Rampaging, blood trickling down his chest, he pressed forward despite the pleas of desperation. In the open field amidst the howling trees and wild grass, there was nothing left to accomplish except the road ahead.
“Marcus! We already did enough! You’ve already done so much. So stop and let’s head back!”
Marcus trudged onwards. The horizon afar with its golden sunset shined onto his glistening skin dried from sweat, tears, and gore. A few lacerations marked his back and a puncture wound heaved up and down on his right abdomen.
“Marcus, please!” The girl thirty paces behind collapsed onto her knees. “Please…”
The evening sunset seemed to welcome him. Marcus smiled with a crazed light in his eyes. “Is it a life worth living if you don’t give everything you can?”
“But you have!”
“As long as I’m standing, breathing, seeing, feeling, there is still my life to give. To constantly endure, there is no greater meaning.”
The girl wanted to break into tears, but something within wouldn’t let her. A knot welled up in her throat as she choked. What could she say?
Marcus screamed, “Did you forget about Samuel and the others? His dying breath, his final attempt at glory, he passed in my arms! He had a choice between safely returning back to ground zero instead of continuing. So tell me, why did he fight so goddamn hard?”
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“Marcus! We already found the Light of Unbounded Fervor. With it, we can go back and change the world! Isn’t that what Samuel wanted?”
Marcus laughed like a maniac. “You really think the Light can simply resolve all the issues that plague us? You really think some abstract, intangible miracle substance placed on Earth can truly change the hearts of all?”
“What do you mean?”
“If change could come about easily, then the universe would truly be a meaningless existence. After all, the universe follows the Principle of Least Effort wordlessly, indifferently.” Refusing to elaborate any further, Marcus walked. He could feel his lungs burning like molten iron, his heart violently thumping, his thighs sore, his shoulders and arms going limp, and his mind struggling to retain consciousness. He knew he was close to the source, the birthplace of the Light. If he could reach there, a place beyond the realms of knowledge currently known to humanity, there would be no turning back. This is what he wanted. Born a devil who learned to love, he had already sacrificed everything he could. Now, his only and last friend in this alien dimension, the girl who pleaded for him to rest, would disappear as well.
Marcus’ body began to disintegrate, a familiar sight to those who knew they were transitioning into the next membrane of this dimension. Closer and closer to the horizon he marched, the sunlight beckoning him to seek everything he was destined for, the girl yelled at him. But he could no longer hear her. A suffocating silence, like that of sleep paralysis where his body couldn’t budge even a single millimeter, Marcus embraced his powerlessness in the face of the overwhelming infinity, the vast sea of the unknown. For Marcus had now entered uncharted territory, an unexplored membrane that humanity deemed forbidden. Theorized as a zone of disconnect, modern technology would have zero means of transporting him back to Earth.
The girl sat there in the desolate field of yellow grass as the sun waned. Marcus had vanished.