Description: "Dear Diary, What was supposed to be my weekly fight homework turned into something else entirely. Seishirou Ryouhara caught all of us by surprise. I thought he was just crazy at first. But he came prepared. He had a new trick this time. It affected me more than most people's attacks have. The cough is getting better but it isn't really the most important thing that happened. To explain that, I will have to explain in more detail..."
Before this afternoon, no one will have heard of the Malignant Maid. But every good Sentai show requires its villain of the week for the beloved, flashy, super friends to defeat and save the day. In order for there to be something for heroes to do, there must be a criminal mastermind for them to face. The SSSS's won't be particularly sensational if they aren't using their powers combat crime and there will be no where to sail if there is no crisis to avert. Thus, like countless standin villains across the sands of time, the Malignant Maid simply came to be. Unless she proves to be a challenging enough fiend to merit a two-parter, her mark upon the world will be forgotten within a week, replaced another quickly contrived monster.
It's hard to say where her life went so wrong to put her on this nefarious path. What decisions, what poor choices brought her here today, to the famous maid-themed cafe parlor in central Japan. The short name is Maid in Heaven. The full name a seven word spanning title so long as to not merit repeating here. Normally a bustling diner located in the heart of a popular tourist district, the cafe is anything but that for now. Patrons cleared, staff given the day off, the cafe is silent but for the ticking of an old fashioned lock mounted to the wall behind the counter.
Perhaps she was bullied by a house cleaner as a kid. Or perhaps her mother was some kind of anti-dust fascist to send the girl down a path laden with crime and evil schemes. Whatever her history may be, heroes must rise to put a stop to her or, if she has her way, die in the attempt. Kula had never particpated in a costumed fight before. The sheer necessities of such a thing created problems. Her normal attire, after all, wasn't because she belonged to a motorocyle gang after all. A form fitting body suit that helped regulate her inner temperatures coupled with a thin, leather jacket of impressive durability and leg-protecting chaps were all functional elements of her standard fighting outfit. And her gloves, those distinctive, insulated, yellow leather fashioned handwear, were crucial for the sake of keeping her hands safe from the jagged, flesh-damaging edges of her icy creations.
And today, they wanted her to fight without any of it. They promised it wasn't for long. Some officials chuckled that the Sentai Sailors weren't really going to give the ruthless ice wielder any trouble. As much as the fight was drummed up as a challenge for the girl, it was more of a spectacle than anything. No doubt she'd send the team of justice-minded opponents packing rather quickly. Such assurances were of some comfort as Kula reflected upon them, standing alone in the cleared out cafe in a costume that offered none of the defensive advantages of her normal gear. Her hands are bare but resting on the counter at her side are her leather gloves. She had managed to convince them to let her put them once the fight began and even now, the girl's fingers on her right hand clench and unclench, itching to put them back on.
True to her title role, the NESTs assassin is dressed very much as a maid. Clad in a knee length black dress that ends with frilly laces at the hem, the rest of her legs are covered from the thigh down by white stockings that end in a pair of black, polished dress shoes. A white apron is worn over the short sleeved dress, matching color with the white slip occasionally visible beneath the skirt of her dress depending on how she moves about. A large white bow in the back keeps the apron in place while a large red bow at her neck provides additional color. Not appearing MALIGNANT enough, sticking up out of the white and black frilly hairpiece atop her head is a pair of /bat wings/, to indicate her evil alignment in classic cartoon-genre style.
The clock ticks in the otherwise silent cafe. Blinds have been drawn over the windows and lights dimmed, given it a shadowed, mysterious look. All part of the show. The violet eyed killer waiting next to the counter looks neither excited nor nervous. Perhaps a little bit bored. For some her age, the chance to play an evil super villain may seem like a novel opportunity. For the engineered Assassin it's just another day.
Exhaling softly, she lifts up her left hand, holding up the strange weapon they decided to give her. A feather duster on one end, a sharp carving knife on the other. The knife end is made of plastic... This series is rated 'E', for Everyone.
Meanwhile, a group of the City's Finest Special Warriors Assault Group, The Sensational Super Sentai Sailors, unbeatable with a record of 1-0, are getting ready outside. Little known to the heinous villain that lays inside the Super Beauty Cafe. Dressed in brightly colored and color coordinated civilian clothes, Ransu, Keishin, Kimiko, Fuugo and Ren of the lost Fujihara clan are all gathered behind a large van peeking around the side.
"Okay guys, are we all ready?"
"I'm new, and ready for anything captain!!"
"Ransu~, so heroic '-'"
"I wonder if I can get meatbuns in there..."
"....Che."
"Okay guys. The enemy's in there! Kimiko, you go in the side, Fuugo, use your special ability. We'll go in the front and use our Special Assault Velgadzer!"
[ Right! ]
"Okay guys. Sailorize!"
HOO!!
The level of sparkles outside just becomes bumped up to unbelievable ludicrous levels. Practitioners of the ancient art of sentaijutsu, the unbeatable specialist tactical troupe leap out from behind the van with their clothes exploding off into cherry blossoms, thier bodies radiating intense amounts of justice as one by one they gain the amazing super armor the likes of which have never been seen before or ever really will again.
[ ON THE POWER OF THE EARTH! ] "Geo.. SAILOR, RED!" "Geo! Sailor BLUE!!" "Geo--Sailor Pink~!" "WOOAARGH! :STOMP: :STOMP: GEO SAILOR YELLOW!" "Geoviso. Sailor PoDotto.."
[ We are--SENSATIONAL ] *kanji* [ SUPER ] *kanji* [ SENTAI ] *KANJI* [ SAILORS! ] *kanji! pose! EXPLOSION!*
From every angle, spandex-armored sailors just burst in all over the place, jumping in through windows and blinds, kicking down the door, jumping in from the side over the bar, flipping all over the place, it's just like an explosion of colorful bodies flying in everywhere and assuming perfect tactical grouping four man pose #6--evenly spaced three feet apart with the leader up front. Geo Sailor Red's hands swish to his side as he faces down the enemy, Kula Diamond! Swish! Then he points! He can tell who the evil is just based on the bat wings on her head!
"It's over for you here Malignant Maid! We know all about your evil plan!" [ *Yosh!* ] "Submit to the merciful will of justice--and be destroyed!" Swish! Pose! "Sanjin Tokubetsu Senjutsu BERUCHARU Taihou VERUGADDOZERU WAN!!"
Sailor Red, Blue and PoDotto (he's wearing the special evil grey polka dot armor for the record) assume a crouching pose, a sparkling chi-construct rendition of an energy cannon appearing on Blue's shoulder while Red and Blue make mosre swishes! "It's over for you here!" Geo Sailor Red ... repeats, for no apparent reason. "We're gonna take you down right here!"
"YOSH!!" Sailor Yellow, who is just a giant helmet in the window (he changes size?!) agrees loudly, but seems not to be able to fit inside the door anymore. "Our eyes are on you, foul maiden!"
"Watch out Sailor Red!!" Sailor Pink observes in shock from the side, "she's wielding the Arkenhammer!" she points out Kula's featherduster.
"We'll just have to go straight through!!"
[ Yosh!! ]
They'll probably continue talking amongst themselves in dire and well audible tones while their Three Man Special Tactics Virtual Cannon Velgadzer One charges up to take out the dreaded Malignant Maid once and for all, but after a certain point, is Kula even listening?
Kula was ready for this. At Angel's behest, she had checked out and watched episodes of Power Rangers. The NESTs operative had phrased it as 'homework'. It was part of the deal in her adopting Milton, the blue plastic penguin figurine. And for that, the girl endured hour after hour of Power Rangers episodes. So when the premise of this charade was explained to her, it wasn't like she was completely clueless as to the particulars...
She might not have been ready for the flat out... /enthusiastic/ nature of this squad gathered to combat her nefarious ways. As they charge into the cafe, Kula holds her ground, her passive, neutral expression a sure sign of just how intimidated she was by the outpouring of peace and justice emanating from the colorful protagonists. Violet eyes blink slowly as they pile in (Except for poor Sailor Yellow), the black-and-white clad maid staying next to the counter, lowering her left hand slowly, the feather duster-combo-knife no longer raised in such a menacing manner. Perhaps ready to kowtow to the superior numbers, the Malignant Maid's resolve may be shaking!
Part of her wonders if she should even reach for the gloves. While she has, historically, almost never held back against any foe... she had never been asked to star in a kid's Sentai show either. The sharp teeth of her icy attacks may just be completely unnecessary here. Her hair remains auburn, the presence of her icy chi non-existant. Quietly she breaths in then exhales. While she was convinced to dress the part... and while she'll happily play with stuffed animals when they're not being eviscerated by a certain NESTs project, playing pretend with other /people/ was something she just had zero experience with.
Thus it is that Kula Diamond stands quietly, arms resting at her sides, head slowly canting to the right little by little. "Now that you're here," she draws her left arm up slowly, plastic-bladed featherduster and all, "There's no reason for me to stall any longer." *SWISH* The featherduster gets whipped down to the side, leaving a trail of soft, fluffy down in its wake as she points it toward the floor dramatically. "I will defeat all of you before you have time to charge your weapon." She declares this coolly and without wavering. If only they knew she wasn't just saying those lines to play her part... Oh no, the auburn haired maid is quite serious.
"You have three seconds to finish preparing yourself and then I will hurt you."
You can't really see his eyes for the huge visor, but there is a strong sense that if Geo Yellow's face were able to be seen, he'd he squinting rather suspiciously at the Malignant Maid right about now. He doesn't think she could be a challenge for all of them after Podot beat even him in open combat, but there's always the chance she could be concealing some trick or another up her sleeve.
"There will be no forgiveness for people like you," the giant sailor assures, from just beyond the window, but doesn't seem to be making any serious effort to come inside.
Geo Pink and Blue back off warily as the Maid swings her Arkenhammer like the divine judgment of an evil god. You can almost hear the distress in their voice, "Watch out, She's going to use it!" they utter in tandem.
Geo Podot snaps, "No more games! Let's dirty her house!"
"Okay guys!" Geo Red declares, raising a fist, "Okay!"
[ Three Man Special Tactics Virtual Cannon Velgadzer One, CHARGE UP! ]
Their cannon continues to charge.
Yeah that's gonna be awhile, but apparently they missed the part where they only have three seconds. They're doomed. Two point five five..
Geo Yellow notices something out of the corner of his eye, "GUYS WATCH--"
[ Augh!!!! ]
The special tactics cannon fractures in four pieces instantly.
There's an explosion of smoke.
Colorful bodies fly everywhere.
It's over in less than a second. Sentai bodies, steaming with dramatized dino damage are strewn all over. Pink is folded over a cafe table, her spine bent the wrong way as she seems to almost shift in elegant repose. Blue has fallen over kneeling with pure willpower but doesn't seem to be moving any further than that. Yellow is collapsed outside (it turns out he was merely a giant head as opposed to a giant body) while Red struggles to stand. Podot slumps and hits the ground facedown, "ugh.. Maria..."
A lithe form steps over the polka-dotted body.
"Waste of time..." he comments.
The youth is dressed in basic black, monkstrap shoes with uncharacteristically unbound pant cuffs draping over the ties. A smoke grey loose shirt of thin wool covers his hands in longsleeves up to the knuckle. A familiar silver chain loops about his neck twice. Hip sack at his side. A long blade spins in the air between dexterous fingers. It had an odd handle to blade ratio of one to one, kind of like a sword switchblade. Another is slung at his back in a leather sheathe. The outfit is basic, strange for someone of his stature and well known proclivities, but Seishirou Ryouhara has never been entirely... predictable.
"I was hoping that they'd at least weaken you so I could finish you off then and there, but there would have been little hope of that there," the Ryouhara shinobi suggests, giving Kula's outfit a brief clinical inspection before stepping forward. He pauses, glancing back.
"ugh.. Maria.."
-kick.-
"augh!" Podot falls silent.
The villainess's sleeves are rather short, so the chances of having tricks hidden there is slim. At this rate, the girl is really wondering if she'll get scolded if she just reaches out, grabs the nearest Sentai Sailor, and smashes his head through one of the glass windows to summarily defenestrate one of her opponents as her opening move. It would be the tactically smart thing, and her passive combat algorithms suggest that doing so would not only reduce her opponent count by one but shatter what passes for confidence among the sparkling parade, making the remainders even easier prey than they already were.
But maybe that would be overkill. Maybe she shouldn't act at one hundred percent efficiency. Would it even look good on camera if she finished this whole thing in a minute? Does she even care? For all the uncertainty that goes through the girl's mind, she is as calm as a frozen pond on the surface. Her head is still canted to the side just a little, mouth drawn tight, neutral. What to do with this gaggle of goofballs... what to do indeed. They have less than half a second to finish their posing. Then she will end one of them as warmup.
The paralysis of indecision is resolved for her as a force of concentrated ideal enters the scene. Bodies scattered, the fight robbed from them in an instant, leaves the only other person standing in the parlor to be the maid-disguised Kula and a young man that just flat out isn't supposed to be here. "Seishirou Ryouhara..." the NESTs assassin speaks up. Operatives had been trying to track down the terrorist ever since he slipped through their fingers at Kabul. Leads were followed, bribes paid out a plenty, and even Interpol information was leaked. And while they picked up pieces of the trail, they couldn't pin him down with enough accuracy to send in their trump card to finish him.
Standing there, dressed as a maid of all things, she hardly looks the menace she was when she stalked him down in Afghanistan. But clothing doesn't make the killer by a long shot. The ruthless ice manipulation she bears, on the other hand, does. She takes a step backward, swiping her leather gloves from off the counter a she does so. She's put them on thousands of times in her life - it's an action that takes only a moment for her after such practice.
"If this was a trap, it isn't a very good one," she notes, her foot nudging aside one of the unconscious, brave Sailors that landed next to her after the explosion as she draws first one glove on then the other. She wonders if the cameras are still rolling. If so, her troop of handlers may be rushing toward the cafe this very moment. A chance to cage the recluse and keep him from escaping from Kula this time would be an opportunity they couldn't possibly pass up on.
A flurry of questions enter her mind. What is he playing at showing up here? What does he hope to accomplish? He's caught her by surprise, but is that enough? How does this fit into his plans? How does this move his goals forward? But speaking and asking questions are for those who get to make decisions. That isn't her job. She closes her eyes for a moment as she takes another step backward. A shimmer of white courses up from her feet, over stockinged legs, only to vanish beneath her layers of white lace and black dress.
In its passing, however, is the evidence of that seal over her power being relaxed. Her auburn locks, content to rest against her shoulders a moment ago, become pale blue, shifting slightly as if driven by an unfelt breeze within the enclosed chamber. It knocks her bat wing hairpiece slightly askew but she doesn't seem to notice. A cool frost crystalizes on the window nearest to her and a barely discernable vapor rises up from the floor at her feet.
"Did you bring your followers this time?" she asks, her tone almost hinting at a smile if she wasn't so deathly serious. It's the only way she can think that the Ryouhara ninja would put himself in plain view of her again. Possibly for the last time if she accomplishes what she set out to do those months prior.
The youth, so simply dressed, cuts an image somewhat amusingly almost out of Kamen Rider, a thin and lanky boy, hand in pocket, lazily regarding downed foes as if they were not much more than mere distractions, throwaways. To be fair, they were--they stood not a chance against himself or Kula Diamond and they should probably thank him, compared to what Kula might have done in the next second. His shirt seems just shy of falling off a shoulder. Really, it wouldn't be hard at all to imagine him summoning gaudily costumed beasts in the next moment or two.
"Please...don't insult my ideal with pointlessness. What sort of person relies on followers to do a job they can't do themselves? That would be conceding defeat before the conflict." Ryouhara asks, his words thin but warm, humor that Kula will no doubt dutifully record but never really enjoy on the same level tinging his voice. Due to his eye, he can read even the emotionless, the dead serious Kula Diamond, working off of his knowledge of her behavior to tell what it is she really is thinking. How best to kill him, among other things.
But in this way, he can answer the question that remains unasked.
"You see. The very fact that you had the advantage last time means that you need to be removed before I can progress in my goals further. For some, you'd be considered a hurdle to overcome, a limit to exceed, an obstacle to pass. For me, it's simpler than that. I have things to do." He indicates, with his blade. "... and you're in my way."
