up and shook some of the pain out of his head, "I'm fine, what about you? How'd the evacuation go?"
Kairi looked at the ground for a brief moment then steadied her gaze straight ahead and said, "L-Lets just stop this bastard before he can cause anymore trouble!"
"Kairi..." Mew sighed while rubbing the back of his head, "I'm reeeeally glad you want to help but-"
Alex suddenly burst forth from the rubble and lunged himself closer towards the two of them. He was hunched over, his chin soaked in blood from his nose. He gasped and gagged angrily, hunched over like a gargoyle as he angrily hissed.
"Who...do you think you are?!" He screamed, focusing entirely on Kairi with blood red eyes.
He stood back upright as the environment fed him the energy to continue. Kairi trembled, wondering aloud to Mew, "W-What is he?"
"He's calling himself the Phoenix of Destruction..." Mew hung his head and awkwardly mumbled, "Buuuut he's actually my original self, Alex Whiter."
Kairi swung her head back and hollered out a wide-eyed, "W-WHAT?!"
Mew smiled, threw his hands up by his face and proclaimed, "Surprise Kairi! I'm a clone!"
"...What did you just say?" Alex suddenly muttered, his tone becoming frailly docile.
He staggered forward a bit with a limp looking body and glared his beady eyes at Kairi's face. Ignorant to her discomfort, his teeth creaked with a grin as laughter ruptured forth from his lungs.
"Hahahahahaha! Yes! Yes! We do see the resemblance! Those cushy cheeks...Those flowing locks of hair...That shapely body..." Alex leered his head back and whispered dully in anger as his eyes turned dark red, "You're that traitorous bitch's little sister...aren't you?"
Kairi froze in place and started trembling uncontrollably. Alex appeared right in front of her in the blink of an eye and squeezed his right hand around her head, all while whispering in her ear a single, horrifying word.
"Die."
Mew leaped over Kairi and pounded Alex in the head with one loud thunderous punch. He was quickly buried two miles underground, with Kairi leaping back out of the way in shock. Mew landed in front of her, turned to his side, and told her casually, "So as I was saying..."
He put a hand on her still shaking shoulder, which seemed to calm her down a bit, then expressed in a more straightforward tone than he usually cared to take, "I appreciate the help, but this is my fight. Not yours."
"But Mew! T-That guy...whoever he is, he-"
"He's not going to be a problem," Mew interrupted, missing the point entirely, "But Auris would kill me if anything happened to you."
Kairi stared wide-eyed at him but then her eyelids sank whilst she remarked, "...You're doing that lying thing again."
Mew stayed silent as Kairi swung her head up and proclaimed, "You know I can help! You're just stubborn about fighting this all by yourself!"
Mew shut his eyes slowly and remarked, "...Yeah, you're right. Nothing gets past you when it comes to me anymore does it?"
With a big old smile he winked at her, which also caused a dark rift to open behind her. Before she could respond to its presence Mew had already gently shoved her through and closed it.
"That should keep her out of the way for a while..." Mew closed his eyes and let out a big sigh, "Geez, so much for our first date."
"Oh don't worry, foolish replica..." Alex's voice echoed from down below. Mew wisely got out of the way as Alex burst forth out of the ground, a tower of flames and stone scorching its way towards the stratosphere with him at its center.
Alex tightly squeezed his fists together by his hips and proclaimed, "Because you and everyone else in this miserable universe will soon have a date with the afterlife!"
Mew swiped a hand beneath his nose and chuckled, "Hey! Glad to see your edgy phase isn't dulling your sense of humor Alex!"
"What's a real laugh is that you seem to have found your own traitorous muse. How long has that wench had you under her spell, I wonder?"
Mew rolled his eyes, threw his arms up and proclaimed, "Man I don't know what the hell you're talking about!"
He then flicked the side of his head and followed-up with, "Did I hit you THAT hard on the head?!"
"Hmph, no matter..." Alex lowered the intensity of the flames a bit and landed on the ground at eye level with Mew. He tilted his head slightly with a smirk, chuckling deeply to himself.
"You'll never get to see her true colors..." He started reaching for his pockets, "Its time I stopped playing around..."
Mew widened his eyes and something about that word, "time", drew out the memory of a black and gold stone from his mind.
"Time...time..." A stone, that as a matter of fact, he used at one point, "The Time Stone!"
He glared down at Alex's right-hand pocket and then threw one of his demonic claws through a rift connected to the pocket. The moment Alex grabbed the stone, Mew's fingers wrapped around it too.
"Not this time Alex!" He proclaimed as the stone released a faint glow. The next second, the two watched as all the colors was flushed away from the scenery, signifying that time has frozen completely.
