Author's Note:

The Extra Chapter shall be up in three to four days, mainly because of all the questions and thoughts I have to answer and write after the chapter itself.

Epilogue: The Dark King Returns

It is night time on the world of Plit. Everyone has sunk into a deep slumber as the chilling winds sway the blades of grass to and fro gently on the outside of their houses. The moon is full and shining brightly above the pale night sky, which has a few fog-like clouds spread about to cast an eerie yet relaxing atmosphere across the world. The people of the world would find solace over the fact that they were able to see that beautiful celestial object in all of its glory once more, especially considering the troubles that could have permanently left them without an existence just a few days ago. But as they slipped into a state of nirvana below their wrinkled bed sheets, little did they know that as they fell asleep, one familiar to many both friend and foe would awaken from what should have been an eternal slumber….

Amidst the rubble of was once a glorious and proud monument of the Elemental Overlord's existence lies a skeleton with a bone structure resembling that of a human's. The flesh and muscle tissue has all but decayed off by now, where it all rests upon the ground, unconsumed by anyone. The jaw is cracked open, for the last moments of this human was spent cursing the name of his slayer, Alex Whiter. The skeleton laid there, alone and unnoticed by anyone of this mortal world. However, there was one who wished for him to be revived, one whose malice was so great that it defied the laws of death and life and allowed him to continue pursuing his goals even though his host body had been obliterated.

It was the original Dark King, whose innermost desire is to see his antithesis mangled before his very eyes for reasons only a few select beings have truly laid witness to with their ears. As time ticked down towards the dawn of midnight's hour, the black drenched spirit floats out from an otherworldly void on the precipice of the ruin's barrier, a pair of ghastly, glowing yellow eyes slipping through the shroud of darkness as a somber yet deep growl cracks through his fanged mouth. With a rather serpentine descent, the spirit makes his way to the skeletal remains of his former host and slips in to where the chest cavity used to be.

With a turn of his body, the spirit begins to chant an unholy series of words that would be found deaf in the ears of anyone but his own kin. In seconds darkness leaks out from his spiritual body, flowing out across the bones in the form of many ethereal trails that weave across the legs, arms and skull and wrap themselves around the joints tightly. After a firm web of darkness has been formed across the skeleton, the spirit continues to chant at a more rapid pace, his voice filled with ecstasy as the darkness begins to solidify into the form of bone tissue. The thin layer of tissue is meshed together perfectly against the bones, which is then quickly joined by the growth of muscle tissue and flesh.

Eventually, as the Dark King's spirit is hidden away under the layers of flesh growing around him, skin and hairs begin to grow into place along the body while the necessary organs grow cell by cell inside of the skeleton. The spirit slips into the slowly growing, conscious mind of the human as the effects of his ritual continue to go without his words to guide them. The jaw is forcibly shut, and teeth poke out through the gum lines in a rather bloody fashion. The eyes grow into the sockets, but they are kept hidden behind the sealed eyelids for the time being. A familiar, bowl cut black hairstyle grows on top of the scalp, strands of hair coming out in front of the ears to create something similar to a half-sideburn as the rest of his hair lays out behind his head.

As clothes spawn from the darkness to cover his bare body, the right fingers begin to twitch to signify life in the human, and with a light grumble through the lips the eyelids quiver and slowly creak open. The first thing the boy is greeted by is the bright ray of the night moon hanging high above his head, but instead of flinching he gazes towards it with the light reflecting ominously off of his crimson eyes. With stiffness in all of his muscles, the boy pulls himself slowly off the ground, the juice from his regenerating flesh plastered against the back of his brown, skull-faced sleeveless shirt as he takes his right hand and rubs the throbbing skin of his forehead with a pinching motion.

"W-What the hell is going on here…I-I should be dead, shouldn't I?" The first words that came out of the boy's mouth left him both confused yet strangely relieved, for though he knew that it was his voice slipping out through his lips the tone sounded a bit deeper than he once remembered it to be. The changes did not stop there though, for as he got to his feet he nearly tumbled backwards, his weight having increased and his body having not yet adjusted to those changes. He kneels down slightly in order to keep himself balanced, with one hand being used to help with his support. "This can't be right…I-Is this truly my body?" He knew who he was, that he was in fact the real Joe Dark brought back from the dead, but he just couldn't believe that he was alive after how thorough his demise was.

"Welcome back to the world of the living, Joe Dark." A menacing voice echoes within the confines of the boy's mind, and as his brain pounds against his skull the familiar abyssal spirit of the Dark King splits from his head and floats beside him as he turns to look at him with blatant disgust. "Oh…Its YOU." Sensing his host's obvious hostility, which makes sense considering what he had attempted to do in the past, the Dark King smirks through the blanket of darkness surrounding him and says to his vessel in a more relaxed tone of voice "You should show more curtsy to me child, for it was only through my efforts that you were made whole again."

As the Dark King reached into the deepest reaches of his black soul in order to show kindness in hopes of it being returned, Joe Dark turns his body away from the spirit with a scowl present just a second before his expression escapes his sight. "Do you think I really wanted to be revived? Even if I was subjected to the truest horrors that Hell had to offer, I very much preferred it in comparison to having to share my body with a loathsome shadow of the past such as yourself…Especially since even with all the power you gave me, I was unable to take my revenge on that foolish Whiter…" The boy folded his arms in front of his chest, his body feeling cold for the first time in a while as his words are filled with nothing but quiet scorn towards the original Dark King.