No fear, no wariness. There is nothing but conviction in his voice. Is it his wish to die? Maybe. In some ways.. in other ways, it is his wish to live. His wishes are something he is accustomed to realizing. An ember dances about his wrist as he twirls the blade once last time, the air still threshed thin enough that it wobbles in the thing's wake. The ember, the only concession to his intention, an intensity that defies a meaningful explanation.
Geo Yellow outside groans.
"As for a trap..." He looks about himself. "..Skittles are for eating." There is surprisingly little visible preamble to the match, it would seem for all times that Ryouhara simply barged into the match without thinking much more than that about it. The red lights on those cameras are still running. Of course, it would be foolish to take that at face value. "Your predicament should tell you that much," he suggests, the only thing he'll engage of Kula's outfit at the moment. It would be equally so to consider Kula any weaker for it--but it is a predicament of an outfit nonetheless. To make himself clear, he notes tersely, "they weren't. Not at all." Kula's handlers should be on their way.
Distantly, there is a massive explosion, just far enough to avoid being deafeningly loud, but close enough to jostle the hot tea in the teacups on the bar with a soft clink. Ryouhara doesn't even blink.
"...That was."
In taking out the squad of damn fools, Seishirou undoubtedly did them a favor. Without even touching her chi, Kula would have torn them to pieces. As is, they will probably get dragged off after the fact without much in the way of lacerations, broken bones, or any other troubling signs of having faced the violent fighter. If she was older she would, perhaps, feel utterly ridiculous facing a high priority target dressed like a maid for some cartoon level tomfoolery. As it stands, it's merely another variable in a vast matrix of data her passive combat algorithms are hard at work sorting, prioritizing, and sorting again.
He came alone then. "Isn't that the point of followers? To do your work for you? To be the ones that take your bullet, to get in the way of those who intend to kill you?" Her concept of leader is clearly defined by her upbringing in NESTs - a Cartel ruled by a man who claims divinity and seeks to bend technology to make it an undeniable fact. "What else are they for if not to make you stronger than you really are?" she asks back in that mixture of cynical naievete that seems to taint her perspective. All she has known, all she has experienced is fabricated by the NESTs handlers who have raised her from infancy a scant couple years prior. She didn't comprehend the humor in Seishirou's tone or else she wouldn't need to ask such questions.
He continues speaking - speaking of ideals, of goals, and how she's in the way. There's something unsettling about that perspective. That she's in HIS way. Her purpose was to erase his existence, to make him pay for triffling with things way out of his clearance bracket. But now he's turned it back around on /her/. He's sought her out as something that needs to be removed from his path.
What does he hope to accomplish here? The cafe will be swarmed in a moment. Even if he was in a position to defeat the young assassin on her own, she's about to be not alone any second now. Or so she thought.
*BOOM*
Or not.
She glances to the side at the shuffled tea cups, their cooling liquid rippling from the affect of the explosion somewhere outside. And then those eyes, crimson when contrasted against her frosty blue hair, shift back to him. That changes things. She doesn't flinch at the thought of her handlers being eliminated. If they're dead, she thinks nothing of it. They treated her like a thing. A weapon to be paraded out in front of the world week after week. And she came to see them in a similar light. Things. Weakling sycophants who exist to cart her around. If she had wanted to turn on them she could have wiped them out any number of times by now. Of that she was certain. If this group has been eliminated others will replace them. NESTs has no shortage of men and women just like them. Pawns. She will likely feel no closer to them than she did this batch.
"I see." Her left hand crosses in front of her, glove closed, an aura of brutally cold temperature coursing over her forearm. The tea in the cups next to her freezes solid. "That's too bad for you. Whatever your goals may be is not my concern. That is simply your problem. I recommend abandoning them." She sweeps her left hand down to the side, a trail of white energy left in the wake of her motion, a chilling reminder of that wellspring within her. Of course - neither has forgotten each other's potential. That much was thoroughly explored last time. If only such ambitions could be set aside just like that. But if they could be, Seishirou Ryouhara never would have become her target in the first place. "Otherwise, you're about to help me solve a problem of my own. I'm tired of being dragged all around the world looking for you."
Ryouhara was relatively sure nothing permanent befell Kula's support in his ninkou explosion. There wasn't any point in it--she'd just get more. Seishirou has no interest in killing pointlessly. It's more useful to disable them to the point where they wouldn't be able to complicate the match any. That /is/ what this is about, right?
Complications.
He thinks on it briefly, the blade sliding down straight in his hand until he can tap it against a thigh swathed in drill. It really is just as he thought. "You don't know anything but what they teach you." Through that realization and what Kula says, Seishirou can determine the extent of the NESTS leadership, the tactical style of its members. From this, it's not difficult to imagine that Kula would be nothing short of required to protect the leadership even if it meant her own life.
As expected.
".. It's a shame .."
Seishirou steps forward, the cool darkness of his eyes and the ease of his gait betraying only the slightest bit of sadness. Only the slightest bit, beneath a wave of judgment.
"...That I have to break a flawed creation."
This is something he says with conviction, the surety of things that are simply just not yet proven. A belief? "I would take you with me if I could." His thin form stalks into that field of cold, faint mists curling about him as the intense heat of his own force of intent reaches conflux with the deadly chill of her emotionless resolve. Ice crystals meet embers, each melting and freezing in kind. But to consider the two's regard, there is no real difference. Not in the slightest.
You see, Seishirou has no interest in killing, but neither would he shed any tears at all if every one of her handlers were lost in that explosion. He has no patience for idiots who propagate the goal of trash science.
"You see..if I disable you here, there will be no more need for you to be moved around anymore."
Even in the case of that sure and vicious death that ice represents, there is nothing but confidence in his hand and his ability. Doubt cannot enter his mind where his ideal is involved.
"I abandon nothing. Let's go."
The world itself seems to move slower as the Ryouhara shinobi whips into motion at even half his normal speed-- he brings his blade forward as he bolts directly for Kula. They were both dressed differently, but the skill, the intent.. is all the same. That odd blade whips about, coming to bear on her.
COMBATSYS: Seishirou has started a fight here.
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Seishirou 0/-------/-------|
COMBATSYS: Kula has joined the fight here.
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Kula 0/-------/-------|-------\-------\0 Seishirou
She takes in a breath as he observes the narrow scope of her learning. It's mostly true. The only one within the cartel that has ever sought to open her eyes to the outside world has been Angel. The NESTs operative has introduced the girl to pop culture, had her watch shows that she SHOULD have seen had she grown up normally, and even encouraged her to question things more. The ice user has tried to follow Angel's advice, even to the point of questioning a lot of what she's told. But old habits die hard, and knowledge grafted into her mind as fundamental truth is difficult to shake loose. "That's not true," she protests his accusation. "There are things I know that they do not. That means I know more than they teach me." she declares firmly.
She visibly flinches, just slightly, as he speaks of her as a flawed creation. How dare he. She hates that he knows that for all her very real looking human body, she's artificial - a creation from a deeply burried lab. How dare he know that. Not many outside of NESTs do. That tick in her expression passes so fast that even cameras would have a hard time picking it up. But Seishirou wouldn't. "You are very confident... In case you forgot; I was sent to kill you. Not the other way around."
He speaks of disabling her. Taking her out of comission long enough to have to rest up and heal. It's a viable direction. If he can accomplish it. It is to that end that he charges toward her, blade held, ready to be put to work. That aura of intensity that radiates around him clashes into the sphere of negative energy that renders her immediate surroundings frozen. She returns in kind, sprinting forward to meet him, a blur of black, white, and blue. Her left hand shimmers, an aura of white solidifying into a blade of ice the length of a kodachi. "Fine." He asked for this but she speeds forward with no regrets, no guilt. His dimise will eliminate being dragged around from locale to locale every time field agents believe they have a lead. He'll have to understand if she's not interested in /his/ solution to the constant hassle in her life.
It is with that weapon that she swings, backhanded, trying to parry aside that blade of his with the flat side of her own. In the same instant that her twist at the waist takes her toward her left, her right hand snaps forward with frightening force for a girl so frail looking. But he would know something of deceptive appearances, now wouldn't he. The flesh of her arm is bare below the shouldler but her gloves, essential to protect herself against the flesh destroying cold of her attacks, are on tight.
A spiral of chi swirls down her arm toward her right hand as she aims to plant it into the Ryouhara's chest. Before it reaches her wrist, it has already partially solidified into a mixture of energy and razor edged rings of ice, their forward momentum powering her hand forward even faster toward what she believes to be an inevitable collision with his sternum.
COMBATSYS: Seishirou dodges Kula's Medium Punch.
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Kula 0/-------/-------|-------\-------\0 Seishirou
To contrast, Seishirou has since gotten over his mild dislike of Kula and her methods and means. Were he in her position, he might understand, but he regards the indignant clone as one might a different species. With curiosity. Simply, he is a different person. Everything he is is a falsehood and everything that is true about him is nonexistent. So he is accustomed to intuiting, to deducing, to simply /knowing/ everything. When others take offense to this, even the deathly serious Ryouhara would admit to some childlike curiosity.
"So you can observe?!" Still. It would be folly to call Seishirou blind to the threat that Kula poses. To contrast, when you're dealing with the kind of heads that the NESTS hydra employs, it is absolutely necessary to be aware. There is no other reason Seishirou would even bother with attacking NESTS' favorite project. Facing the threat headlong is the only way to accomplish his objective. She would understand, if she had the mind to understand him..
... but it doesn't really matter, does it?
This will be the understanding they attain:
Kula takes his forward attack directly, and briefly the two are twin blurs, distinguishable only by the color of the forces at work. She twists the glittering kodachi at her left to turn his blade aside, knocking the steel of his defense wide as her right stabs in in razored rings of vicious ice. He doesn't seem too put off, instead twisting one leg in front of the other, as if he'd never intended to really attack her at all. His hair flicking about them, dark eyes snap to quickly, following the trail of energy as it coalesces towards her wrist, punching the entire thing towards him. The attack will slice into him--and distancing himself will not be useful. There was nothing but Kula's need to stop it from flying from her wrist to chase him anyway.
Eeling quickly, his entire upper torso slips to the side, kicking off with one foot and briefly exploding into full motion, his swordhand twisting as he maneuvers. Slipping around Kula's left range, he whips the blade towards her throat, spinning. He braces a thumb against a rib of the otherwise plain wooden hilt, shifting a mechanism inside, and aligning a catch hole.
Then a second blade, glowing, sprouts against the weapon only centimeters to the left of the first, locking into position only briefly, forming a dual-bladed 'bleeder' weapon. He concentrates, and the weapon bucks, firing the glowing thing in the short range at Kula's throat. Ninkou Kenhou--a short-range cannon-blade, simple tactics backed by his talent with both wrench and sword. The advantage of this weapon is that Seishirou doesn't need to compromise his defense by pressing a potentially suicidal attack to get at Kula. He can be as versatile with steel and wood as anyone could be with chi, fire and ice.
"Can you learn when the situation has changed..?"
The glowing neck-piercer bolt whistles only faintly.
COMBATSYS: Kula dodges Seishirou's Calculated Tactics.
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Kula 0/-------/-------|-------\-------\0 Seishirou
COMBATSYS: Seishirou has left the fight here.
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Kula 0/-------/-------|
Small fragments of ice sparkle into the air as her blade of ice meets his steel weapon. The transition from deflection to striking is fluid, graceful. One might almost conclude that she has received training with weapons. In truth, she manipulates the matter as naturally as if it were an extention of herself. No extra training necessary. The Ryouhara ninja is merely witness to her evolving creativity in combat in action.
But the crystaline kodachi isn't the threat he need concern himself with. Those swirling rings of sharp ice, on the other hand - those could tear a whole through a man's torso. Kula stops short, her fist evaded, arm snapping back with great velocity, and those rings meant to plow into Seishirou's chest continue on, shattering against the wall some twenty feet away. Of the rings Kula pays no heed, knowing full well that she's stepped into leaving an opening for the miraculously fast foe.
He's going straight for the neck. Versed in techniques that target vulnerable points on the human body, she identifies the intent behind its trajectory in an instant. Another ring of metal against crystalized water echoes out as that parrying blade becomes her defense, intersecting the center of the bolt, the weapon held vertically in front of her throat, the bolt a mere inch from making contact. Crimson eyes identify the small weapon snared by the ice blade in her left hand for a split second, confirming her suspicions as to the deadly nature of the projectile, before she flings it to the side quickly, discarding the icy knife along with it. The profile on Seishirou made mention of the danger of his weapons not always being the surface threat. Best to distance herself from it entirely.
The defense all transpires in the blink of an eye before Kula is once again in motion, taking a retreating step backward, buckled shoes slipping across the floor with a plastic clatter. The bat winged hairpiece, already dislodged by the unsealing of her fount of chi, falls to the floor where she was standing during their exchange of attacks. There's no need for cartoon symbols to establish the threat here. Things have gotten far beyond that now.
"Nothing has changed," she counters. "For you and I. My job remains the same, only the hunt has moved to a new location. Here, let me show you..." When the black and white clad girl moves again, it is in less of a direct beeline this time. Darting forward, she spins into a stop some yards away, sweeping her hands through the air. In their wake is a screen of sleet that fills a corner of the parlor, obscurring her position for a dangerous moment. It may serve to conceal the angle from which she attacks next.
"This time," her voice comes from the left. "...Seishirou Ryouhara. There will be," her voice comes from the right. She drops down from the ceiling, right leg leading, encased in a boot of ice replete with quarter-foot long icy spikes. "No escape." With that foot the girl attempts to plunge directly into the young man's right shoulder. He sought to disable her with slashes to the throat. She seeks to wound his shoulder and cripple his right arm. What then of his tools, should she succeed. Those icy cleats aren't just for show.
If he suffers their bite, he will find that once imbedded in his flesh, they begin to affect the very blood near the puncture wounds, literally crystalizing the blood flowing through nearby arteries. Kula, however, will simply spring away if able, the boot over her foot powderizing the instant she lands.
COMBATSYS: Seishirou dodges Kula's Strong Kick.
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Kula 0/-------/-------|-------\-------\0 Seishirou
Far beyond.
Kenhou whistles through the air as Seishirou snaps the blade to the defense. His eyes half-lid in troubled irritation when Kula's blade comes to clash with his own. The shortblade is used exactly as it is commonly, a single defense suitable for the close quarters of the cafe. Though Ryouhara has little doubt that Kula has received a certain kind of training, there is a difference between weapons training and intuition.
Ryouhara lacks illusions as to what he's facing. It doesn't take a genius to see just why Kula was being entered in so many official events, carefully looked after by droves of fawning handlers. She's collecting information, up close and personal. Countless numbers of battles have been logged already by the young construct--every single one an exercise in observation. Patterns are observed, and it is obvious--the most effective of strategems will undoubtedly be adopted. It also doesn't take any particular genius to realize the irony.
He is another of the same.
Dragging a long arc of steel through the passing wind to slip the blade of that weapon false and at his side, all Ryouhara catches of Kula is a glint of frosted pale hair as she retreats in the face of his response. As expected, the rings continue onward. Had he actually tried to outdistance them, he would have been gutted. Responding instinctively in kind, the shinobi kicks off the ground on one leg, his body shooting back like a ragdoll, clearing a colorful sentai body as he raises the blade of Kenhou in front of him in defense, free hand hanging limp at his side. "Che."
Her sharp eyes flick to a side. That wasn't a productive trade. Kula has excellent defensive indexes. And with that glittering force of chi, her offensive indexes were--from his own memory--a challenge to his own. Investing only a small amount of effort, she can press as long as need be. Fortunately, he's already seen this maneuver.
He pauses in a notable concern as she summons a wave of sleet to curtain her movements and seal his ability to respond. Blade at hip and eyes betraying only the subtlest hints of frustration, they track Diamond's voice as she speaks, no other movement betraying the shinobi's direction of intention. The curve of his lip.. shifts, inscrutably.
By the time Kula punches down from above into his outline, all that deadly cadre of spikes finds is a a vague indication of Ryouhara--an almost picture-perfect afterimage in red produced by the rills of heat haze of sheer speed of motion. There is no indication of acceleration, or even movement at all. He steps quickly and it readily seems that if only in one step alone, he shrinks space.
An ember in that intermediary space glows hot.
