World of Darkness

Love and Valor

Dark Samus shoved a group of seven Spirits inside a pocket dimension filled with other prisoners of their kind.

Seeing them, Young Zelda sighed. "So, who were your friends?"

One of them, a warrior named Aeron, said that he didn't know. "We never had any. Heck, we had no idea how any Fighters could survive that."

"This can't truly be the end of the Fighters!"

Hector the Devil Forgemaster spoke up. "She has a point. Heavy Lobster and I got separated from Cloud and thrown in here, but that doesn't automatically mean he was defeated."

"So we just have to have faith in Luigi and Cloud—they'll save us!" Nino exclaimed supporting him.

Hearing those names triggered something inside Aeron. "A Fighter...I was stabbed by one. He held me by his blade and smiled like a madman. I don't remember anything else about him."

Hector gasped. "A blade?"

"Yes. And the last thing I saw was a flash of purple."

"So they find him."

Paper Bowser could not contain himself and let out a Freudian slip: "Well, we're as good as doomed."

Zeke scolded the Koopa King. "Bowser! We must have hope. Besides, we can't rule out the possibility that the perpetrator wasn't Cloud!"

"Look, I'm sorry, pretty boy, but this little girl is expecting that the last of the Fighters, our supposed savior, is a guy who's afraid of his own shadow. We'll be stuck here forever."

"As unlikely as it may seem, we have no other option. I believe that something like this wouldn't have happened if there wasn't some way out of it."

"Tch! Keep dreaming."

"Do you not have the faintest glimmer of hope of seeing your son again?"

"N-No."

"That's what I thought."

The Fighters returned to the center of the Dark Realm where Dharkon was waiting for them. His voice boomed across the sky as he stared at them. "How? How dare you defeat my chief lieutenants and steal away my children?"

Mario stepped out in front. "Why explain that to you when I can show you?" He reflected one of Dharkon's projectiles with his cape. "You're a-gonna pay for what you did to everyone, and then you're gonna pay again for what you did to my brother!" He let out a massive war cry as he jump-punched Dharkon in the eye.

"Graaaagh! A measly human? Hurting me? Impossible!"

Mario focused all of his might into defeating Dharkon, who warped behind a veil of dark energy, but it wasn't long before he reemerged. A section of the Dark Realm's sky began to collapse. Galeem had returned.

The two beings and their armies waged a full-on three-front war on the Fighters and each other.

"What should we do now?" Zelda asked, "This is truly an enormous dilemma."

Both Mario and Luigi could hear Galeem and Dharkon tell them at the same time to kill the other eldritch for separating the brothers.

("Dharkon poisoned him. Think of what would happen if all the world were strangled by that vile being.")

("Need I remind you that light made all this possible. Light turned your world to cinders. Light took away your friends, your family, your everything, especially the brother you hold oh so dear.")