"Yes, it was rather, unfortunate, to say the least that the cursed new Elemental Overlord succeeded against you…But beings of our nature cannot simply falter to the hands of death when our hatred still lingers, and seeing as I had the means of which to revive you I figured I would do so simply so you would be allowed another chance to kill the one you despite so deeply." "…There are a lot of questions I begrudgingly want to ask you just because of those few sentences alone, so I shall start from the beginning…" Removing the scorn from his voice for a few moments, Joe Dark turns around and faces the spirit of the Dark King with his eyelids slanted to give him a more focused glare. "The matter of the revival, for starters…"

"Hehehe…I am not expecting you to show any gratitude towards the lengths of which I went to bring you back, but I shall reveal the details to you nonetheless. You see, to bring you back to life I had to gather up a vast quantity of darkness from the world that the person died on to use as a bartering tool with the guardsman to the Chasm of the Dead. The process took quite a long time, for darkness is not something that is found very often on this wretchedly peaceful planet…I managed to fill three-quarters of the required quota thanks to an explosion of darkness created by the destruction of that witch's blasphemous copy of the new Elemental Overlord, but it took yet another year after that for a new source of darkness to appear in this world. A gigantic beast with a draconic appearance appeared above the Overlord's citadel of light, its body surrounded by the ghoulish flames of a thousand dying black souls. Extracting the pure darkness from those flames allowed me to fulfill the request of the guardsman. After taking your soul from the Chasm, I took whatever darkness was left over from my earlier extraction and used it to recreate your body and infuse your soul back into it."

There were only two words that resounded within Joe Dark's mind by the time the Dark King finished his chilling explanation. Repeating them slowly and quietly with a tone of shock, the boy unfurls his arms from his chest and thinks long and hard about the gap in time between his death and revival, and couldn't bear to think about how long it may have been since he saw the world around him. "How long has it been since I died?!" The boy fervently asks the abysmal spirit as he lifts his head up in desperation. "It has been a year and three months…Give or take a few days. I made sure to adjust your body so it would match the physical appearance of what you should look like at your current age." "A…Year and three months…" Joe Dark was absolutely devastated upon learning that he had been dead for that long. Even a month felt like a ridiculous length of time, but a year…

As the revelation that everything around him would have changed immensely, and the irritating truth that his foe Whiter had likely gotten stronger as well during his absence in the world. "…You wasted your time, Dark King…" Joe Dark says with a hint of depression in his voice as he turns away from the spirit and takes a few steps across the delicate rocks below his feet, taking a solemn look across the place where he once fought his longtime foe before he stops in place upon hearing the Dark King address him once more. "Hehehe…And why is that, Joe Dark?" "I couldn't beat Whiter before, and now he has likely become stronger…I have no chance to win now, so all you have done is brought me back to die once more…"

"Hah…Words of surrender? I shall admit, I never expected you to discard that rampant, bloodthirsty drive of yours for even a millisecond…After all, it was because of that very desire to kill the one you loathed that I was able to find you in the first place…And besides, do you think that I would revive you if I did not have a plan in mind to make you far stronger than you were before?" That last sentence caught Joe Dark's interest, much to the malicious joy of the Dark King as he turns around and stares at him with one eye. "Go on…" He says, slowly urging the spirit to continue on with his explanation as a smile creaks open across the front of the spirit's black body.

"First, I feel I should mention this to you since it relates to my plan…You see, though I brought you back from the dead, I wasn't able to return you to the full level of power you had been granted once before via my possession…But there is an easy way to not only regain that form, but also increase the strength of it tenfold. Remember how the Elemental Overlord absorbed the spirits of the Inner Guardians and gained the ability to access my antithesis' Phoenix Form long before he logically should have had it? While the Elemental Overlord has the ability to absorb pure sources of elemental energy in order to increase his strength, so to is it that you can absorb all manners of negative energy in order to increase yours."

Intrigued by the prospects of what the Dark King was bringing to his attention, the boy creaked his lips open to reveal his overjoyed, sadistic smile as a renewed sense of determination appeared in his widening eyes. "Hehehe…Now then, I'm liking the sounds of this plan of yours…But how do you expect us to go about it, especially when you yourself stated that this planet was not very rich in darkness?" "Come now, surely it isn't hard to think of an answer to your own question there, is it? Plit and Earth are not the only worlds in this grand universe, and with the Hands having been slain just recently there is no one around in existence to stop us from departing to other worlds and finding reservoirs of darkness there."

"And is there any world you have in mind, phantom?" The boy inquiries with a grin of intrigue present on his eagerly raised face. "As a matter of fact, there was one particular world that I had visited in my past life that had many objects from which negative energy could be drawn from. Tell me, my child, have you ever heard of the seven Chaos Emeralds?" The familiarity of the objects mentioned by the Dark King ringed deeply in Joe Dark's memories, and with his arms held out to the sides of his body he looked at the spirit and said to him with honesty "Yes, I do believe I have." "Then let us not waste any time, shall we? We have a vast universe to traverse, and though it shall take a while the journey will be worth it…."

As the spirit of the Dark King ended his sentence and began to slip back into the body of Joe Dark, the boy crouched slightly and looked towards the moonlit sky as it struck midnight exactly. "So…You promise not to possess me this time around?" He then asked the spirit with a morbid sense of curiosity. "You have my word. You shall be in full control of your body at all times, even if for some reason you fail to best the Elemental Overlord. Consider me to be nothing more than a guide from the underworld, and we shall get along just fine." With a smirk of excitement over what the Dark King genuinely promised to him, Joe Dark looked back up towards the sky and said in a quiet tone "Alright then, lets get moving…" With a powerful leap and a thrust of his body, Joe Dark pierced through the sky with darkness trailing closely behind him, unnoticed by the sleeping populace as his echoing laugh slowly faded out as he broke through the planet's atmosphere and prepared to travel through the vast depths of space beyond…

To Be Continued