Standing by the broken bay window where the sailors first entered into the cafe, his blade is held loose at his side, his eyes dark and intent. The difference between Ryouhara and the standard saturday night run-in at Howard Arena.. Seishirou knows exactly what he's dealing with. There is a sound on the wind as he redirects his own internal energy to his mind. For someone already known for their ability with on the fly calculation, it's difficult to imagine the kind of determinations he'd need to actually invest a little of his own personal natural energy to invest. The detail would be lost on a less observant person. But Kula, incomplete as she is, is hardly dull. When Ryouhara steps forward, his eyes sweep the area quickly, taking a mental graph of the fighting space in front of him, and Kula's dimensions, mentally storing the thing away as a 'mnemonic.' The acoustics from Kula's distraction attempt are referenced and commited to memory as a telling test of the cafe's ability to reflect sound from particular directions. Senteijutsu--Ryouhara calculation. Though retaining these calculations requires some measure of chi, the value to someone like Seishirou is immeasurable. Within a certain margin of error, the amount of distraction any particular opponent employs against him at this point, up to and including sealing his vision.. is pointless.
Though he could comment tersely about who is on the hunt here, he doesn't. He doesn't respond with any long or complex speech, his mind currently turned to marshalling chi to finish the calculations he's making of Kula's current index without her leathers and his assessments of her probable routes of assault.
At this point, threats are worthless in the face of action.
He speaks plainly and simply.
"...So you seem to think."
COMBATSYS: Seishirou calculates his next move.
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Kula 0/-------/-------|-------\-------\0 Seishirou
Each fight is an exercise. Within NESTs itself, there are few that can even challenge the young killer's deadliness in combat. Trying to fabricate legitimate tests of her capability or present her ever churning, ever expanding combat algorithms with a real challenge became hopeless once she grew beyond a certain point. They had outdone themselves with this one. She was too good for conventional training. In stepped the world of sports fighting. Week after week, they could shuttle their trillion dollar experiment from one fight to another. There she could find challenges; there she could be legitimately threatened; there she could evolve.
With each style, each approach to fighting she faces, her combat algorithms expand their parameters, resort their priority queues, and relink nodes from thousands of parallel lists of reaction and action. The sheer quantity of combat data ingrained in her malleable young brain is staggering. NESTs technology pushed to the penultimate point. Only one step beyond remained. The Ascension of Igniz.
The worst thing about it is that the ironically dressed maid, that cleaner of NESTs pests and mistakes, has no idea about how a single bit of it works. Seishirou draws his chi in, helping him calculate and ascertain countless facts, juggling an almost incomprehensible amount of data to formulate a plan of action. She... acts on pure instinct combined with a child's intuition for clever alteration of their circumstances. Her ice is not unlike the ultimate lego set any kid could want. Children assemble blocks, make simple gadgets work. She weaves ice, sometimes playfully, and at times to deadly results...
Case in point, that boot that powderizes as he foot comes down having missed the Ryouhara heir. She's ended lives with attacks less creative than that. But for Seishirou - she's being pushed, forced to draw on tricks that she had only thought about before but never exercised. Like what happens if she tries to turn a body's blood-stream solid. It seems she'll have to wait to find the answer to that question some other time.
As white powder sprays across the floor at her feet, Kula whirls, turning to face the ninja directly, eyes narrowing for a fleeting moment. His speed remains formidable. If she was trying to chase him through the streets of the city, she might be hard pressed to corner him. But he's not running. And either is she. Tense, perhaps a little frusrated at her inability to reach him yet, the girl's hands clench, a cascade of shimmering snow drifting down around her form as the temperature drops another few degrees.
He takes in the landscape of the cafe to acute detail. She lets her instinctive algorithms drive. Unarmored this time, she is more vulnerable than last. But her capacity for improvized defense should not be easily forgotten. "You evaded the field teams for the last few months easily enough. I bet you could have continued to do so for a long time...." She relaxes, unclenching her hands, preparing her next move. "The only way I could be in your way," the girl speaks up, "Is if you were targetting /them/ again. You didn't learn why that is a bad idea last time?"
Her arms are straight at her sides, palms flat toward the floor, fingers outstretched as a shimmer of white emanates out from her feet, leaving in its wake a slick of ice that stretches toward Seishirou. Not deadly in its own right, but it does lend even more speed to the young thing as she bolts forward in that instant. Without friction to slow her down, her speed has only increased - her capacity to harm has not.
She whips into a leap from a yard out, kicking out with one foot swiftly with the intent to crush it into Seishirou's chest. She'll scatter those calculations and send his metrics awry in an instant with that ice-skate like blade along the base of her foot, threatening to tear into him with savage force. Her motion is fluid as she comes to land on her opposite foot, completing a second spin and smashing her heel for his stomach. If not careful, he may be sent clean through the broken window. He robbed her chance to do that to one of the Sentai. It's only fair.
COMBATSYS: Seishirou endures Kula's Ray Spin.
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Kula 0/-------/-----==|===----\-------\0 Seishirou
It's difficult to reign at the top.
To contrast, the world that Kula was exercised like a prized pet in was not one that Ryouhara Seishirou would have a part in. The competitive sport was something he had talent for, he could seize any number of opportunities, any number of prize winnings. But to do so would be to compromise his own goals. Ryouhara's hand has receded from that competitive world, moving in a world just underneath it.
Make no mistake, if Kula Diamond did not appear in this battle today, Seishirou wouldn't have ever appeared. She is the target of his interest and no other.
He had made notice of Kula's ability of instinctive calculation earlier. While people like him had to dwell on the details, they seemed to come naturally to her. That was in fact one of his first clues that she was hardly what the world would consider a natural genius. There is a certain level of calculation that is simply not done by most tensai, the fact that she seemed to intuit the fine details of those caluclations without the preamble of spirit--the heart of making the educated guess--was all too like K'. Innocent creativity turned to deadly force all too easily with Kula, but the spirit of the thing was lost. A child's curiosity, but one rendered in dead, emotionless ice. The information slipped through his conscious mind only briefly, before leashed somewhere inside his skull, held in retention.
Blinking once as he completes his calculations, Seishirou's head tilts.
It's a curious expression, identifying the ice trail.
"I don't think you get it.."
Pause--skating? He steps back from the ice trail quickly, beginning to marshal more of that chi in ribbons of heat drifting off of him and licking against the ceiling, against the shattered glass crunching beneath his monk-straps. With an abrupt startle, Ryouhara's teeth grit, his train of thought cut short. Though he is deathly silent, the blood arcing through the air should be evidence enough to Kula of her draw of first blood. She /crushes/ him.
... But Ryouhara holds his ground, skidding back with the force of her kick, slamming a heel against the base of the high seat between himself and window, diffusing--no, suspending--the force somewhere between his leg and into the ground. What is most important is he seems to have stowed the blade at his hip--his hands are freed in an instant, whirling to imterpose his fingers around the stockinged ankle of that outstretched leg, to hold her in suspension for just a moment.
Eyes veiled beneath a wave of black hair, he grimaces.
He intended to be hit?
He seeks to hold Kula still only for a moment. All that is needed is a moment. Kula might see the angry red lines drawn in every shard of glass, etching out designs. Aerodynamic bladed designs. He's imbued the glass shards here with trace amounts of his own chi, the Ryouhara kamon reflected in every single one. His genius ability is not of calculation. It is of construction. In an instant, he transformed the trace glass here into shuriken of varying shapes and sizes. Simple ninkou, specifically. That of homing shuriken. Slowly, that force rolls back through his leg, uncoiling as he /stomps/ the ground, causing these things to flip into the air spinning, whirling blades acting on their own volition. They don't seek Kula's chi, though. They can't, not with only that brief time of attunement.
... They seek Seishirou's own.
The shinobi is carved to pieces instantly as spinning glass blades perfectly quadrisect him countless times over. A sacrificial attack? --it's not him.
Outside, Ryouhara picks himself up off the ground, a perfect mirror image of the wound even now slicing into that copy traced into his flesh as well. It was a necessary sacrifice, being kicked out of the window exactly as Kula intended--but leaving a copy of himself inside to make it appear as if he hadn't at all. THe force she applied was divided between the two--Seishirou flew shorter than he should have. The wound throws off red-flecked steam as Ryouhara applies emergency tactical aid to it in the form of searing heat. His train of thought is not interrupted in the slightest.
She is curious. For her own purpose, or for her group's--it is one and the same.
As he was intending before. He'll give her this much.
"Your teams are exactly where I need them to be...my goal is within sight."
Controlled exactly. Just like his metrics.
If Kula is caught even for a moment by that copy's grip, she'll be diced with those glittering shuriken just as surely as he is. Creativity is not something reserved only for children.
COMBATSYS: Kula blocks Seishirou's Kawarimi Suicide.
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Kula 0/-------/-----==|==-----\-------\0 Seishirou
Into the sphere of intensity that radiates around the lone Ryouhara the ice wielder darts. All that forward momentum converted gracefully into that spinning, helicoptering kick. The blade of ice lands, an arc of crimson scattering across the ceiling before she comes in for the second kick that is no less punishing. What she doesn't expect is for that kick's angular momentum to come to an early stop, her ankle snagged. There is that instant in which to blink, her leg held in place when it's supposed to be snapping to the ground to form her support.
Crimson eyes widen, breaking off from his face to view the window. She can sense it. The chi drawn there. Engineered into her very blood is a highly refined sonar for such. She can hunt a target by chi signiture alone across great distances if necessary - all part of the perfect little killing package that is Kula Diamond. The real question, however, is when did he do it? She never took his eyes off of him until this instant. How did he have the opportunity? How did he slip that by her senses? And more importantly, what is he going to do with it? He's in the way - holding her leg outstretched, the girl forced to balance on her left.
She figures it out one blink too soon, her attentions, distracted first by the glace, snapping back to the figure of the young man in front of her. The image is perfect and the chi behind it so masterfully concealed. She almost missed it. And for that, she almost paid a severe price. The flying shuriken hit a pane of encrusted, thick ice, each of them embedding into the surface with small, ringing noises as they're brought to a stop. By the dozens they puncture into it, protruding out like a field of quartz crystals.
The ice takes the brunt of it, but a few slice into her suspended leg. She wasn't able to stop those. Long slices of red leave their mark on her right thigh or left shin, her white stocking marred red. It would have been worse but for the way she falls, sliding on her back along the icy slick she had created, coming to a rest with her head bumping the counter lightly as several more shards of glass imbed themselves into its surface inches from her face.
The girl kicks back up to her feet in an instant. A gloved finger traces along the cut on her thigh as she inspects it for severity, leaving the blood frozen in its passing, keeping the loss of essential life's blood to a minimum. His alacrity, his constant redirection, and his confidence all bother her. And now he's outside. There is no fear in the assassin's mind now. This is going as it should. All of her training, all of her power are capable of handling this clever foe. He may be able to talk circles around her, but she has the power to silence him.
The wall next to the window explodes and the uniformed girl walks through the crumbling plaster, shattered glass, and cloud of rising vapor left over by the pulse of potent chi. "Your goal," she echos back with a hint of derision as the shockwave settles, a pink neon kanji for 'Heaven' swinging down by one nail sparks for a few seconds before fizzling dead. "You said you wouldn't bring followers for a task you could do yourself." She extends her right arm out to her side, creating a spiraling, narrow beam of ice that solidifies into a four foot long glass-like tube of diamond-strong crystal.
"You should have brought some." She leans into a forward sprint, both hands getting a tight grip on the staff of ice. But the maid-dressed Kula isn't coming to attack him with a broom stick... at the extended end of it, further ice grows, shimmering into a mirror-like, horizontal blade. The young killer puts the added range to use, swinging the ice-scythe out from a yard away, trying to use the reach to hook the weapon into his side then tear him in half with a savage pull.
COMBATSYS: Seishirou interrupts Fierce Punch from Kula with Kaitaijutsu EX.
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Kula 0/-------/---====|======-\-------\0 Seishirou
There is no notable pretense to Seishirou's confidence. It's not really something that can be defined as ego or bluster. Not something born of scientific results, of the kind of countless tests check-marked with a green pen as Kula is no doubt accustomed to. The strings of success are tied round a kind of complacency, bearing it with them as surely as rain follows the storm. Though he is unthreatened by the halls of ice she commands, as Seishirou stands, his sharp eyes never stop looking at Kula as if she has ceased to become a threat, even as a Ryouhara Copy takes care of the rest of matters for him. Neither of the two gathered here are the best, but their abilities are sufficient. She should be aware of that herself. It is something born of a youth who has simply. Experienced. Worse.
Inspired, and without fear.
He is confident in his own ability, it is simply enough to say.
His eye is that of the engineer, thoughtful and only faintly troubled by Kula's ice field--her perception was fast, and her defense, even faster. At the last moment, his chikuzou ninkou shuriken embed themselves into an intervening field of rapidly solidified frost, scoring only what will ultimately be superficial damage. Even Seishirou has to frown at that much.
Kula's command of chi was a source of consternation for the young shinobi, a deciding factor in their last battle. The trouble was it was a kind of absolute defense, guarding against attack from any possible angle without compromising--and in fact strengthening--offense. Against that kind of ability, the battle would always hinge less on raw brutal force, but on technical superiority.
That is not something that concerns Seishirou overmuch.
The sound is oddly muted. His shirt rumples in the cold bales of wind that roll from the gutted cafe as Kula steps out, her newest nicks and cuts frosted shut by now. She speaks to him, suggesting his mistake. That he bring his followers. She is someone used to fighting many people at once--and winning. His eyes follow the neon kanji trailing from her finger curiously before it winks out of existence. The least creative technique at all from her is what actually intrigues him, even when she creates a pole from thin air, a glittering length of crushing force.
His expression does not change.
"Followers this, followers that," he repeats. "People talk about their ability as if it proves their worth. Believing in nothing but that ability, as if their strength in fist alone determines truth. Are you really so blind to think that the forge of history is run by the blow of men's hammers? Do you even understand what it means to truly follow someone?"
She attacks at him with the curve of that ice staff, but the approach of the weapon is wrong, at the range which she lifts it, it would merely be a slapping blow upon him, if even that. Additionally, Kula is not one for simple blunt force attacks. Her mode of operation has always skewed deeply into the blade.
He is unsurprised when it is a deadly culling scythe she swings at him.
In all truth, the cold bite of her blade becomes well known to him as it lances around him, and he whirls, the blade slipping past him. He needs to realize that weapon's attack--to taste it's numbing cold bite in his side, the vicious hook grazing him ever so. He needs to, because as long as she is wielding such a massive blade against him, her crystallization chi is occupied. He only moves then, stepping quicklys, his hands a blur as he slips past her with the scent of his own blood, his fingers.. lightly brushing the back of her hair. A gentle tap, forcing a mark to form just past all the lace at her neck. The Ryouhara symbol, with a saltire cross over it.
"Did you really even care at all when I took your brother construct's arm?"
He skids to a stop near that window, his limbs poised at all sides, his fingers splayed out slightly. Quickly, he reaches into the length of sleeve at his left hand, unlooping a Buddhist rosary hung loose around his wrist there, knotting it between his fingers as he raises his hands twisted in the form of hitsuji, the ram handseal, the tip of his left index finger resting just under his nose.
"It is as simple as this; if not, you are following orders you can only barely comprehend the meaning of. You linger here to kill me only to sate your laziness. But you still do need to kill me."
He activates the ninkou Kaitaijuzu. The 108 bead rosary begins to flicker kanji on their wooden beaded surfaces, formerly invisible, one each in turn. With each, a strong pulse of energy is administered through a 'overlay matrix' created by Ryouhara at the moment of that touch, correspondant to an analysis made of her aura. From this moment forward, every weak point in her aura revealing itself, no matter how much it shifts and twists, will be struck in systematic hierarchal fashion as Seishirou's ninkou works to break that ultimate defense down using the exact amount of force necessary and nothing more. An evolved strategy, his ninkou will attack until there is nothing left to impede his progress.
A placid glance over the tips of those fingers.
His voice grows deadly cold.
"To contrast, I only need to dismantle you..."
He lowers his hands, the string of beads in his left still lighting in sequence as they disappear into his sleeve once again. And slowly, the glass shuriken from inside the cafe--the numbers whose jutsu weren't compromised and did not shatter from the attack--come slowly spinning behind him in a field of razor sharp glinting weapons hovering at what seems to be his command. This is the strength of spontaneous ninkou construction along with the use of tactics. Though hastily constructed, these blades are attracted to the pattern of his chi. Unlike the Ryouhara Copy, he has much better control over his chi matrix.
And should he have his way, Kula will have much worse control over hers.
