CHAPTER 205

Marcos watched as the Miyagi-Dos retreated from view, making sure that they were out of sight before he finally turned his attention back to the construction site. All of them, especially Sarah, had to practically be dragged away. It went against everything the Miyagi-Dos believed in, leaving a man behind. They were supposed to be one unit, getting out of sticky situations by working together. Not sacrificing one member of the team, even if it was by their own choice.

Thankfully for Marcos, Robby had managed to drag all of the Miyagi-Dos away and towards the exit of the park. The promise he had made to Marcos earlier still rang through the Taikai Champion's ears, and he owed it to the Cobra to honor it. It allowed Marcos to turn to the bigger task at hand.

His mind locked into battle mode as his body prepared for the most brutal, bloody war he had ever fought. Marcos might have been the best fighter in the Valley for his age, but he paled in comparison to the skill and power his father possessed. Decades of training had crafted his father's skillset, decades of construction work had trained his body, and decades of hurt had killed any emotion from him.

Marcos shockingly wasn't scared to go up against his father. But he was… reluctant. After all, it was his father who he was up against. He was about to lock horns with the man who had raised him. The man who had put clothes on his back. The man who had, no matter how dire the situation, put a roof over his head and food on the table, sacrificing so much to be able to do so. This wasn't some robot, some killing machine. Maybe that would've been easier, Marcos thought to himself.

As soon as Marcos stepped inside the dark, empty construction site, it was clear that the battle had officially begun, as before he could even take a step towards the staircase to the height where his father was, Marcos stopped dead in his tracks. A massive projector screen had suddenly turned on, displaying onto the wall opposite him an extremely familiar video…

The video was of him, and although Marcos didn't actually remember the day it was taken, he had seen the video countless times since…

"Alright, wait right here. I'll video you walking in with him." Marcos' mom told her husband as she scurried into the house, camera in hand. It was the day Marcos had been born, and Marcos' parents had just brought him home from the hospital.

"Honey, why do we need a video of this?" Marcos' father groaned from outside the frame of the old, slightly fuzzy camera frame.

"Because our child was born today! We're going to remember this day forever!" Marcos' mom exclaimed. Felipe nodded.

"Exactly why we don't need a video to memorialize it." He murmured, though he obeyed his wife's instructions and carried Marcos into the house. "Welcome home, son. What a handsome boy you are." Felipe whispered, quiet but loud enough for the camera to hear him. "Thank God, you look more like your mother than me!"

Felipe gently held Marcos in his arms, unwilling to let go. It had been love at first sight, from the moment the nurse had washed the little boy off and handed him to his father. Felipe knew, in that moment, that he wasn't going to let a single hair on the baby's head ever be harmed. He was going to love and protect him, hold him close until the day he died.

Marcos forced him to be torn away from the projector screen. He wasn't sure how they had gotten ahold of these old, home videos of his mothers, but these were just mind games. Either Silver, his father or both were simply trying to fuck with him and screw with his mind before the big fight. It was working too. These thoughts, the thought of the man his father used to be, wriggled deep into his head, making it harder and harder to face the fact that he was about to try and kill him.

Unfortunately, whoever was in charge of these little mind games wasn't done yet. They still had a few more tricks up their sleeve, as Marcos was about to find out as he continued to walk further into the scaffolding construction site.

Marcos climbed up a long staircase and ladderway to the very top floor of the unfinished building, rising to the floor where his father was waiting. And when he reached the top, projected onto the door that would take him outside where his father was, was yet another very familiar home video from earlier in his childhood.

"Boys… smile for the camera!" Marcos' mom exclaimed. Reluctantly turning around to face her, both Felipe and Marcos groaned in annoyance.

"Mom! We haven't even started yet!" Marcos grumbled. His mom nodded.

"I know! I know! Just one more picture, I swear!" His mom reassured them.

"You know, if I didn't know better, I'd think that you were trying to prevent me from teaching him." Felipe remarked, wiggling his eyebrows, playfully accusing her. Marcos' mom laughed.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! Here, you two can start. I'm done bothering you." She told them.

Marcos and his father turned back to face one another, excitement sparkling in the young 7 year old boy's eyes. After years of begging, Marcos' mom and dad had finally agreed that he was old enough to start learning Martial Arts. They had determined that he was finally mature enough to learn the dangerous sport, a sport he had been idolizing since before he could even walk, having seen his father training all of the time, and even watching the sport on TV a few times.

"Now, son, the first thing we always do is we bow. It shows respect to your opponent. And you always want to be respectful, no matter who you're up against, don't you?" Felipe told him. Marcos nodded and bowed deeply.

"Now what?" Marcos asked, eager to follow every one of his father's instructions and get to the good stuff.

"Put your hands up. Like this." His father demonstrated a basic fighting stance, one foot in front of the other and one hand in front of the other. Marcos copied him.

"Is this good?" Marcos asked. Felipe smiled widely at him.

"Excellent job, son." He replied. "Now… hit me."

"What?" Marcos asked, taken aback slightly. "Aren't you going to teach me how? Like strategy and whatever."

"I will. Eventually. But for now, there's not much to teach you. You know how to punch. I want to see how your mind works. Try and look for an opening and punch me."

Marcos nodded and slowly began to attack his father, very sloppy with his punches. After all, it was the first time he had ever fought, even if he had watched a lot of it up until now. But as he started, it had become abundantly clear that Marcos and fighting were a match made in heaven. The young boy took to it like a duck to water, unafraid to throw punch after punch at his father, even if he was completely sloppy and unorthodox. His father had been right: the best way to possibly learn the basics of fighting was to be thrown right into it and then adjust from there. It was the way to shake any fear and reluctance from the person's system, not that Marcos had any, as he was loving every second of this.