Alex flared his nostrils and ripped the stone free from Mew's grasp. Once Mew retracted his hand he screamed as though he had been personally violated, "This is OURS! You will NOT steal it from us again!"
His anger blinded him. Mew happily ran forward and slammed his fist into Alex's face. He dug his knuckles in deep until Alex was thrown off his feet. Mew's eyes remained open at all times, devoid of even the slightest pause.
"Got to strike hard and strike fast! While time's frozen Alex shouldn't be able to heal himself!"
Alex started to resist and bore his teeth down. Mew took a swift slash at his chest with his claws. The slightest hint of pain seemed to agitate Alex enough to lower his concentration, freeing Mew up to pound away at him a few more times.
He was pushing him towards the closest building. He had plenty of time to whip his arms around in broad strokes, lashing his darkness into Alex's body like a pair of steel fiber ropes.
"I have no doubt that I could've wound up like you Alex..." Mew spoke softly as he squeezed his fists taut and turned the darkness around them into thick, spiked clubs to bash Alex atop his head.
Alex held his ground, but it caved in in seconds. Blood dripped out of his skull and down his head, covering his eyes. Mew turned his hands back to normal and proclaimed, "But I'm here now! And I am still me! And as long as I am who I am...!"
Mew threw his fists back, grit his teeth, and spread the darkness out from within to summon dozens of other fists to his aid, "I will never turn against the people I've sworn to protect!"
Alex's back was rammed into the side of a steel beam. The frozen time kept it incapable of breaking, and thus put him entirely at Mew's mercy. Mew threw hundreds of punches a second across Alex's body, battering him into a bloody pulp because he knew that he could take it. He never moved out of place, and never lost sight of who he was or what he was doing.
Alex struggled against Mew's might to reach down into his pocket and tap the time-manipulating stone. Mew released the pressure off of his opponent as time resumed. The force of all his punches tore a path of destruction through the bottom of the building and all the way out to the bay.
Mew hopped back and the entire building collapsed on top of Alex, throwing up a heavy plume of dust. Mew swiped his arm out as hard as he could to dispel the dust and then squinted at the hefty pile of debris. To his shock, Alex didn't escape that.
However, it didn't take long for the debris to be start getting pushed aside like it was a small hill of pebbles. Alex threw his body out and landed on his hands and knees. There was a lot of blood coming out of him, with Mew even believing that he might have overdone it...Were it anyone else but Alex Whiter.
Alex's upper body suddenly sprung back with his blood-soaked face aimed at the sky and his arms limp by his hips. He cackled very loudly, the blood in his throat doing little to slow him down.
Mew cautiously raised his fists towards Alex and proclaimed, "Stand down Alex! You're in no condition to fight!"
Alex kept laughing for another half-minute before throwing his head forward and breathing in heavily. His unnatural, heaving breaths were foreboding and enough to keep Mew at bay. The boy then gazed at Mew with his bloody eyes, his hands rising towards his stomach.
"This doesn't hurt us...You...can't...hurt us!" He cobbled upright, his arms swaying like pendulums before his chest. He started dragging in the elements around himself to heal, undoing all of Mew's hard work.
"God this is ridiculous...! Is there nothing I can do to keep him down?!" Mew, for all his clever tricks, was really at a loss of ideas for this problem.
Fiery bird-like wings exploded from Alex's back and bathed his body in shadow as they stretched out to cover an expanse of a couple dozen yards. Alex then thrust his body upright and summoned claws of flames around his hand.
"But we...CAN HURT YOU!"
Mew stood on the defensive only for Alex to rocket straight towards the sky. Leaving the city's perimeter in seconds, Alex's crimson effigy spread fear across the state for miles around as he entered the troposphere, then the stratosphere, and onward to the mesosphere.
"...Oh my god..." Mew slowly widened his eyes in a panic and tried to fire off the ground after him. The debris hastily churned like a discordant pit of garbage, tossing and turning Mew off his feet and throwing him around like a rag doll.
Those few dreaded seconds of god-like power on display was all Alex needed to escape the planet's atmosphere and tear his way through a few satellites. In the depths of space his fire was replaced with air to allow him to breathe.
He then slammed his palms together, poising his burning hands straight down towards Seattle, which was little more than a microscopic speck of dust this high up. A raging inferno of hellfire consumed Alex's body from head-to-toe and concentrated upon his hands. A gigantic six-sided glyph appeared before his body, followed by two smaller four-pointed glyphs before that.
"Fight back with all of your anger and hatred replica...!" Alex's fire expanding massively in seconds, growing larger than his body yet still having plenty of room to increase in size.
"For if you don't...Then you will share with us the pain of losing everything!"
Next Time: The Third Encountered