She swings out with that hefty ice weapon of hers - the largest creation of that detail she's ever made manifest in a fight before. If her handlers were conscious - if there were even /cameras/ in place to record this match that has moved outside the cafe, they would be impressed to see how she continues to invent, evolve. They would be curious about where she got the idea to do that. And why she tried it. What corner of her combat algorithms, after iterating over millions of parameters, arrived at that option? But they aren't there to see, and no tape will be viewed of this exchange. A pity, considering the nature of it.
She expects him to try to escape it. Anything less would be folly. In fact, she swings a little wide with that prediction in mind, potentially hooking him even if the Ryouhara proves evasive. What the young man choses to do next was not factored into any of her branching routines. To willfully be laid open with the savage blade of the scythe just to get in close enough to brush his hand against the back of her long, frosty hair makes no sense.
Whirling to face him, that pole still gripped tightly in her hands, a portion of the blade covered with red, the sharp edges of it melting from the direct contact with the ninja engineer. Even as he draws the beads from his sleeve, she stares back at him, crimson eyes narrowed, gloved fingers tightening on the frozen polearm. She's going to take another swing at him, let him feel the bite of its wicked edge again. Fast as he may be, escaping the longer ranged weapon is going to test his abilities even further.
"I hate him." she answers his question regarding K9999's arm with a perspective that considers only the present. The past, when she might have cared, is no longer to be found in her young mind. To someone alive for two years, four months ago seems like an eternity. What transpired a week ago old history. And then it activates. The seal that went unnoticed at the back of her neck is at last commissioned for its purpose and the aura of the NESTs killer finds itself assaulted, disrupted on all fronts.
He can see it in her eyes. The moment the realization hits. A sharp gasp escapes her lips, laden with frosty vapor that vanishes quickly. She tries to fight it. But she's never been attacked like this. Dealing with chi strikes from the outside - that she's a master of, her engineered body quite capable of shifting the focus of her inner chi to contend with it. But this is unprecidented, and in that moment she finds herself helpless to stop it.
The glass shuriken shift into action, moving into a holding pattern, beholden to the Ryouhara's chi in action. It hasn't even really hit her yet how gravely serious the situation is until she hears the crack in the frozen pole in her hands. Brittle, it resonates with the sounds of an ice cube submerged in warm water... before it simply collapses. It falls to the ground at her feet, a mixture of rapidly melting ice and water, landing in a pile of slush at her dress-shoe clad feet. Taking a step back, eyes widened, the girl stares at the mound that was once her precisely maintained weapon of crystal only to watch it continue to melt rapidly, reduced to a useless puddle on the hot ground.
She can feel it at work within her. The shifting, adjusting assault, the matrix binding and closing off her aura as she struggles to bring her chi to the surface again. The rising panic in her visage is impossible to miss as it transpires. She can't weave ice. That gift that was hers by birthright, that energy to create as she sees fit, with the slightest effort, is closed to her. Her instinctive algorithms are at a loss. She's only ever entered this state after having expended her ultimate technique - unloading all of her pent up power in a single, catastrophic maelstrom of ice and sleet. But she hasn't done that.
"What did you do." she snaps. The ice scythe was the first to go. The aura of frigid temperatures around her is the next, along with the shimmering swirl of snow flakes that had spun about her perpetually. The blue hair goes next, becoming damp, auburn locks resting limply against her shoulders. Violet eyes glance down at herself, her hands extended, palms raised, as if trying to solve the mystery of where her chi went. "What is this," she grits her teeth, glancing up to stare at Seishirou.
The external frustration merely a reflection of the confounded state her combat routines have been thrust into all of the sudden.
But she has fought without ice before, when forced to keep going beyond the limits of her ultimate technique. It isn't unprecidented, and as quickly as her temper flares, it sooths again, her instincts adjusting, correcting, skipping ahead in their algorithms. "No matter," she declares, hands tightening. "It isn't enough to save you." Denied her ice, she is still lethal. A fact she intends to prove as she gives chase.
Her left hand snaps forward first, seeking a grip on his left bicep - intending to hold him still long enough for her right hand to come in tightly clenched, ramming forward with piston-like strength toward his ribcage. There is that instant when it seems she's pulled her punch - that transitory moment before all that forward momentum gets driven home a punishing blow designed to crush bone and collapse organs. Her mouth is a tight-lipped expression, her violet eyes gravely serious as she seeks the eyes of the one who thought to stop her ice short.
Now it's personal.
COMBATSYS: Seishirou interrupts One Inch from Kula with Kunai Critical.
- Power hit! -
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Kula 1/-------/=======|====---\-------\0 Seishirou
"If you hated that boy, you should thank me," he answers.
"What I did was simple. I showed you a different world."
He needs to explain precious little else. Nursing the newly made gaping cut in his side, Seishirou slides a hand over the wound, placidly feeling the residual frost bluing the fringes of the wound thaw as he watches Kula carefully. As every aspect of her frigid aura weakens, shattered. Though he has it in great measure, relying on just skill alone has never been the way of Ryouhara's last heir. He operated in a realm of observation and cunning. Using his kaitaijutsu here at least temporarily seals Kula's most dangerous asset--that childlike creativity, part artificially born of algorithm and calculation, but also.. part natural.
As much as it pains Ryouhara to admit, the natural facet was the greatest threat to him. It makes it seem all the stranger when he continues. A young man perfectly level, blades buzzing only inches from his ear as he speaks in chilling cold voice, differentiated from Kula only in the careful measure and intensity of tone.
"Someone without idealism, who only follows routine, won't be able to understand yet." Her way is formidable. But by necessity, he will surpass it using his own method.
His Kaitaijuzu B works patiently and without much need for his regulation, past the measure of his energy required to keep the debilitating jutsu active. The strength of that ninkou was that it didn't attack a person physically, but worked directly against their chi, thereby allowing Seishirou to continue the attack. Kula is upset now. He can read that easily. She slips in quickly, easily, resorting to basic hand to hand. Though she is thin, that doesn't mean she lacks the power to lock him in place for just long enough. Her fist slips into the intervening space, the tight quarters--and pauses, for just an instant.
And in perfect tempo to the attack, he twists away--opening the space to not one inch, but two, three inches, within the range of motion afforded by Kula's grip. He moves back just enough.. for the fist to reach its conclusion against his tilted ribcage, letting the vast sum of force dissipate somewhere inside Kula's shoulder instead of in his internal organs. At it's source, deduced instantly by the scion.
"The ability to strike from zero distance with full force. K' has already shown me this technique."
Now he has proximity.
He doesn't need to hold her still.
Her holding him is enough.
Without moving, he shifts the direction of his chi. And this close to him, it's not hard to feel it. Embers curl past Kula as his heat becomes a thing alive, enough to drag at the loose wisps of hair at the youth's temple. It floods past her and suffuses the two in his scent, his force of intent. Whirling, blades swarm in from all directions to follow the source, glittering ninkou shuriken looking to gather themselves around the young assassin's body, sliding in all directions at curious angles, following his waves of chi. Risky--
But they stop there, stars collected only instants away.
A direct attack would have been outranged, or evaded.
He's sealing off her ability to circumvent his attack.
Deadly calm brown eyes widen in a sharp glare.
"Your confidence.. is misplaced."
Fingers of his free hand curling into a claw, Ryouhara twists a hand, before whipping it downward past Kula's body.
As if set spinning by his hand directly, the swarm of blades follow suit.
Stasya
Kula doesn't like this different world. She likes the world in which she can draw ice into existence with the slightest thought, weaving it into patterns, weapons, toys, and designs; creating attacks, defensive barriers and reflective mirrors with the wave of her hand or flick of her wrist. This world he's showing her contains none of that. Her aura wrestles against his chi manipulation, fighting a war within the silent chambers of her soul. It's visible, the way her jaw clenches at moments or her eyes twitch to the side as if her focus is elsewhere. She needs to beat this.
Idealism. There's that concept again. The very idea is young in her. It is hard to expect ideals from one who is kept in a cage that has never needed to be locked. Bars are for keeping those in who would otherwise escape. In her there is no such desire. Not yet. She doesn't have to admit to not understanding what he means. Even though that confusion is hidden behind that distant mask of sudden purpose, he has seen enough of her psyche to know.
She gets the hold she sought, but he sees through the technique too quickly. He tells her he has seen it before. If she had known, she would have reconsidered. K' is better at it than she - a fact she would be loath to admit. Her hand to hand melee is still deadly, but her predecessor had the greater strength to put the same style to use. Her punch glances, leaving a mark, but not bearing the force it was meant to.
The intensity of his will, when not tempered by the bubble of frozen temperatures that perpetually surround her in combat, is palpable. She would stifle it if she could, those embers drifting past her shoulder an affront, a reminder that she lacks the same ability now. But taking umbrage at his chi manipulation isn't something she has time for as she finds herself surrounded by a field of glinting glass shards.
She's trapped. A minute ago she would have blown them away, using wind to counter their momentum, or an explosion of thick sleet to weigh them down and render them harmless to her. At the very least - a barrier would help, a means to protect herself from the sharp edged glass.
But she can do none of those things. The panic that crosses her features as the shuriken dangle precariously in the air is unmistakeable. Without her armor, without her power, she isn't the threat she believed herself to be. He lowers his arm and the blades plunge. There is a motion in the last instant, where the trapped operative brings her arms up to cover her face, to protect her eyes and cheeks from the glass.
The splashes of red an instant later are evidence of the lack of barriers to stop them this time. Into her bare arms, the back of one hand, her undefended sides, stomach, and legs the painful darts fly, each one slicing through her unarmored flesh with ease. "AH!" The cry escapes her lips. An admission of pain so rarely provoked from the tight lipped killer. Collapsing to her knees in front of the Ryouhara heir, she bleeds.
Blood seeps down from beneath her short, white laced sleeves, drawn from a shard of glass sticking out of her shoulder. The white aprone of her attire is stained red; in some places due to the shards of glass sticking right through it, but in others it is from blood dripping down from a fierce cut in her cheek. Her face flush with very real pain, she reaches up to pull some of the sharp shards out, casting them aside, while forcing herself to one knee.
Her gloved hand rests at the side of her neck for a moment before pulling away, leaving sticky blood in the palm from a wound opened by a passing shard that didn't stick. Her hand brushes along her leg, knocking others out at the risk of making the bleeding even worse. She can't stop now. But trying to move with the glass still in her would just aggrivate the injuries further.
She lifts her face, glaring back at Seishirou, breaths coming harder now as she continues to fight not just him but his presence within her. Her combat routines keep insisting that she draw ice and skewer his chest for a fatal blow, only to then correct themselves in the acknowledgement that she /cannot/, for she lacks the power now. At last they settle on another option and Kula springs into a combat routine rarely used on real opponents.
She's upon him swiftly, moving as a blur, darting low, planting her hands to the ground as she swings her stockined legs in for his ankles in an attempt to sweep him clean off his feet. It doesn't end there, should she manage to hit him, for she'll come out of the sweep into a kneeling position, driving both hands forward into a punch targeting the side of her falling foe.
COMBATSYS: Seishirou dodges Kula's Slider Shoot.
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Kula 1/-------/=======|====---\-------\0 Seishirou
Glass blades soon are stained and splotched with blood.
Shuriken shatter and lance over the young assassin's body, cutting, drawing blood, flying like glittering lightning. Some stick, of course, others fly past. In the end, they flash briefly before shattering against pavement, others just barely managing to follow the trails of Seishirou's chi before slowly losing spin and clattering to the ground uselessly.
In the end it was a simple matter of expenditure of resources. Ninkou Chikuzou requires quite a bit of chi to perform, which is why the most advanced ninkou were commonly forged over periods of weeks and months. Seishirou was one of the fastest kougakusha in the entirety of the Ryouhara clan since the time of Ikou--but there are still limitations as to what he could construct. While it is possible to create many glass shuriken based on the concepts of 'conservation of motion,' 'reinforcement of form' and 'sympathetic aura attraction' and then direct those shuriken as weapons against Kula, using them for more than a single attack would inevitably drain the charge of blood he invested in forging them in the first place, disrupting their fragile matrixes and causing the Ryouhara kamon to fade from their reflection.
He kicks one aside, idly.
She kneels before him, strangled by her own pain. But his view is placid and critical of the young construct, expectant of her next move. But something in him is ... intrigued by the look in her eye. Though his engineering eye can root out the complexities of her algorithms and strategy, even determine the way she thinks, there is still a detail he's missing, something inconceivable. She isn't paying all of her attention to him. Her moves have become less sure, more inventive than murderous. She doesn't have access to that chi anymore, and is struggling with the instinct and compulsive need to use it. She says nothing, and the meaning of his words come a distant second in the face of that urgency, but he knows. He has her attention.
Curiosity of his own drives him to speak.
"I'll tell you only once. Following orders is a little different from following belief. The first is ignorance, and means you have no freedom of your own. The second is ambition, and means you have nothing but. One is simple and the other is earned. That is the difference between you and those who follow my way. It is the difference between you and the other project, K'." He can read that glare. Read that frustration, that extravagant anger.
Her long legs stab out, barely perceptible in a blur of motion as the deadly NESTS assassin stabs out her fast attack with force enough to make her limb's crack in the air audible to his ears. His eyes dart low to her as she is upon him in an instant. Even without her chi, she has raw speed to fall back on, and she has quite a bit of it. Even in this kind of a situation, it wouldn't be an overestimation to say he is evenly matched.
But her leg slams into a weapon embedded in the ground. The simplistic 'Kenhou' blade, sunk into the concrete. It is the only trace left of Seishirou, his motions fast enough to cause his body to flicker and vanish as a ghost, somewhere to the left.
Even as he moves, his ninkou, Kaitaijuzu--a real ninkou--wars with Kula's own fluctuating control even as he speaks. The ninkou is a patient one, working in ambience against ambience. Kula's aura shifts against it, riling but by doing so only shifts the matrix of the weapon's operation in turn, continuing to indicate the weakest parts of her aura. Just as he prods Kula mentally, Kaitaijuzu prods her spiritually, attempting to shake her aura apart with the series of calculated detonations of chi inside her. For the moment, using it, he has the advantage. But it is temporary, and he will need to rely on other modes of assault to retain it.
Kaitaijuzu B is one advanced ninkou.
The blade he draws from the leather sheath at his back is another.
Unlike Kula's earlier attempt, Seishirou's voice echoes everywhere.
"Until you understand the chasm... do not speak to me again of followers!"
Sailing down from above, the shinobi spins, tumbling end over end like a child's play jack. The peculiar ornamented trapezoidal blade in his hands shoots straight downward in a wide cutting slash aimed to score deeply across Kula's body as he lands in a deep crouch, one leg outstretched behind him and the other crouched deep before him. He knows Kula can track his movements almost as easily as he can track hers. She will undoubtedly try to circumvent his blade in accordance with her math.
The problem is, when it's Senchakiri... the math is different.
A solid blow took off K9999's arm. Even a graze from the blade is vicious.
Ryouhara draws Senchakiri in a wide sweep while dropping targetted down the southeast diagonal, and even areas where the blade just barely passes concrete leave a long dragging slash mark in the concrete.
COMBATSYS: Kula blocks Seishirou's Senchakiri.
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Kula 1/------=/=======|====---\-------\0 Seishirou
The blade whistles, its speed terrifying, its edge putting razors to shame. A rustle of cloth is audible as its target reacts, and then a yellow leather glove, the back of it slashed open, spattered with blood, arcs through the air to land softly on nearby grass.
But that is now. What transpired seconds before is pertinent.
He lectures on the difference reasons people follow and she listens, still pulling sharp shards from her skin to cast them aside. Freedom and the lack thereof. The difference between those who follow Igniz like her and those who follow him; the difference between the rogue she was supposed to kill and herself. There is that slightest twitch before she attacks. Perhaps that, alone, was sufficient to give him warning as her compsure continues to be tested by the pain of his attack, the war within, and his words.
The girl's stocking clad legs attempt to twist Seishirou to the ground long enough to leave him vulnerable to a punishing follow up attack. It isn't to be. Her right foot collides with Kenhou with so much force that the buckle on her shoe snaps cleanly and by the time she draws her feet back, holding back the punch that was to be, the dress shoe is left lying next to the sword, drops of blood rolling over its polished surface.
Even in her condition, she can track him. Her chi may be locked off but her precisely honed combat instincts, her nigh super-human speed... those are still at her disposal. She doesn't move, remaining crouched. Kaitaijuzu remains strong, assaulting her chi paths savagely. Never before has she been rendered so helpless by a technique. He descends with speed and that ornamental blade that is anything but a harmless decoration. It's too fast, she can't escape. But without armor, she can't defend herself either.
