Sam looked at a random creature that looked like a mix between several different small animals. "Whoa! What's that!" She squealed, causing it to skitter back into the forest where it came from.
Clyde walked up to a plant that was glowing blue. He slowly reached out and touched it lightly, causing it to close up and squirt a glowing blue goo at him. "Ewww…" He said, looking down at his arms, they soon started to glow. "Cool…"
"Clyde!" Mecca scolded. "Don't poke stuff, it could be dangerous!"
"I'm glowing!" He said, pointing to his glowing blue skin.
"I can see that, but don't go around poking things!" Mecca said, firmly. "Now get that glowing goo off of you, also."
Clyde grumbled, taking off his jacket. "Yes ma'am…" He said, using the jacket to wipe the goo off and then tossing the jacket aside as his glowing faded. "Aww…"
"That's better." She said before turning back to Aiden. "So, where is Cten on this planet?"
He looked down at the tracker. "She's not far from where we are, so we should start walking."
And so they did, they walked through the forest. "What're we gonna do when we find her?" Zim asked.
Aiden shrugged. "I guess we'll just take her back or something…"
"This'll be fun!" Clyde said excitedly, deciding to pick a fight with a leafy plant, giving it a swift punch. "It'll be action packed and dangerous!" He gave it a high kick and the plant swatted back, but he dodged. "Ahaha!" He grinned successfully, doing a sideways, spinning kick in the air just to show off.
Mecca sighed and grabbed his hand. "Clyde, calm down."
"Fine…" He said, pouting.
After a few minutes of walking. They reach a town, though it's not a pretty sight. Most of the wooden buildings are on fire, dead bodies piled up outside of those houses, people screaming and trying to hide only to be killed by the few Marked there. They soon spotted Cten.
She was lifting up a small child Darth Vader style, with her hand out, using her telekinesis to lift up the child by its throat and strangling it before ripping off the child's limbs one by one, blood splattering everywhere as the child screamed in pain, struggling until it bled to death and was dropped to the ground due to lost interest as Cten ran off to find another victim.
Mecca gasped and covered Clyde's eyes, since this definitely wasn't a scene for a 12 year old to see.
"I wanna see!" He whined.
Char chuckled coldly, "No you don't, kid."
"They're definitely activated." Aiden said, studying the scene below. "We need to deactivate them before they kill anyone else."
Char put a hand on the handle of the sword that was attached around her waist. "We could just kill the fuckers."
"Well, we could…" Aiden said, considering it carefully. "But we shouldn't. They don't know what they're doing, plus they're hard to kill in their activated mode."
She removed her hand from her sword. "Fine."
They looked back down at the scene and made eye contact with Cten. She turned to the others, screaming something in Latin and then teleported away, the other Marked disappearing from sight as fast as possible with the help of their powers.
"Shit…" Char hissed under her breath.
"Aren't their senses heightened when they're activated?" Sadiki asked.
"Yeah, they do." Aiden replied.
Sadiki put her hands on her hips. "Then maybe you guys should've kept your mouths shut! Where's Cten now, Aiden?"
He looked down at the GPS and sighed. "She's on another planet."
"How far is that planet?" Nemo asked. "Surely she can't teleport too far at one time, right?"
"Well…" Aiden hesitated. "Because she's activated, she's also a lot stronger… She traveled to a planet that is four planets away."
"Damn!" Char exclaimed. "So I think we should make a plan for next time, instead of just standing there like a bunch of retards. The more prepared we are, the better chance we have."
He nodded. "That's a good idea, but we're not going to go in and kill them."
Their planning was interrupted when a Marked jumped out of nowhere, attacking Nemo with skilled moves. Nemo screamed and tried to fight back but realized it was hopeless and hauled ass into the forest like an idiot, the Marked following quickly behind. Char pulled out her sword and ran in after them, followed by Aiden to make sure no one got hurt.
He ran into the forest and tackled the Marked to the ground, letting Nemo and Char run to a safe distance and soon retreat back to the others.
He looked down at the Marked, and looked down at it, his breath catching when he saw the familiar face. "…Erin…" He could hardly believe that the sharp-toothed, red-eyed, squirming, hissing, clawing Marked below him was Erin. She scratched him across the face and he quickly remembered what he was doing. "Tranquillatas, amorem, vitam." He watched as her eyes returned to the green color they used to be, her body becoming calm and her face seeming a bit dazed and confused.
"…A-Aiden…?" She asked, not sure where she was.
He smirked down at her. "Yeah."
She hugged him tightly around the neck and he wrapped his arms around her middle. "What's going on…?" She whispered in his ear. "Was I activated? How many others are activated…?"
"Well…to put it simply, some idiot said the activation code on Makku and the Universe is slowly being destroyed planet by planet."
Erin pulled away from the hug. "…So almost every marked in the universe is activated!" She stood up. "What about the Princesses? With Red's training, they were strong even without being activated…"
"Cten is the only Princess I know that's been activated." He explained, getting up beside her.
"So you don't know about Sprint… Well, either way, we're all screwed. There's no way we can kill or deactivate over a hundred billion Marked."
"Not unless we get them all on the same planet, which I doubt we can do."
Erin shook her head. "There's too many, we need to find the Princesses and hide out somewhere until this is over… They won't destroy their own planet, so we should deactivate Cten, find Sprint and see if we need to deactivate her, and take them both to Makku where they'll be safe, and all your friends too. Then all we can do is wait, when there's nothing left, they'll deactivate themselves."
"Yeah, that's the only thing we can do."
"So where are the girls?"
"Cten is on another planet about 4 planets away and Sprint's chip isn't working…" He said, his voice lowering when he noticed that about Sprint. The fact that she didn't show up on the GPS meant that either her chip wasn't working, or she was dead.
"Well, let's go get Cten and hope for the best for Sprint. She's strong, she's smart, I'm sure she can figure out to come to Makku…"
He nodded. "Let's go back to Mecca and the others and go back to the Voot."
Erin nodded. "Yeah… Um…A-Aiden…" She blushed shyly.
He turned towards her. "Yeah?"
She leaned right in front of him, got on her tip toes and kissed him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders, though she pulled away before Aiden could even react. She stood in front of him, looking down and blushing. "I…um…I missed you…a lot…and…I'm glad you're safe…" She then walked off, heading toward the others.
Aiden just stared after her before following her back to the others.
"So what's the plan?" Char asked.
"We find Cten and hide out on Makku until this is all over." Erin explained.
"Well, Arline is still on Earth…" Sam reminded everyone.
"Then when we get Cten, we'll drop you guys off on Makku then go back for Arline."
"We have a few human friends…" Char also said.
Erin sighed. "We'll get them too."
"So let's hurry before they reach Earth." Aiden said, causing everyone to hurry into their Voots and on to the next planet.