"Be careful, buddy. Don't let your hands drop or I can hit you back. See?" His father remarked, shooting out his own hand and flicking Marcos gently on the head to make his point. "As good as your attack is, your defense must be just as good, do you understand?"

Marcos nodded and brought his hands closer to his head, both blocking and attacking at the same time. He was getting into the groove of it, finding a flow with his punches, and to his father's great shock, even managed to land one, a relatively tame punch but a punch all the same, burying into his father's gut.

"YES! I did it!" Marcos exclaimed, stepping back and dancing up and down in delight after scoring a punch, oblivious to how easy his father had taken their little sparring session. His father was just as over the moon as Marcos was, chuckling as he pulled him into a hug.

"Well done, son! Did you enjoy it?" His father asked. Marcos nodded.

"I loved it!" Marcos exclaimed. Fighting… it was a rush like nothing else. Marcos had fallen in love that day. His father chuckled.

"I'm glad to hear it. I'm telling you… if you stick with it, you're going to be a lot better than me one day."

"Impossible! You're the best fighter in the world, dad!" Marcos told him. Felipe chuckled and shrugged.

"Maybe. I am pretty good, aren't I?" He joked. "But mark my words, son. One day, you're going to beat me."

As Marcos pulled himself from the video once more, he found himself filled with more hesitancy than ever to walk through the door and step outside to meet his father. Seeing these incredibly happy memories had awoken a part of him, deep within his core, that he had almost forgotten about after everything that had happened after that point in time.

His father wasn't that person anymore, Marcos told himself. Outside, was a man who wanted nothing more than to kill him. A physical resemblance of the father he once knew, but nothing more. So taking a deep breath, Marcos placed two hands on the door - ignoring the sign that said "DANGER! GO NO FURTHER!" and pushed it open, stepping outside onto the small platform where the battle with his father would take place…

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The Miyagi-Dos ran. They didn't think twice. Forced to leave Marcos behind them, the Miyagi-Dos sprinted as fast as they could towards the entrance/exit of the park. Although they wanted to stay with Marcos, fight alongside him, they knew that they couldn't. The most they could do was to honor his last wish and make it out of here safe. The Miyagi-Dos had won every single fight they had fought so far at the park, and they didn't fancy sticking around for when the tide inevitably changed and the likes of Silver decided to get involved, a mysterious absence thus far.

They almost made it to the entrance of the park, spitting distance from the large "WELCOME TO GOLF N STUFF" sign, when suddenly, their path was blocked by a long line of people that instantly made their hearts drop to the ground in shock and horror. Standing in front of all of them, leading them, was a certain pony-tailed former sensei, chuckling at them and shaking his head.

"Come on, you guys. You really didn't think you would be allowed to leave this park alive, did you?" Silver remarked. Flanking him were not just an entire army of henchmen, but also enemies that the Miyagi-Dos had already fought and thought they had conquered. Hector, Kim, Trey, Cruz and all of their other 'vanquished' foes were back on their feet, staring at the teenagers with fury in their eyes.

All of them hardened adults, it didn't seem like the beating they had taken had affected them too much. In fact, if anything, the exhaustion that was beginning to take its toll on the Miyagi-Dos seemed to be affecting them more than the people they had supposedly 'beaten.'

An army of at least 20 people backing Silver, they began to advance slowly towards the 9 Miyagi-Dos, who were trying to push down all of their exhaustion enough to be able to face the enemies. Everything was stacked against them now. They had almost half the number that their enemy did. They were extremely fatigued too. All of the signs pointed to the fact that the Miyagi-Dos were about to be flattened like pancakes in a few moments.

"We barely managed to beat these people when they were alone. How the hell are we supposed to beat them now that they're all together?" Hawk muttered quietly, raising his hands into a fighting stance but noticing them visibly tremble.

"Not to mention now we don't even have our best fighter anymore." Demetri pointed out quietly, referring to the boy who was currently at the top of a construction site in the distance.

"Calm down, guys. Focus. We've got this." Miguel murmured, trying to instill a feeling of hope of some kind into his team, but even he realized just how hopeless this situation was. Even he knew that they couldn't fend off numbers like these alone.

"You see the irony here, right?" Silver commented gleefully as all of his troops advanced. "Half of you guys are former Cobra Kai champions, and if any of you had actually followed our philosophy and showed no mercy, you would probably be on your way home right now. But instead, you turn your back on it completely, and look where it's gotten you."

"HEY!" All of a sudden, a voice sliced through them in the distance, and they all turned to see an entire army marching towards them. For a horrible moment, the Miyagi-Dos thought that these were more enemies, there to pile on and put the final nail in their respective coffins. It wasn't.

Instead, Daniel Larusso, Johnny Lawrence, Chozen Toguchi, Mike Barnes, Bobby Brown, Jimmy, and most shockingly, John Kreese, came barreling towards the scene before them, desperate to save their students and friends before it was too late. As soon as Daniel had gotten the message from Demetri to let them know what was going on, he rallied the troops and they all made a beeline for the amusement park. Kenny and Shawn had been the ones to let Kreese know too, so together, they had created a resistance to Silver's Army.

Daniel, Johnny, Chozen, Barnes, Bobby, Jimmy, Kreese, Shawn, Kenny, Sarah, Miguel, Robby, Demetri, Hawk, Sam, Tory, Anthony, Devon, Chris, Bert, Nate. Who in their right mind would bet against such a formidable team?!

Well, Silver certainly was. He had built a fierce fighting force of his own. With the likes of Hector, Kim and so many more brutal henchmen around him, they didn't even need Felipe in this fight to be considered the overwhelming favorites.

Standing face-to-face in an almost Avengers-like showdown, there was only one thing left to do…

Silver turned to his side and nodded.

"Kill them…"