That she isn't slashed savagely is a feat of reflex and instinct in perfect communion. The only part of her body armored well enough to take the hit is her hands - those precious leather gloves providing the protection she needs. Her right hand snaps to her left wrist as her left arm moves into the blow. If she were so foolish as to simply block it directly, she would be bereft a hand. Instead she turns her arm to the side at the perfect moment, causing the blade to glance off the back of her glove, tearing into it and ripping it from off her hand.
A soft hiss accompanies the sound of the glove landing in the grass as Kula draws her left hand back in, craddling it tenderly, ignoring the bleeding slice long the back of her hand. The difference between losing a hand and receiving that shallow slash came down to the difference of a width of a single human hair. The mathmatic metrics behind it defy comprehension. Such is the speed of instinct combined with ever growing experience. She's evolving. Even now, she begins to fight off that chi of his within her. It's a slow war, but her formidable aura is beginning to win, muffling some of the explosions of chi within her body.
She rises up to standing, drops of blood from the back of her hand falling to the grass to join that which was already lost, and then she turns on Seishirou. He has delineated the gulf that exists between her, the loyal pet weapon of NESTS, and those he choses to ally himself with. He's judging her and it only irritates her further, because on some level that baffles her, she cares about that judgement. Perhaps it was an oversight on the part of the genetic engineers to design a weapon that was so dependant on seeking approval from those over her to fuel her motivations. They no doubt never anticipated that there would be others to whom she would look to for acceptance or feedback. Of all people, they could not have predicted that it would be the likes of her targets, the rogue experiment, K', and the terrorist, Seishirou.
She wavers. What does he have - what does K' have that's so special? "How are you different from those I serve? Those who follow you may have different reasons for doing so... but what have your ideals gotten you? What will your goals get you? Are you going to become a god just like them? Just like all the others?" The Vegas... the Rugals... the world is full of them. What's the difference? She gets a warm, safe home, the food she needs, and a lot of... shallow attention.
Unclutching her hand, the girl goes back on the offense. She may ask him what his ideals are, but she can also force him to prove just how important they are when his life is on the line. Her aggressive speed has not slowed in the slightest as she leaps into the air into a graceful spin. Snapping out of it, she aims to drive a heel into his shoulder in route to landing close to him.
If she manages to sink that heel, she'll reach out for his hair, one gloved hand, one bare hand, and draw him in with the downward momentum already inflicted upon him all so that she can bring a knee directly up into the young man's face - first once, then a second time before twisting him to the ground with her tight grip. If she can break him, then all his judgement is for nought. Meaningless words if he can't back it up with strength that true purpose would grant him in her mind...
COMBATSYS: Seishirou fails to counter Medium Kick from Kula with Kawarimi Suicide.
# Disabling hit! #
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Kula 1/-----==/=======|======-\-------\0 Seishirou
COMBATSYS: Kula has left the fight here.
[ \\\\\\\\\\ <
Seishirou 0/-------/--=====|
The initial form of Kaitaijuzu, the Kaitaijuzu A, was meant to dismantle malfunctioning ninkou. A tool was necessary for the task, as such a thing is terrifying to see. A rocket or a bomb only explodes once, but a ninkou could explode many times over, again and again.. When outside of his control, a ninkou could become a very ugly thing indeed. The B form was merely an application of a grade suitable to deal with the more complex auras surrounding other fighters.
He tests her, measures her as he can. The situation is different from when it was before. Before, by find him, by defeating him, Kula proved that she was worth his time. Now he seeks her out directly as an impediment to some goal of his. Though she will never know the truth of it, there is more. Ryouhara looks at her differently. He pushes her, forces her to move against him in all of her deepest instinctive ways, forcing her to respond.
It is the only reason someone like him would speak at all.
Interesting, then, that he treats Kula now much like he would any other malfunctioning ninkou.
Though for someone like Ryouhara, for whom all the world is a machine with everyone playing their individual parts to create 'history'.. is that really out of the ordinary?
He is impressed. For a moment he was convinced she was about to lose a hand to Senchakiri's edge, to become K9999's successor as a name on Senchakiri's list. Where she differs from K9999 is that she is able to perceive the deadly mathematical upset between 'proximity' and 'probable damage' that Senchakiri presents. And, in fact, were Senchakiri any other blade, she would have cleared the weapon entirely, with only perhaps a scratch or nick of the armor for her trouble. Had it been any other. Had she thought anything else.
It is not.
She does not.
The glove falls into the grass, subject underneath the placid eye of the Ryouhara shinobi, turning his head slightly to glance in its direction, flicking the blade of Senchakiri to cast off the single drop of blood that sits on its edge. He frowns. The damage wasn't sufficient to justify the amount of resharpening he'd need to do to maintain that edge. Not sufficient on its own, anyway.
A glove falls, then a shoe. Piece by piece, the guise Kula was forced to masquerade in falls away. As far as Ryouhara was concerned... they were both facades. The product of pointless consumerism on one end, and pointless engineering on the other. Hence this much--as she sacrifices ground to him physically, she gains spiritually. Within, that time limit on Kaitaijuzu's operation fades, a countdown to the 108th bead, the last operator mantra in the procession. She evolves.
Inscrutable by nature, he seems not to notice it at all..
Slipping as easily out of that spin as the morning rain, she slams into him with full force, driving his light frame back only just so--the margin calculated to such extent that it exactly matches the length of both of her hands. His face slams into her knee once--twice, emitting a choking gasp from the shinobi as her body snaps taut against him, flicking him towards the earth, bleeding--
--he dissipates into a wave of heat just before impact.
"..only a forty-five percent chance of success," Seishirou murmurs, what few artifact values of the santeijutsu used earlier flicking to mind, the few remaining that were relevant now that all factors have changed. "... a good success rate to seal you, but ultimately a mistake.."
In the distortion of air, he has changed location, crouched low near the gaping open window of the cafe, coincidentally near an unconscious giant yellow Sailor head, almost larger than himself. Boneless, the shinobi sways to a full stand. Senchakiri loose and held reverse at his hip, he runs a hand over his face--smearing the blood from his nose and forehead beneath dark black bangs in something resembling weariness. Though it is confusing, the damage Kula felt was real. What she experienced--not an illusion. The pain almost crushes his skull, giving him a headache. Though he moves quickly, imperceptibly, the blood is evident in that face, the wear evident in the wrinkle of his brow. At least, it will seem to be wear, if Kula doesn't catch the whites of his teeth in the shadow of his arm, showing Kula his fangs. He heard her question.
"...A god...?"
Snrk.
"heheh... hahaha... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!"
Never before has and never again will Seishirou's laughter be so bitterly genuine, or heartfelt.
His laughter fills the air with haunting clarity, at one of many punchlines to a joke that was never spoken. All of a sudden, the Ryouhara prodigy /understands/. His level of thought is intense. Kula intuits. Ryouhara examines. THere is a difference, and never is it more so apparent than now.
"Is that Igniz' goal? To become a god? No wonder NESTS engineering is so fucked up..."
Idealism is strong, and motivates those two, those men, Vega and Igniz. Gives them power that is just simply beyond most mortal's comprehension. But Seishirou has had a glimpse of what is possible with that idealism. And he comprehends it. "What point is there to trying to become a supreme power?" he suddenly asks, derision clear in his voice. Half-lidded eyes darken in countenance as more of those embers crawl through the air. Easily, his line of hypothetical questioning continues. Lazily, he gestures. "To be something you can never be. For what purpose?"
Dark lines steam, an incomprehensible amount of heat tracing circles and shapes within circles between the two, lines of steam curving before and behind Kula and Seishirou, boiling concrete and flash-frying grass.
"That as a goal alone... is just pointless vanity."
Ryouhara slides that free hand into his pocket. He watches Kula "For such a thing to be achieved, idealism comensurate with your goal is necessary. There are men who exist in this world who are almost completely living ambition. Igniz. Vega," he says the names. "Of those, both are vastly superior to me in strength." He fought Vega directly, who defeated his ideal. He has seen it already. And it is inspiring.. "But still no point. Because the strength of my idealism ... is beyond theirs. That is why history will favor me. What is my goal? Simple."
He envisions a world where the strength of the mind can prevail over the strength of the fist. Where brutes and fools are delegated to their proper place as servants of the truly strong. The ancient age where skill, not circumstance, determined the victor of the day. A better world, that favors the enlightened. A better world, that favors the evolved.
"I will change the world. My ideal... is one that dooms me."
They are sheathed in a giant kamon scorched into the ground, a ring sketched around whilring leaves in the wind. The seal of an ancient family that claimed their own nobility through civil war. At dead center of that family seal, the blade of Kenhou pierces into the earth. Seishirou stands at one end. Kula at the other.
"My ideal... is 'RYOUHARA.'"
COMBATSYS: Seishirou has left the fight here.
[ \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ <
Kula 1/-----==/=======|
COMBATSYS: Kula has ended the fight here.
Not once but twice she slams his face against her knee. That she releases him at all is that instinctive feeling that maintaining proximity for long and some other weapon will be put to use while she is again too close to escape. No - the girl has determined contact with the Ryouhara must be kept within certain limits. Slip in, strike, gain range. Staying close - that has enabled painful counter attacks. As blood drips down her once white apron, a wound sliced open by one of those countless shards of glass, Kula lets go.
He cites numerical odds of success but the look on her face suggests that she might not be listening - or if she is, she doesn't understand. It would hardly be surprising. If his intent is to seal her, her intent is to end him. A goal she senses she may be drawing near. Even denied her precious ice the girl is a living weapon, a life with a singular purpose.
She whirls around without hesitation, long, auburn locks trailing a split second behind as she faces spots him near the building where this deadly dance began. "The mistake was coming here." she declares, no less convinced of that than she was the moment he arrived, scattering hapless Sentai out of his path. She was worried for a moment, and while anger burned beneath the surface of the normally freezing girl, her control had not. Fear is difficult to install in something designed to fight and die for Igniz's cause. They saw to that.
And then he laughs. In a single phrase the construct had unwittingly shown him the focused goal of the god of NESTS. His reaction catches her by surprise and the girl pauses, keeping her distance. Her thoughts are still split, her concentration divided. There is a fight to continue in the great within. Not one of ideals or ideas, but of survival, fighting against that which so actively seeks to keep her power sealed.
She doesn't answer when he asks if that is the goal of Igniz. It's written in her disconcerted expression. He asks her what the point of such a pursuit would be and she stares back silently as if she had never so much as once considered why Igniz shouldn't become a divine being. He just should. It is all Kula has ever known. One may as well ask her why fire burns. She doesn't need to think about it - it just simply does. The purpose... the /reason/ has never mattered to her before. Now it does.
The area is awash with Seishirou's chi, heated circles burning into the surface of the ground at her side, smoke rising from scorched grass. Without her own aura to repell it, the heat is intense. He admits to the superior strength of he who commands her. She also knows well the terror of being in Vega's way. But what he claims to possess is something far more difficult for the artificial life to understand. The strength of his idealism... he claims it defies theirs. That there is power more important than the might Igniz commands; the power she represents as his representative in matters he need not dirty his hands. She may have nearly just caved in his face - and might even have done so with one more strike - but that isn't the proof Kula expected it to be.
The wind picks up, a swirl of leaves carried past the girl before being burned into a flash of ember and the girl glances down to spy the large crest between her and him. A short gasp escapes her lips, the girl looking taken aback, tensing, recoiling, ready to flee the circle's proximity as if it were the precursor to something deadly. She is silent for the longest time. He would know it by then. That the war within has been won. Her power could be sealed only for so long. Violet eyes glance up from scorched seal, vision tracing over Kenhou, before coming to rest on Seishirou himself.
The girl takes in a deep breath then exhales slowly. A second breath, a second exhale as she slowly raises her face to the sky above, extending her arms out to the side at a bit of an angle. She half closes her eyes and in that moment unleashes her power once more. It courses over her, a blanket of white that rises up from toe to head, vanishing a split second later. As she lowers her face to be level once more, her hair has become that notable frozen blue, like a winter sky the day after a storm. And contrasted against that hair, her eyes now crimson hued, focus back on Seishirou.
The girl raises her right hand, clenching it into a fist. It still bears her yellow glove while her left does not. "Seishirou Ryouhara. You better run. If I get my hands on you... your ideals die here." She had threatened him before - advised him to abandon his goals and run. But at the time, when he first arrived, it was more of a taunt uttered out of petulant reluctance to deal with him at the time. Spoken now, her tone is different. As if she was warning him. As if she was making it clear that in falling into her grasp, he was leaving her No. Choice. in the matter. She will have to kill him. He might even get the impression that she isn't as eager for this outcome as she had sounded at the outset.
"History will forget your name if you fall here." She sounds almost disappointed in this declared outcome. The death of ideals she sees as the inevitable result of prolonged battle... Is this truly to be the final cry of the Ryouhara?
COMBATSYS: Kula gains composure.
[ \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ < > ////////// ]
Kula 1/------=/=======|=====--\-------\0 Seishirou
It would seem that was to be the site of the battle. Drawing battle lines in the sand, Seishirou made his goals as clear cut for Kula as he has ever made them, to anyone save his apprentice. The grounds were marked clear where the winner of the fight would be determined, drawn in dark carbon with even darker will, the heat of Seishirou a thing alive until the very earth itself is branded with his will.
He steps forward, sniffing away idle droplets of dark blood from his nose placidly, watching Kula's wary response evenly. Even as he does, he knows his Kaitaijuzu has run its 108 bead course on her, inflicting massive amounts of damage, but yet still leaving her standing. Her aura strengthens and though he already knows from simple calculation the end of the dusk, he would have known it ended otherwise just from the air. The crawling expanse of the sky slowly turning blue about her, and a bitter taste of chill dancing off his tongue.
The embers of his force of will drift near Kula, only to be frozen where they stray too close, dropping to the earth as if rendered impotent with twice the zealous efficiency.
He blinks once as the tint returns to her hair and the cold fire to her blood. But from the idle tilt of his hip, it discourages him not in the slightest. Not at all. The spectrally sharp blade of Senchakiri comes to bear on Kula as he holds it out at length lazily, as if Seishirou merely extended an arm instead of that magnificently fanged ninkou tool. It centers on her, his eyes calm, the tilt of his brow subtle and unexaggerated. Simple.
"That.. is your first mistake."
His voice is light now, losing the ferocity it had just a moment prior. The reason for that is simple: the topic he is discussing no longer involves his family. He speaks now, noninvestment again making him seem a reflection of Kula's chill demeanor. "You see.. you can kill a man, but your strength is not of the kind needed to kill an idea. By your hand, my ideal will never die."
He slings the spine of the blade across his shoulder, the ornament chain hanging from the pommel making a soft steel noise as he steps forward. He will make use of his blade here to disassemble Kula to her basic elements, if needed. Dark rills of energy begin to crawl from Senchakiri's edge, heating the steel in patterns refining it to sharpness as a stopgap for his real forging jutsu. That is the difference between himself and Igniz, you see. While Igniz deploys killers to deal with anything and anyone he can't be bothered to dirty his hands with in the pursuit of godhood, Seishirou would die at the hands of any one of them, if he thought it would accomplish his goal.
History will forget his name? "I hope that it does."
He readies himself for the attack, plans forming in his mind. Using Kenhou's ninkoujutsu as the source of a matrix for another Ryouhara Copy, he will use an enhanced speed to attack Kula directly from behind with Senchakiri. His body is bleeding and beaten, blood was welling in his sinuses and causing dimness in the left side of his vision. But nothing about him really matters. His work is not yet done. He slips low, into an attack posture. This will be fast.
"'Ryouhara.' That is all that history needs to recall."
Kula continues her declaration, continues speaking to him. And what he realizes is.. Kula's delcaration is not so much taunting him as it is.. warning him.
".... Saa..." he breathes outward slowly, his blade lowering to his side. Sliding gently into the oiled leather at his back, Senchakiri makes little more than a muted whisper, the hiss of its cooling steel meeting the suspension ninkou oils that keep it from cutting out of its own sheathe. "Pointless," he suddenly concludes, an unnerving lilt entering his voice, entirely too gentle to actually /be/ the terrorist Ryouhara. "I'm done here. Continuing onward would just mean I get beaten up by that ice of yours a little more.." A concession? No.
