The Backstory of a Broken Hero...

The Discovery of Something Awful...

(None of the artworks presented are mine)

Ezra had had now been wandering in the dimension for days looking for this entity. He hasn't found the source of the corruption yet, but he not going to give up, not by a long shot. He eventually found himself in a deep valley and saw something... "He" was awaiting him. He introduced himself as Z'algatoth or "Zalgo" for short (Tyler/Destroid would later go on to describe him as "Horror Incarnate" and/or "The Tumor of The Multiverse").

Ezra gave one quick look at him and quickly realized in fear that he had never gone up against anything this powerful before, but it was too late for him to fall back and make a plan at that point. Zalgo had already blocked all the ways he could have escaped the valley from and even put around a massive fire barrier around the valley to just to be sure. Ezra knew that there was no way out of it now and he is going to have to deal with Zalgo alone... and so, the battle began. This battle went on for 5 hours, with neither side willing to give up nor be defeated by the other. Eventually, Ezra was hit with a near-fatal attack and was knocked to the ground.

Ezra tried to get back up, but he just couldn't go on, his stamina and damage intake had reached it's limit. With Zalgo now confident that he had victory in hand, he proceeded to praise Ezra for being the only mortal to even remotely come close to him, let alone, give him a good fight. He also told him that he will be given a quick and painless death as gratitude for giving him an enjoyable fight. While Ezra lying there listening to Zalgo, he began to lose hope. He came to the fact that there was nothing that he could do now to save himself or his friends. Since he wasn't strong enough to defeat Zalgo, in his mind, he had failed... and now he was going to die there...

Then, something slightly unlocked within him... an unawakened power that had been laying dormant within him since the beginning. As Zalgo used a final attack to finish him off, Ezra with his now new, seemingly out of nowhere power, was able to dodge it with minimum effort. This action had taken Zalgo aback, he did not expect Ezra to be able to move, let alone, dodge his attack in his badly damaged condition. Ezra quickly used his last bit of strength and a fraction of his newfound power to land 20 of his most powerful strikes that he could manage faster than Zalgo could react. After Ezra finished his final barrage of attacks, Zalgo stood there for a few moments, then fell to the ground. His body turned into ash when it made contact against the ground and then scattered to the wind. After Ezra looked around one last time and made sure that Zalgo was gone for good, he activated the machine to create a portal to get home to recover. Before he went through the portal, however, Ezra looked back at the dimension one last time, for he still had an uneasy feeling that his job still wasn't done...

After a few months, Ezra had recovered from the battle with Zalgo. For the next 10 years he jumped in between the Naruto, Monster Hunter, and Digimon Universes helping out whenever he could and just generally had a good time. Ezra also trained to strengthen his powers in-between dimension traveling, for he still felt uneasy even though there were no signs of Zalgo still being around in 10 years. At this point, Ezra was now (at maximum) was a continent buster with his powers. So even if somehow Zalgo returned, Ezra felt that he was ready to take him on once again if he ever did return. He was wrong... Oh so very wrong...

While Ezra was doing another one of usual portal hopping to check in on the respective universes, a massive hand ripped the inter-dimensional tunnel. This caused a vacuum like effect, causing him to get sucked into the tear and sending him off course to where he was originally headed to. Before Ezra had even looked around to figure out where he had ended up, he instantly felt a sense of fear and terror that he had not experienced in a very long time... When he opened his eyes, his stomach sank...

He was back in that same dimension that had fought and supposedly killed Zalgo all those years ago. Ezra's horror began to rise as he saw... "Him", Zalgo, just standing there with a sinister grin that no holy being could possibly match. Ezra couldn't believe it, he saw Zalgo die right in front of him, how could have possibly came back? Zalgo instantly knew what Ezra was wondering, but only gave a convoluted answer.

Zalgo also told him that he didn't think that a mortal even like him could have actually defeated a weaker version of himself and he was now going to deal with him personally. Now... the actual battle began. This battle lasted for a mere 15 minutes compared to the last one, Ezra was able to react and keep up for a solid 5 minutes, but he eventually failed to react fast enough to block an incoming attack and got locked in a series of multiple combo attacks from Zalgo. Ezra was outclassed in everything compared to Zalgo (With the exception of his reaction speed) and got absolutely curb-stomped, which left him lying on the ground with all of his limbs and his entire rib-cage broken, along with large gashes all over his body.

Zalgo now standing victorious over Ezra decided to not just break him physically, but to also break him mentally... Zalgo opened up a couple of portals and retrieved each one of Ezra's friends. Then, he used one hand to unseal and pull out the Nine-Tails that was still in Ezra, making sure that he can't use it to recover. After doing all that, he proceeded to mentally torture and kill all of his friends one by one. All Ezra could do was to watch Zalgo killing everyone around him while he was stuck there, powerless to do anything to stop him. After Zalgo was done killing all of his friends, he had moved back to his main task at hand. He looked back at Ezra with satisfaction, has he had achieved breaking him mentally.

Ezra was pushed past his breaking point, it was one thing for him to deal with the suffering he had gone through... it was another for having others to suffer because of them being related to him in some form. Something snapped inside him... a mental barrier that had held back this sinister hidden power was finally broken. The second this hidden power was activated, It snapped all of his broken limb and rib bones back into place and rapidly started to heal the fatal slashes across him. His right eye quickly changed turned into a cold black while his left eye's sclera did the same. His left eye's pupil color went from a light blue to a glowing crimson red and his normal iris turned into a slit. Ezra stood up again, and this time, he was ready going to give no mercy. Zalgo was slightly taken aback by this sudden surge of power from Ezra and was intrigued on how a mortal possessed so much power. Ezra and Zalgo both stood their ground, both got ready to fight in a round 2...

This second round lasted for a solid hour with Ezra gaining the upper hand the longer the fight dragged on. Even when Zalgo made nearly identical avatars of himself (as in terms of power), Ezra was still able to beat them with moderate difficulty and still keep going. Eventually, Zalgo had taken far too much damage to be able to continue the fight, so he quickly made a portal and quickly disappeared through it. Ezra would have gone after him if not for how damaged he actually was and the side effects starting to kick in from using this power. The reason this power was sealed in the first place was because long usage or exposure to it eventually lead to the gradual disintegration of the user's body. So, he broke himself out of the form (This would go on to be known as his "Genocide" form) and used the last bit of his remaining chakra to slightly heal the gashes from Zalgo.

After he got himself barely patched up, he took his friends bodies back to their respective universes and buried them. Tyler hated himself for not being able to save them from Zalgo in time and said that they didn't deserve to die the way that they did. Soon after he was done with giving respects for all of his friends who had fallen... He got out of the dimension and began to start constantly hopping between universes to try and escape from Zalgo chasing after him...