The Matters of Power

Chapter 63- The Fate of Marcus Fernandino [1]

It feels like an awful dream. I'm fully awake and can sense everything around me, but I can't open my eyes no matter what I try. Please, please let me see where I am, anything! It feels like torture, what have I done to deserve this? It feels like an eternity before I can finally have the ability to open my eyes, and I find myself in an unfamiliar place. A spacious room with bland walls and flooring, with nothing worthy of note other than a cheap table placed a few feet in front of me. Any attempts to move at all is met with restricted limbs and the sounds of chains. "Yep, I've been kidnapped now," is my immediate thought as I assess the situation, but for some reason any attempt to loosen or destroy the chains are absolutely futile. It doesn't help that I'm not even tied to a chair like with the Crimson Group, I'm being held in place by the roof and the ground being the base support for the chains. Seeing no better idea than to wait for an opportunity, I decide to do so. And wait. It doesn't take long until I'm brought to attention by the sounds of what sounds like an elevator ding, and an elevator that somehow was on the far side of the room opens followed by a familiar figure. Mr. Corvanez. Dammit, now the memories are hitting me, the man who did this to me is just approaching me nonchalantly. I stare him down, staying still in silence until he gets within the closest distance I can talk to him. "Finally decided to visit your guinea pig, huh? Must have been hard to lure a high school kid out of sight and kidnap him." He doesn't immediately respond, but he straightens his jacket before looking at me dead in the eyes. "Despite being in this situation, you can still crack a joke. At least you have some energy in you." He grabs something from his front pocket, a phone, and places it on the cheap table next to him. "Marcus Fernandino. Ever since nearly a year ago you took that crystal and gained those powers, you've changed drastically in nearly every way. Where there was the loser back in Austin, now I see a rising star in the making who can shake the very world as we know it." "...And? If that's the case, why am I here? You say I'm a rising star, but all I see is being some toy for your own pleasure, old man."

He sighs deeply, "You just don't get it. You're just not strong enough. You're not strong enough to face that Guadaro or even close enough to have a chance to defeat him. If you had made even any concentrated efforts to push yourself to the limit, you would have dealt with those gangs with ease and surpass Guadaro." "Oh, Guadaro this, Guadaro that, what is it about him that you absolutely despise that everything that I have been forced to do is to fight him?! This whole year I've been at your beck and call, and you won't even tell me anything about your vendetta! It's ridiculous, what point is there for me to fight him in the first place?!" "Because neither of you see the bigger picture!" He slams his prosthetic fist on the cheap table that nearly causes the phone to fall down to the floor. "Contrary to popular belief, you were not the first one I've given my powers to, and it's not Portleo. It was Guadaro. Long before you were given psychic powers, he was the first person I ever trusted with my powers. Every single thing I had learned, I taught him. Every single ability I had mastered, he trained to competency. Even as I rose high in society, he worked his way to be at my level. Despite being pessimistic about the world, he had this sort of... 'resolve' that he could achieve better things with his powers." By the way he talks about him, you wouldn't have thought that he was constantly hunting him down. If anything, it sounds like he has some fonds memories of him... memories that sadly are overshadowed by whatever made him obsessed by his downfall. "We didn't see eye-to-eye on everything. Hell, we sometimes fought on certain topics that clashed with our ideologies. Yet that... weasel practically hung me out to dry, abandoned everything we had worked on, spitting on my generosity with my lessons and using those powers for other uses. Uses that could otherwise have been beneficial to everyone if he didn't leave so foolishly." He mutters a few things under his breath, but even after all the plot dumping, there's something missing that doesn't make sense to me, something that he probably is keeping secret... maybe... is it been that the whole time... "Old Man... don't tell me, you've been using me to clean up your dirty work by wiping out those affiliated gangs and in doing so draw Guadaro out in the open?" He seems surprised by my sudden remark, but his smile all but confirms it. "I've had to make deals that could very much be considered associated with devils, kid. As much as I wanted to climb the social ladder with clean hands, life has a way to fuck with you one way to another. HE is the last loose end, the one thing that could upend all the work that I have built, but you're smart enough to know that I can't approach him in any way or else he would leak the evidence. It's a good thing I know him well enough that I just need to keep some form of pressure to keep him on edge."