Run? Che. That sort of thing is reserved for crass pigs. He thrusts out a hand and the glint of a line appears around Kenhou's hilt, only briefly visible in the light before the weapon flicks into the air, caught by him easily. "I'd like to fight you," he states easily, sliding the simplistic ninkou into another sheath in the array with a click. "As a test of my own limits. But right now, your intentions are empty. As I said. You don't have a mind strong enough to kill me."
Slowly, methodically, he turns and walks away, presenting Kula with a glance of the Ryouhara symbol, a mirror of the grounds here, emblazoned on his back. He leaves slowly, oddly walking away, when he could simply vanish and no one, not evne Kula, could stand a chance in hell of following him. He seems to do it deliberately, as if he doesn't care if Kula has a shot at him. He invites her to do so. "You're not ready yet," he explains. "When your body is perfect, the mind is the only thing left. Leave this world of mine.. Gain an ideal. Something that gives you real strength, not illusory strength. And when you have something that you believe.. ...Then, come before me."
That's the difference. Seishirou never said Kula would succeed in killing him.
"See. You're wrong."
There was never any threat in that circle he delineated.
None at all.
"..I don't think it was a mistake at all..."
COMBATSYS: Seishirou gains composure.
[ \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ < > ///////////// ]
Kula 1/------=/=======|====---\-------\0 Seishirou
He steps into the circle; into the fabricated arena. He has laid out as plainly as anyone save one has had the privelege to hear. It isn't to achieve godhood like the tyrants of the world. Titans wage war to find the ultimate secret of divinity but the young man standing before her isn't like them. As he tried to explain to Igniz's youngest follower before - those who follow him are different. Not movited by greed or power - theirs is a higher order of ideal - the world could be better, more enlightened. And they shall make it so.
She stares back at him silently, not stepping foot within that scorched circumference. His words echo in her mind, but her psyche struggles with the concepts. Perhaps there are those who could explain them to her in simple terms. Perhaps the ideas are too deep for such simplification - ideas best understood on one's own, little by little, the mere thought of them encouraging growth and advanced thought.
Her power unsealed, she believes herself once again the hunter who's prey seems to not yet understand his plight. But then again... how could she expect him to care? He has already declared his vision, his deal will be the doom of him. What menace could she possibly hold next to such inevitability? The death she promises him is swift. The girl is ruthless but not a sadist. He has seen her instruments of assassination in action. She need only weaken him and end it. Already, her strength renewed, her combat algorithms spin back up to full potential. Everything about this encounter and their prior one in the distant desert is compiled into routines - each of them dedicated to the demise of the terrorist standing before her. He steps forward, a man condemned, expecting no stay of execution when the time comes. No hesitation. No fear.
It slowly sinks into her as to why. The death she promises holds no finality for his /cause/. She cannot kill an idea. The words shock young Diamond, causing her to recoil, right hand tightening, faint whisps of white coiling up through her fingers. Should it matter? Does she want to destroy his idea? Does that inability to do so change anything at all? Why does it bother her? That he has something so core to his existence that is beyond her capacity to destroy? She holds nothing sacred that cannot be taken away yet what truly matters to this young man is beyond such limits.
Her warning rings out. Her precisely honed instructions demand that she kill him. Those are her orders. And as he drops his sword to his side, it seems the opportunity to do so is all too real. The glorious blade is sheathed, the battle at hand declared pointless. Kula's right arm lowers slowly, the silent chi still curling up and around her wrist and forearm. He retrieves Kenhou, flicking it back into his grasp with the tug of a wire gone unnoticed. He's done here.
The assassin's jaw tightens as he declares her young mind unfit to kill him. Her left hand ignites with that white, brutally cold energy, the chi beginning to damage the bare flesh where her glove should be. She told him he should run. A concession to that inkling of a thought that in slaying the Ryouhara scion, she would be putting a stop to something bigger than NESTS, greater than Igniz. Something precious that should not be destroyed. But he turns his back on her, inviting an attack, and the girl takes umbrage. It's all her killing directives need in order to take over again. Here is her target. Her next course of action has never been more clear.
She takes a step forward, over the scorched line. The ground at her feet begins to reflect the blue sky overhead as a remarkably thin sheen of ice begins to spread out from her. If he escapes, he could attack again. If she does nothing, she will have to answer for it if anyone finds out. For long, painful moments, he kept her chi at bay. But now that energy demands to be released. And the slowly departing ninja shall be its target.
The girl takes another step forward and the slick continues to expand. Vapor rises up from its surface, the sun overhead mirrored flawlessly in its frictionless surface. She told him to run but such craven retreats are not for Seishirou Ryouhara. Another step forward is taken. "I will obtain an ideal." She won't have him lording such concepts over her from the afterlife where she is about to send him. "But-" Kula leans forward, knees bent, planting her palms flat against the ground. "I will not be able to seek out a dead man."
The flesh of her left hand bleeds. Not just from the injury inflicted by the slightest glancing contact of Senchakiri. Her chi freezes her exposed skin brittle, cracks and creases forming, causing blood to spill down over her bare hand. The crimson victory spills over her hand, spreading over the ice. The vapor rising up from her left side takes on an a pink hue and smells of blood.
The entire crest becomes covered with that expanding ice just before the first spire explodes out of the ground. Jagged, countless crystals of ice, fused together with singular purpose, surge up at an angle in front of Seishirou, aiming to lacerate the front of him. The first one is huge - by the time it reaches its full height it blocks out the sun, the formation over ten feet wide at the base.
But it is only the first of many to follow. Another rises from the left side. This one shimmers with a tint of pink, infused with a small portion of the young experiment's own blood, aiming to continue the savage job that the first one began. A third rises next, this one sparkling like a metric ton of diamond crystal, the sky filled with a spray of tiny shards that fly up in the face of such crushing momentum.
More spires follow, their creator encased in a field of brilliantly white, blazing chi that burns cooler than the most distant comet as the girl continues to pour all that pent up power into that most deadly attack.
COMBATSYS: Seishirou dodges Kula's Diamond Edge.
[ \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ < > ///////////// ]
Kula 0/-------/-------|====---\-------\0 Seishirou
Adelheid says, "She is nice to me."
COMBATSYS: Seishirou has left the fight here.
[ \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ <
Kula 0/-------/-------|
COMBATSYS: Kula has ended the fight here.
"No point."
No point...
No point...
Every point.
She falters as he speaks, underneath eyes of a careful study. It is part of the reason why Seishirou elects to lower his blade here. He has no interest in killing Kula--truthfully as he has said, he never really has. Disability. Dismantling. Those are his goals today and if it is true, what he has seen in those childlike red eyes, there is truly no more reason to fight her. But he is not sure. And when it comes to the world, Seishirou is never sure of anything but what can be measured with his own mind.
That is the reason why he turns that kamon at his back upon her and walks away so intentionally. That is the reason why Ryouhara does not vanish. Were Kula to be lain down in a bloody mess right now, there would be no reason for his slow walk, this deliberated retreat. Seishirou moves with the shadows as instinctively as Kula draws upon that killing ice now. Accustomed to the biting chill of the wind beneath him as he walks on the the breeze and the terrifying blindess of the dark that he speeds through--it is no serious effort for him anymore.
It is even something more than base pride.
She slips her hands against the earth, and beckons the butchery forward. Crests reflecting her deadly resolve at all sides flooding all about her, she measures her attack.
The youth pauses.
Stopping, he looks curiously to the side and over a shoulder, silken bangs moving only faintly with the motion, almost lazy in countenance. He almost misses it. An eyelid flicks open just a bit as the first of the spires breaks earth and blooms with razor fine targetting at his chest, seeking his heart.
He hadn't the 'blood' to withstand such a thing. He is almost torn in half by that first spire alone, his limbs swaying like a rag doll's as literal tons of frigid destiny rips him wide open, his pupils dialating in pure shock as yet another spire catches him from the side, ripping out his spirit and impaling it too--a thing congealed into another facet of Ryouhara, a grim boy in a light blue jacket wearing the headband of the Leaf as another spire rips into him as well--producing a young man in something like a monk's clothes. Another splits off, impaling him again. This time it is a youth no older than 5, a cheerful boy with hair longer than heaven--
Another, and another spire. Endlessly, the spires find him.
Endlessly they find more facets of what is fundamentally.. the same thing.
By the time the butchery is finished, they all look the same, limp forms of the dark clad Seishirou that engaged Kula today, all impaled on that gallery of agony, each twitching in the throes of death. The shock of their fate has not yet reached them in meaningful ways, meaningful ways more than their eyes would reveal. Immobilized. Dying slowly, a score of kills for Kula to count in that glittering rain. But they are not dead yet. And slowly, a symphony of lips move in mismatched timing to say different iterations of the same thing.
"Why do you persist."
"Why kill me?"
"Is it your orders?"
"It's okay, I'll die for you.."
"I cannot be killed so easily."
"Why even think this way?"
"Don't you understand the meaning?"
"Until my goals are complete."
"No mercy, is there.."
Why. why. Why. Why? Why.
"Why."
He is /right behind her/.
There is no sound beyond his word. All a test to see if she would really let him leave. That would have provided the proof that his job was done. Clearly, it has not. There was never any threat in that 'ideal' he wrote upon the earth. It was never any exploding seal, never any sealing mark. But it was written with his own chi. And moving chi through the earth on that magnitude does cause the residual focusi of his chi to react in ways that he can notice. He seems unconcerned about standing on the ice slick, and one could imagine that he would have good reason--Kula's ice, even having returned anew, is still raw, and there is a still a good quantity of her chi tied up in the ice slick at her feet, and the massive spires before her. It is still a gamble. He stands behind her now, his hands still sheathed in his pockets as if he intends only to speak. His words are mirrored by every single one of the dying Ryouhara butchered on Kula's deadly encasement. Starting with that first: Why.
"Do you need help?" he asks quietly, solemnly. "To silence your mind?" He thinks on it. "... fine."
He makes no move to attack. He has no chance to. His eyes widen as a blade plunges through his chest, a long trapezoidal shape sliding past steel, bone and flesh as if they were little more than paper. Plunging through his midsection at an angle as it seeks to find Kula's body with the faint jingle of the Steel Leaf chain hanging from its pommel. The tool Senchakiri impales him, held by its true master. A real Seishirou Ryouhara, standing in the shadow of the duplicate, one of many employed in the last few moments.
He is silent in his works.
Lifting her slowly by the end of that blade if he can truly attack her successfully here, a twist of the blade will inflict incalculable damage and flicker the chi-matrix of his 'agent' into disappearing, little more than a heat haze on the wind..
COMBATSYS: Kula dodges Seishirou's Kawarimi Suicide.
[ \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ < > //////////// ]
Kula 0/-------/-------|==-----\-------\0 Seishirou
Fragments of multicolored ice scatter across the slick that has become the surface of the earth. Pink, blood tainted crystals, others as translucent as the finest diamond, others the rich blue of an artic glacier. Her hair settles down, the brutally cold energy coursing over her body coming to a rest, drawn back within that living chi capacitor. Her head bowed, she is slow to move, crimson eyes coming to rest on a sharp edged chunk of ice that slides into her limited view of the slick beneath her. Its jagged tips are anointed with blood that is not hers.
So it is finished. Like the playwrite who failed to write an ending to any of his plays, the machinations of Seishirou Ryouhara have come to an end. She looks up slowly, hands still propping her up against the ground, attention shifting to the primary spire and the body fastened to it. Like a moth pinned by a curious child's needle, the Ryouhara heir is dead. She closes her eyes slowly, lowering her head again, her hair draped down around her face. It takes a small amount of effort to break her left hand free, the blood that had seeped from her opened wounds having solidified against the ice, leaving her palm frozen, encased in her own element. With a grunt, she pulls it free, breaking her hand loose from the ice and rises back to standing straight, her arms resting against her sides.
She glances up again to inspect the summit upon which Seishirou was speared. But this time she notices that there is not simply one body but many. Bodies mounted upon a sea of needles, each one bearing a mask of shock, each one a bleeding, shattered corpse to be. Many of the razor edged tips are coated with blood even as they stay standing, a forest of murderous stalagmites of ice. A soft intake of breath heralds her surprise at the grotesque sight. And that's before they begin to speak.
An entire team of speaking Seishirou's addresses the young experiment as Kula quicky glances over her collection of victims that can't possibly be real for all the horrific detail each entails. He attacks with that most excruciating of questions. It can cause tyrants to pause and wise men to wrestle with endless theories and postulates; parents to groan and children to scowl petulantly.
'Why?'
There are the obvious ideas and reasons. It could be loyalty. Engineered, brainwashed, refined to be the docile, cooperative living weapon that she has become - such an upbringing must hold incredible sway over her actions. But that loyalty has begun to wane, young Diamond having begun taking actions contrary to the will of NESTS when she thinks she won't get caught. Sparing Whip's life and swearing off her hunt of K'; shoving poor Shurui out of the path of Igniz's murderous Ideon Blade while making it seem like an accident... Cracks have begun to forum in that flawless loyalty of hers.
She looks bewildered. Others have asked her 'why?' before. The grey-haired accountant who thought to play games with NESTS' finances that she was dispatched to kill. The poor, low ranking NESTS employee let loose in a forest for Kula to hunt as just one of her countless, soul-rending training exercises. Scattered across the days of the two years of Kula's 'active service' are the bodies of those who asked, in their final, desperate pleas, 'why?' In each and every case, the very focused killer had finished her job without hesitation.
Asked now - on the field of fire and ice - she hesitates. As the questions echo out, her bleeding left hand raises, coming to rest with fore and middle fingers against her forehead, her thumb against her cheek, covering her left eye as if she seeks to assuage an ache caused by the attack of so many questions.
She whirls around in an instant, ever so much faster when moving atop that frictionless ice of her making. The expression across her visage is one of confusion mingled with frustration. Why indeed? Those crimson eyes fix on him, mouth drawn back, the tips of her upper teeth visible as she breaths heavily. Her chi is divested, sustaining that slick and the mountain range of ice that failed to achieve their goal. It requires effort even from the likes of her. The chorus of voices rises up again as they inquire as to her need for help and she screams her reply, "I want what you have!!" A goal, a meaning, a purpose that extends far beyond simply being dragged to the far corners of the earth to kill, fight, then kill some more. But for K''s rebellion she may not have even been granted life. But for K', she has no purpose.
He makes good on his offer to help by bringing that fated blade to bear once again. Reducing the chi copy to a hazy field of heat in its death spasm, Senchakiri's trajectory would take it directly through her blood splotched apron into Kula's abdomen. But even now, her reflexes prove formidable as previously in that moment in time in which she is forced to make her defense. Twisting to the side in and of itself would not have been sufficient. The blade would have still flayed her skin in the process, leaving a grevious wound even without spearing through her.
It is her right hand that makes that crucial, miniscule difference, as she snaps it to her side toward the legendary blade, forefinger pressing against the flat of the blade just enough to adjust its trajectory that fractional distance off course. It burries itself through the lacy black dress just above her waist, taking a swath of the fabric with it, leaving her belly exposed - a fine red line of sliced flesh evidence of just how close the grazing slash was. Her right hand is extended across her stomach, finger pointing, having prodded the blade aside a miniscule fraction, coupled with her own bodily twisting and turning to avoid the worst of the blow.
Like a child frustrated at their inability to obtain something they want, Kula lashes right back out at the Ryouhara with her left hand, forcing herself to expose it to that ruthless element once again. A flash of white becomes a sphere of translucent ice - the fixed pommel to the three lances extending from that mass of ice that aim to spear directly through the image of Seishirou she faces now. It might not even be him. It could just be another illusion, another trick of the eye, of precise chi matrix manipulation on a scale that staggers the mind.
Given how viciously fast the attack targets him, he might very well hope so. Behind Kula, the frozen spires begin to collapse into cumbersome mounds of unshaped ice as her chi control becomes focused elsewhere. The ice slick beneath their feet remains solid however.
COMBATSYS: Seishirou fails to interrupt Fierce Punch from Kula with Kunai Critical.
[ \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ < > /////// ]
Kula 0/-------/------=|===----\-------\0 Seishirou
COMBATSYS: Kula has left the fight here.
[ \\\\\\\ <
Seishirou 0/-------/---====|
Even free of protection, the chill energy Kula wields is deadlier to her opponents than it ever can or will be to her own body.
The bizarre trapezoid-form katana slips past Diamond little more than a blurred streak of steel. Were it any more to one direction or another, it would have been a skewering blow--Seishirou's Senchakiri was not a blade that operated in half-measures, even its lighting touch a thing of agony. No. Diamond does not simply twist to the side, but redirects the thing itself with a hand, and when Senchakiri stops, its edge is lined faint red with Kula's blood, though in truth it never came too much nearer her than the lace of her dress--it would be difficult to see where it sliced through on a cursory examination.
But the Ryouhara shinobi's eyes are sharp. Sharp enough to be impressed that Kula seems to have intuited the nature of his steel so simply and easily. This will be perhaps the second time she has avoided becoming a living filet at his thin work-worn hand.
Eyes half-lidded, lazily magnanimous, he seems neither jostled nor perturbed in the slightest by her rejection of the fate 'pon a line he'd cast to her. In truth, he seems not focused at all on that thing, that thing alone being only a singular title in the library casement that is Kula Diamond fixing his attention now. It is not an interest of reason, the interest of a thing filled with complex referential texts, dry and dull as they might be. But a Persephone interest of passing; the children's rack holds much in the way of imagination and art if one were to drop all pretense and consider truly the root of what lay there.
Thus is the highest authority of Kagero's nature of interest.
Curiosity, even at the chilling bite of ice.
She seemed very much the petulant child for a moment, and it struck Ryouhara as almost endearing in a fashion, the nature of a young thing who had learned of the nature of death in the wrong way. Ryouhara imagines that even as chi slips from her frostbitten fingers and truthfully /through/ him. Eis lanze. The truth was, as he slid across the slick until he reached the end of it, impalement's blood spreading through three segments of his loose-fit black shirt, it was his intent all along to receive those deadly points. The hitch of the triple threat is kept shy of lethality only by the twist of his body, and the internal shift of his chi and even then, only just so.
His attention.. had prior been focused elsewhere.
She had said something..
He chuckles low, his spine arched and his body turned back just so that the blood trailing from his lip collects just underneath the ridge of his collarbone, his shirt just shy of slipping from his shoulder with the savage blow tripled upon his admittedly faulted body. That... was one of the curses of Ryouhara as well. A thing to be made peace with, it is filed in the back of Seishirou's ordered memory, a detail not taken offense to, but merely meditated upon for the sight of another, more interesting fact.
She wants.. what he has?
"....You want what?" he asks, "To live without limits? To possess... this ideal of mine?"
"Is it something you even really know?" Fingers drop away. His arms slacken at his sides. The point of Senchakiri rotates slowly in that lazy and loose grip until the hilt, a thing of equal parts function and ornament, suspends in only his first three fingers in an odd kind of contemplative fashion. The reason why gangsters display that butcherous act as a show of humility, most of kenjutsu's strength came from the last finger and up, not the inverse. Logic well known to both Ryouhara and Kula.
He wonders..
"It isn't that easy. I have met men with all kinds of dreams and all kinds of goals. Alma to Vega. And none of them gained what they had gained through laziness." He still believes this: "Dreams are not the same as ideals. It is one thing to have ambition. But for someone who only knows how to kill, ambition is pointless--"
He thrusts his arm. Flicks his wrist.
Senchakiri does not rely on power.
Thin coins of ice hit the ground as Ryouhara breaks free.
"--It's just pointless whining!!"
It's like a warzone out here. In the wake of Kula's technique, his copies lay scattered here and there in the cold slush, with the colorful bodies of the soldiers also vanquished at the beginning of the fight. Some of those copies are period clones, dissipating into steam on the spot. Others just twitch periodically, shocked eyes empty and wide. Standing before a field of his own bodies, his arm is stretched and high, the blade still held as loose as it ever was, Ryouhara's dark brown eyes give Kula a look rosined in pure chill belief. Utter conviction. He bleeds profusely, and every declaration of his physical body is the shriek of 'deliverance'--but Ryouhara's mind is clear. Unlike Kula, there is no one for those like him. There is no one else.
He breathes hard, in long, thick gasps that twist his chest.
He is his -own- deliverance.
"Ambition is nothing without the will to mean it!!!"
Come to him with any less and just get your throat cut.
She screams. Then punctuates her declaration with the sound of slivered ice piercing into the body of the Ryouhara. The space in which to react would have been so preciously narrow as the girl unleashes one of her more leathal strikes. Consisting of three lancing spears, each strong enough to puncture solid metal, it would take someone paying the utmost attention to avoid their savage intent - to be distracted, even for an instant, wouldn't be enough. But Seishirou knows that now. He also knows how to survive the killing blow. Someone simply observing would have believed the young man to have not reacted at all with the way those now bloodied spears pierce through him. But Kula knows - she can sense the subtle, almost impossibly minute adjustments he makes in order to prevent a fatal injury.
From behind the weapon, her left hand fixed within the frozen pommel, crimson eyes stare back at him. Vapor from the now slowly melting slick at their feet rises up between the two of them, the color of magma-orange reflecting the sun that has begun to sink in the distant horizon as late afternoon slowly becomes something else entirely. She perceive those sharp, attentive eyes studying her back - seeing not the wince of pain but the curse of curiosity, hearing the that low, soft chuckle of a man condemned of his own free will.
He speaks and she answers with silence. To live without limits. To sieze an ideal so strong as to propel her as it does him. He asks if she can know and she is unable to reply. She doesn't know. She doesn't even begin to know what she doesn't know. But in her mind that doesn't change anything at all. Just as one can observe the effects of of a gentle zypher without being able to see it, the girl can see what the chi engineer's purpose has done for him. And she wants that.
He speaks of the range of men he has met: tyrants and altruists. People who have worked hard for what their dreams, goals, and ideals. What has she done? Sighing at being dragged to fights by those interested in studying her combat potential. Sitting down when an unimportant sanctioned match isn't going her way and simply giving up. Scared and frightened in her own home, afraid that someone will learn her secrets and she will lose what little she has. Afraid to lose, afraid to love something that can be torn asunder by something as common place as a young man's temper tantrum.
It has been said - Write a wise saying and your name will live forever. And as the girl gasps, drawing back as Seishirou frees himself, the wisdom of his declaration has clearly struck even her young mind in a way that she will never forget. She has had dreams. When alone in quiet places, she has thought of what she would like. Impossible dreams; to have a mother, a father. To live in such a way as to have a group of dear, precious friends, like in all the children's shows Angel has had her watch from time to time. To know what it is like to have others that don't just need you for what you can do but want you for who you are. But they had always just been dreams. The great 'what ifs', 'maybe whens', and 'perhaps somedays' uttered over the ages of man by those who never lifted a finger to change their station in life.
The sliced segments of steel-like ice fall to the ground, two of them spinning in place before falling onto their sides, shiny side up, before they begin to melt along with the rest of that vast expanse of blood streaked ice left in the wake of Kula's attacks. As transient as the paper thin dreams she had harbored within the silent chambers of her frozen soul, steam rises up as ice, super-heated by Seishirou's proximity, envelopes the two of them; leaving them to see each other as if through a mist covered mirror.
'Pointless whining.' To declare what one wants but not be willing to execute what it takes to achieve it. Her jaw snaps shut, lips drawn back just slightly, a short hiss escaping between her teeth. There is a spark of something in her eyes - a child's desires pricked by the harsh pin of reality. It takes more than simply 'wanting' something. He has given her, in his words, his actions, perhaps the most powerful lecture on ideals ever demonstrated. It isn't just wanting. It isn't just believing. Nor dreaming. The idiom 'blind ambition' is not without its significance here.
She wrestles with those instructions within. Killing routines, orders, programming that seeks to drive her limbs like a puppetmaster does a marionette. Attack again. Kill him. Serve her purpose - her purpose is to kill. It is all that she knows. But that isn't what she /wants/. She did, before. But then her resolve waned only to be sparked again by him boldly turning his back. But now she realizes she didn't want to kill him - she wanted to take what he had because she did not have it. To rob from him that ideal, to take from him the untakeable. It has dawned on her that such a thing is beyond impossible - it is unfathomable. No one can take that from him. No one can kill it.
Can she even possess that will he indicates? Is it within her ability? Her left hand clenches and the sphere of ice that had mounted the lances a moment before shatters, falling to the ground. Blood drips from splits along her ice-exposed skin, mixing with that already blended into the ice at her feet. He's been poking at her, prodding her this entire time. But not in the same way the researchers at NESTS do. They see the weapon that needs inspecting, but he studies her on a different level. He forces her to question, not just the world but herself. What are her limits? Can she ever grow past that for which she was made? If she couldn't, would that not imply a flaw in her craftmanship? The machine not conforming to its intended purpose? His observations, his remarks about how she falls short - she doesn't have the mind to kill him, he declared. She lacks the will to steer ambition's edge, to carve what she wants out of the world, he implies.
Maybe he's right, she ponders, staring back at the Ryouhara heir. Maybe she can't do any of that. Maybe her life is on rails; a singular track already laid out along a course she cannot alter. Slowly she lowers her arms to rest against her sides. Her eyes are on him but her thoughts are within - that introspection so deep as to sometimes be called soul searching. She ignores the bleeding in her left hand, or the many small cuts and puncture wounds left by his flock of flying glass. Maybe this is all she has ahead of her. This killing for causes she cares little about. That's what she was made for after all.
Her hands clench, jaw tightening, the sound of leather creaking on her right hand, or the squish of moist wounds on her left. No. "No." She can change that. She's already changed so much in the few months of life she has seen outside of the NESTS labs. It is impossible to keep her bottled up forever. That is the folley of the fanatical scientists - to think they can create life then control it. Life doesn't work like that. A single moment of epiphany can flood an entire life with meaning and then the shackles of control become insufficient to contain it.
The fields of ice around them begin to shift, drawn up from their resting places slowly at first but then faster. Drawn, as if by magnetic force, toward a point just behind Kula, the entire collection of frozen matter begins to whirl slowly in place, centered around an invisible vortex of Kula's formidable chi manipulation. Wind whips at her hair and tousles her tattered costume as she begins to gather such incredible amounts of power. A slurry of dirty, bloody ice becomes mixed with an aura of blazing white behind the powerful young menace. "Don't tell me what I can't do. I can do anything. No one can stop me."
She is going to grip him by the neck with both hands. She is going to hold the young man in place and bring all that churning power to bear, sealing him with a tomb of crystaline ice - death by crushing suffocation shall be his fate. Injured as he is, can he possibly continue to defend himself from the likes of her? Confidence restored just like her power over ice, there is no doubt in her mind that success will be hers. She will leave him there - entombed in ice - a dead boy from a forgotten past.
"I will prove... I have the mind to... to-" She takes a step forward, readying her ultimate speed to strike when it happens. A deep, hacking, wet cough like that of a girl drowning. She stops, right hand coming to her mouth as she coughs again, only to draw it away and see oxygen rich blood coating the palm of her glove. That cyclone of destructive force continues to churn behind her - ready to be solidified into a coffin for the last of the Ryouhara. She coughs again, her hand returning to her mouth, her expression more shocked as her focus over the ice begins to wane. Eyes rise up to meet Seishirou's with an accusing glare. She's sick. Her insides feel horrible; the flow of chi through her body wildly off course like a river that has broken its levees in a seasonal flood. What did he do to her? Is it poison? The impact of the Kaitaijutsu against a begin of engineered chi control has lingered deeper than she even realized.
She takes another step forward, teeth gritting, blood dripping from the corner of her mouth, her voice muted now. As if refusing to have this moment of triumph stolen from her, she lunges, one bare hand, one gloved reaching out brazenly for Seishirou's neck. But the moment she does, the ice behind her cascades out of control, exploding behind her, toppling out of the vortex of energy into an avalanche that comes crashing down over the girl. The setting sun is lost behind a wall of collapsing ice. She doesn't stop, knowing even this, her hands reaching out for Seishirou's neck as she determines he is going to share in this betrayal of her chi - he created this moment and now he must see it through...
COMBATSYS: Seishirou endures Kula's Ice Coffin.
[ \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ < > ]
Kula 0/-------/-----==|=======\-------\0 Seishirou
In the end, there was really no way for Ryouhara to properly ascertain the depth of calamity going on in Kula's spirit. He has no penetrating eye that sees into the depth of a thing. He has only symptoms of the underlying malaise: She reacts violently and viciously to his words, and when she does, Seishirou is repaid for those words in blood. His blood. In the end, his response, the faint twitch of his aura, the shift of his body in tune to the acceleration index of the attack--is truly nothing to celebrate. That is the difference between Ryouhara and a man off the street. He is one of the few cherished under Buddha and under God that has the necessary 'depth of capacity' to avoid fate. The skill enough to avoid death--because anyone weaker would have died had they failed in whatever clever defense they had planned. Ryouhara had always planned to defend in this way. The truth is, he had gifted one of his copies with a ninkou sufficient to attack her from behind while he absorbed her assault from the front.
An insignificant truth now, reliant on a narrow window of effectiveness--the exact second of her attack, passed as it may be as the clones lay floored now. A moment's distraction, a moment's interest was enough to make it pointless.
There was one benefit still of relevance.
Being attacked allows him to 'see' her.
And. Despite his lack of appropriate insight into Diamond, despite that lack of power, Seishirou's ability as an engineer is not to be discounted. His 'eye' is nothing more than the experience a man gets from doing a thing over and over again. Simple experience and nothing more. Seishirou has this in two parts. One is an eye for simple biomechanics, giving him that ability to remove himself in the moments before a subject can act. The second is by far his strongest trait, giving him the analytical ability for the construction of things themselves. Machines in particular, relentless calculations made with brutal efficiency driven only by /physics itself/ and not random whim.
It's what he's been using to measure and gauge Kula's responses.
It's what he used to determine K's and Kula's natures both.
To a certain extent, Seishirou is more at home reading the eerie machine responses of those engineered lifeforms than he is with any other sort of person.
Still. Whether it be machines, battlefields or people, Seishirou has that strength to determine minute details through his experience. Kula as she was moments prior was only a construct, and as such was subject to the highest levels of Seishirou's analytical eye. But her resolve flickers, and the fire of something else burns white hot in her. For a moment as he walked away only moments ago, Seishirou was genuinely unsure what she would do.
You see, emotion--real, emotion--is an unpredictable thing once you have it. It's been something Seishirou himself has been trying to avoid. Feeling, that is.
That is why the test was necessary. To carefully distill the difference between the impermanance of a childish want and the real thing. Right now, he's simply not convinced. Every moment she spends acting to crush him is a symptom. A problem for the older Ryouhara boy. It is as with all things that catch his attention. He does not so much wish to cure her, or save her. That would suggest a higher station than he believes himself to have.
Senchakiri dips low, slack to his side. His eyes are still dark like the night, still not lit up, not even by the psychotically awe-inspiring. Not even by the densely beautiful bloom of alice white, the cyclone of force and deadly intent that churns behind her inside the belly of Susano'o. Passing a hand over his chest with a snap, the ice left in his chest warms, melting from the passage of his touch when no longer connected to Kula's will. As his wrist flicks over the wound and back to his side, he paces slow and methodic to the side.
"So, you think you can do anything.."
His eyes narrow somewhat at the sudden betrayal she displays, the cough of blood, the crimson slicked upon her hand and the shock in her eyes. It is a state that she did not feel when she made that intense declaration only seconds prior. New. It's not something that originated through damage alone? Ryouhara's gaze is level, but it lacks in exultation--Ryouhara knows no more about the malady that affects Kula now than she does, though it is likely he could pose a great many more theories than her. Not that she will be privy to any of it.
She slams forward, and though he can see her clearly in his mind's eye, he is driven to take his life in his hands, to not attempt to slip away while she is weak. There is something inside of her that is wrong, and instead of reacting with fear or distress, she reacts with cold fury. She bears down on him with all of her focus and heart. She, more than NESTS, in that moment, wants to be the victor.
... That is something he can grant.
Slowly, all is whitewashed, warm slightly tan skin of the Nagano crow first bleaching, then bluing underneath the shimmering white of a rapidly crystalized heap of cold. Ryouhara is entombed there, frozen in space by what much be tons of ice. He is engulfed in it. As is Kula. Were it any other situation, any other form, perhaps Seishirou may have died there as she intended, a lost boy on an endless field of snow, his only savior being a young girl strangling the life from him. But thousands of moments like that have passed for him before.
... his jutsu is already at work.
That heated aura--his Shinrou Kiritsu--is something that works even as Seishirou succumbs to deadly hypothermia inside the mass of ice, keeping his tears from freezing his eyes over and the blood in his veins from solidifying. Though it can readily be explained as his force of intent, Shinrou Kiritsu is a jutsu. Specifically, a jutsu of chi infusion. Under Seishirou's control. The form grows compact now, seeping slow into the crystalline white. It forms into a network, a crystallization as sure as Kula's own. Forming links, following the pattern Ryouhara had set only an instant before what would be his untikely demise, as if programmed by fate itself. It becomes dense, forming hundreds of small kamon across the thing's surface, an evening's sky if each star were a small red leaf, each in turn kicking up steam as those symbols sink deep into the ice, formed of concentrated chi. Ice bleeds water.
Like everything else, Shinrou Kiritsu is a matrix.
Just as soon as winter hits, spring has come.
With a synchronized detonation of chi, the crystal mass explodes outwards, shattering the ice and spreading it in all directions. It frees them both, restoring to fluidity that one intense instance of Kula's rage, Seishirou being strangled by equal parts armor and cold. His body still convulses in as the kind of chill that seeps into your bones is fought off barely. He hisses softly as he regains effective consciousness in the aftermath of the explosion, still attempting to speak from around her grip, before that supernatural calm strikes him.
Ryouhara's hands raise.
As the taller boy, his limbs are longer. While one hand holds her outstretched wrist, he simply reaches out and touches Kula's face, cupping her jaw in his hand, running a thumb across her cheek, though by now it may streak blood. In most cases that would be a deadly act; anything with Seishirou's blood on it can be considered effectively marked for death. Still, it is an easy enough thing to avoid, should Kula Diamond feel fear at that moment, but there is no threat in the cant of that limb. Through all of it, he remains that darkly serene leader. Forcing a bit of breath into his chest, he can finish the long held thought there.
"Will you? Prove it, that is."
His body fails him, but the will never can. Though he bleeds from a hundred new locations and his legs threaten to give out from underneath him, at this point, his gift to her.. will not. And cannot, be complete. A band underneath his trunk deploys as thousands of senbon assault needles appear between the ripped weaves in his shirt. Some are bent and curved in odd angles from Ryouhara being attacked so, but others remain razor sharp.
Fingertips trailing away, Ryouhara's arms go slack into the dead zones at either side of the circlar attack ninkou, his last words are hardly a whisper as his eyes shut. That whisper is barely audible.
Surrounding the two are great shattered chunks of ice. Inside many of them still float Ryouhara kamon. Only a few were needed to break the crystalline substructure. The rest...
(I think.. you're worth this much.)
Explosions rip through the area, some created by chi force itself, others from shaped charges. Steel and heat fly in all directions. The only thing keeping Ryouhara from being ripped to pieces by his own ninjutsu is the shockwave synchronization--as one of the largest sources of detonation, he creates a 'quiet zone' around himself. Even with that much, holding that much force at bay in his state almost fells him. The deafening blast shatters every window for a block, setting his ears to ringing. The cataclysm of fire and steel is nothing like the stately avalanche of Kula, the ordered seizure of freedom. It is the antithesis. Anarchy. The chaotic bedlam, a ceremonial freeing of everything.
See. Seishirou loves it loud.
COMBATSYS: Seishirou can no longer fight.
[ \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ <
Kula 0/-------/-----==|
COMBATSYS: Kula successfully hits Kula with Ice Coffin.
[ \\\\\\\\\\ <
Kula 0/-------/=======|
COMBATSYS: Seishirou successfully hits Kula with Prime Tactics.
[ \\\ <
Kula 1/----===/=======|
In the wake of so much commotion, so much energy churning wildly out of control, there is silence across the battlefield. A pair of mounds of sloping, crystalized water occupy the space where the two combatants stood moments ago. It is clear as glass and strong as diamond, a shell that crushes them both beneath its heat-robbing mass. The technique is a killing maneuver - death by freezing suffocation and organ compression until the victim perishes. That might have been her intent before her power betrayed her in the end.
Frozen in place, her hands, one gloved, the other bleeding, bare, wrapped around his neck, the young girl stares back at the young man with unblinking eyes, her expression locked in a visage of surprise mingled with morbid satisfaction. Her energy defied her, but in the end she found her grip upon his throat. Perhaps, the thought goes through her mind, they could very well both die - condemned to a death sentence via icy coffin. Perhaps that was simply how it was meant to be. She had stopped trying to take K''s life anyway... does she really have a reason to keep going beyond this moment? Her blood, accustomed as it is to such temperatures, continues to move through her body. Her body won't freeze solid like a normal person's would. NESTS engineering saw to that. She could swim for an hour in the Artic without succumbing to hypothermia. But she needs air with which to breath as much as anyone else. And there is little hope of getting any of that in time.
In the past he had seen her slip her limbs through her own ice with the greatest of ice, the solid matter shifting state and shape to accommodate the girl's very thoughts and whims. But right now, it holds her every bit as much as it holds him, her fingers embracing his neck with a surprising amount of strength. He came to seal her, but in this, she has sealed him. Or so she thinks. This is how it ends for the both of them. The ice will melt eventually, but it will be far too late...
In the end it is the ninja engineer that saves the both of them. His jutsu, his preparations, but ahead of time and in the speed of the moment, proves the undoing of the suicidal attack. Outside of the shell the sound of ice cracking like cubes subjected to warmer temperatures can be heard. Like a glacier readying itself for a slow, uneventful adjustment in position, the occasional popping noise is all that is audible from outside.
The look she gives the trapped Seishirou, on the other hand, speaks volumes. She believes to have proven her point. She was able to stop him even if it cost her her own life to do so. He may have sabatoged her chi manipulation, intentionally or otherwise, but she overcame him all the same. All his words, his challenges, his probbing into her thoughts has come to an end with this final technique.
She becomes aware of his counter to her ice as the network of chi spreads. Symbols, visible, sink into the ice, causing it to melt, pouring out of the crevices formed. Her body immobilized, her eyes shift the slightest degree from one side to the other, the frozen girl watching the Shinryou Kiritsu at work. The explosion frees them both, restoring to them the chance to breath once more. A breath is taken in by the younger of the two, her hands still at his neck, though her grip has slackened significantly. She looks confused, her mouth twisted into a faint frown born of uncertainy more than displeasure. She takes a second breath, wobbling slightly where she stands. It feels as if she's just come back to life - a rebirth - a baptism of ice and fire bringing her back from the abyss.
Her hands at his neck seem to have shifted their focus. No longer trying to choke him to death, she seems simply to need the support to keep standing and her hands, in that position, are simply making due with the only support they can find. One hand takes hold of her wrist, but she doesn't seem alarmed. His other hand cups her chin, a stripe of Ryouhara blood painted acros her cheek by his thumb. Her eyes search his, violet normally, but tinted red against that brightly colored hair of hers, young Diamond seems to seek an answer there, a quest for meaning within the dark irises of the young man she tried to make the next victim of her assassination techniques.
He speaks and she blinks. The question, so simple on the surface, cannot be answered immediately. She almost recoils then, feeling challenged on levels she isn't ready for after surviving a bath in that ice chilled energy of hers. She opens her mouth, then closes it, the response at the tip of her tongue choked back. She searches, but the inspection is within. /Will she/? Teeth gritting, the girl strained to stay standing but also experiencing that rare flash of chill temper her life has been so normally devoid of. "I-" She cuts herself off again. She draws her right hand back, leather creaking as she clenches her fist, taking a half step forward just as she is answered with needles. Thousands of them, wasp strings taking flight in all directions. Again the Ryouhara's ingenuity catches her by surprise. She hasn't the time nor the wherewithall to respond in time as a number of sharp points sink into her unarmored stomach.
Within the valley formed by the large masses of frozen matter, a small cry is heard, her left hand lowering to pull at a few needles at once, taking a step back in the process. She's shifting to a defensive mindset, forgoing attacking in favor of protecting herself from any worse damage. The explosion that rocks the region is deafening. /That/ doesn't catch her by surprise. She sensed the lingering traces of chi - Seishirou's influence within the debris of her massive technique. She even sensed the small spark of life given to them before the detonations go of.
But for all her readiness, the girl can't save herself. Her right hand raises, intent on creating one of her stubborn barriers - it holds for an instant then falls apart, splashing to the ground as slush just as explosive ice chunks smash into her from the frunt. She waves her left, attempting to weave another shield, but only vapor is left in the wake of her outstretched fingers, and a secondary explosion knocks her hard from that side, sending her stumbling toward the right.
Eyes become more panicked as her vaunted defenses fail her now. She takes another swing with her right, raising her palm, trying to force another barrier. It holds. At last. But as the detonation nearest goes off, the barrier becomes fine powder, availing her nothing at all. Outside of that narrow space in which Seishirou is sheltered from the devastation, Kula can do nothing but cough again. That deep, wet cough from before returns. She grits her teeth, struggling to not lose her focus as she's buffeted by countless expsions going on all around her. Her left hand extends, fingers splayed, but rather than a wall of ice she ends up with a sphere of bloody water that falls to the ground with a splash just before the featherweight is knocked clean off her feet to the ground.
Landing yards away as the final echoes of that loud cacophony of Seishirou's symphany dies, the girl curls up on her side. Her prized chi, that avenue of her creativity given form, rendered useless to her now. Lying in a slowly expanding pool of her own blood, Kula rolls onto her knees, propping herself up with her hands, her long hair resting against her shoulders and framing her face. Like the blood seeping from countless injuries, the blue color bleeds out of her locks, leaving soaking wet auburn lengths in its wake. She's spent. She has to stop. She can't even get up.
Lifting her now ashen face slowly, she stares back at Seishirou with dark, violet eyes, her arms trembling as they support her weight for a little longer. Her expression has changed. Gone is the annoyed sneer he was greeted with. Absent is the angry glare she exhibited when he through her power into turmoil. Not present is that look of uncertainty, that expression of panic, or the visage of one confused about their own existence. There is only serenity; that peaceful chill of a winter's morn after a late night snowstorm.
She has her answer at last. It isn't for him. It's for her. "I will prove it. But not to you." Her left hand shifts over to rest atop her right hand, the freezing ice beneath her palm felt even by her. "I don't need to prove anything to you. Or to Igniz. Or K'. Or anyone else." She lowers her head, the ends of her long hair draped against the blood streaked ice beneath her. "I will prove it to myself." Her arms tremble again, threatening to rob from her the ability to stay even partially upright, but she doesn't fall forward, as if refusing to surrender that dignity to the engineer. "In the end- " she coughs again, blood splashing against the ice beneath her face. "- nothing else matters."
COMBATSYS: Kula takes no action.
COMBATSYS: Kula can no longer fight.
Red waves of heat around him crackle ominously with the released force and even then, Ryouhara's eyes widen, as if he might have felt the snap in his own body. The lower part of his shirt shredded to pieces by the explosion, one can now see the gunleather and trailing steam from the senbon projector belt he wore. It was one of the few subcloth ninkou he could wear in this getup, but ironically, it was also one of the most effective without his sash to block the way.
His stance goes wide as Seishirou struggles even to take breath. Not relocating in the face of that avalanche was costly to him. It's almost debatable he can even use Ido Shunshin from this point. But he had no regrets. It was necessary. Even as the air snaps around him, even as the heat cracks loud like one of his own bones, he doesn't regret it. Even as he goes low to the ground, shivering from the chill and holding his own arm close to try and stave off the frostbite.
But still, even as the body falters.
The mind yet still works hard.
Seishirou had to admit being impressed by the resolve he was able to tease out of Diamond's psyche. Contrary to his belief, NESTS did create a complete person. K' proved that much. He did not miss that she accepted her fate just as much as he did. And that was the beginning of what he was looking for. Something that will die by their own choice as opposed to someone else's is the beginning of that 'force of intent.'
It was something similar to what she sensed in his own Tajuu Ryuuouin. That spark of life. Ryouhara is at once shaken and incensed by that intent. It was similar to a game of chicken. The last person to flinch wins the day.
One could say he lost, in that respect.
But that force of intent was what made the loss necessary.
It proved..
It proved...
"You," Ryouhara gasps, sucking in air as if oxygen were the only thing keeping him standing, "...you might be worth it yet," he admits, the words coming hard to him.
He takes a step forward through the ruined slush. It is a Herculean effort, one that burns more blood than Ryouhara cared to estimate. Still his intent burns golden hot behind his eyes. That was the difference between the two, and perhaps one of the last tests. Who would fall first. "NESTS doesn't really know what they're making, do they...?" he asks, laboring to another foot.
He's overextended himself. He should have been gone a long time ago.
"No matter how hard you try...."
He coughs hard, loud and long, blood flicking from the gaps between his fingers as he clasps a hand over his mouth, as if trying to stem the ugly crimson tide. It doesn't work. And it seems with that spear of pain lodged in him, his mind necessarily moves elsewhere. Whatever he was going to say.. changes.
"..We'll all stand for ourselves. Some day.."
He forces the chi to his hands. Ido Shunshin will carry him far away from here. He forces the chi to wrap about him like a cloak. His will here will protect him. It will be a guiding light, for he is absolutely sure that no one else in this world has an ability to attain will comensurate to his own. Responding to that field, his body flickers--
Then, fountains of red explode from his every major articulate.
"gh--!!"
Shock has a particular visage..
So does that haunting smile of his.
".... still got some work to do.."
Ryouhara falls flat.
As the seconds tick by, her face is far beyond expressing emotion. Even the serene visage from moments prior fades as her ashen palor reflects the blood loss catching up with her. She expended all the power she had, and even now wrestles with an injury deep within that wasn't intended. Side effects of interferring with her flow of chi may include: sickness, reduced capacity to breath, violent coughing, and, oh yes, catastrophic failure to control her own power. It can't be helped. It is that very chi that has loaned so much power to a mere child's body. Even her physical strength is augmented by it, giving her durability and striking power that rivals some of the hardest hitting brutes the world has to offer.
That facet of NESTS' great experiment was intentional. That streak of independence, that resolve that shines through in spite all the mind numbing 'education' she has received in her scant years of life... that part isn't intentional. As he says - the scientsts have no idea what they are crafting. No parent truly knows how their child will turn out as they grow up. Will they be a rebellious hellion in spite all the best teaching? Will they aspire to greatness or waste away under the weight of a slothful life? So to do the scientests grossly miscalculate what they have done. There are facets to Kula that escape spreadsheets and datasets and it is in those niches of her psyche that she hides the secrets that would doom her.
As his voice fades, his thought cut off by that rasping cough, one eye narrows, her head canting ever so slightly to the right. He prepares to leave. She can tell that is what he is about to do. But now there is no objection, no capacity to unleash a stampede of ice spires to halt his departure early. Nor does she want to. 'Some day...' Someday they will find each other again. Maybe things will be different then. Perhaps not.
The young girl's eyelids become heavy, her chin lowering slowly as her face retreats back down, her arms trembling beyond the staying point. Blood sprays - this time not from her, small droplets splashing against the field of rapidly melting ice, forming small pools as the frozen surface gives way beneath the heat. Wobbling, she closes her eyes.
And then she too falls, landing with a splash as the last of the ice loses its form, becoming vapor and fluid. A passing breeze carries with it embers and frost licked up from off what little remains of the once great pillars of ice. In time, evidence of this battle will pass. Ice will melt, water will evaporate, the damage to the building will be undone. Eventually, even the scorched earth will lose its form. The battlefield may be transient. But whenever history is in the making, there is that certain, intangible feeling that cannot be missed. Certain events, once unfolded, have the power to change the world.
Her face turned to the side, her eyes open briefly, able to see the blurry image of smudged yellow that is her protective glove. "...you always will." His goals, his ambitions... while others sleep, Seishirou will, by necessity, labor for his cause. Of this Kula is certain. "Society defends itself against the change you would bring it." He will not find his way an easy one. But he already knows that. He would not have gotten so far otherwise.
"Never stop..." she continues, her eyes closing again, exhaustion claiming its own, settling over her body as all the tension left in her seems to bleed completely out. "...I will be there." This was but a single battle in a war - the war that is not yet over. There is more to prove to herself, more to know, to understand. An ideal to gain. Something immortal, untouchable by human hands. She will see him again someday. That final, undeniable thought slips through her fleeting consciousness. And then she sleeps.
Log created on 00:11:41 09/27/2008 by Kula, and last modified on 20:02:45 10/28/2008.