Description: There are some who battle for money. Some who battle for power. Some who battle for influence. There are even some who battle just for the sheer joy of it, the thrill of the fight. But then there are some who fight to change the world. And some who fight to defend that world. There is a 'space' in this conflict, an idealistic space where the will of even those who may or may not be dead will clash. They will fight. And they will return to the AEther, never changed.
Drowning -- in a sea of flame.
He gasps for breath and the air congeals, rebelling against his lips. He reaches out and the world dissolves, leaving him alone. Pale strands flare with the movement, and with eyes uncomprending he regards the dirty bandages that yet swathe his body. A bolt of lightning shatters the sky, carving an arabesque of crystal, and in that moment of white oblivion he can no longer distinguish between his limb and what clothes it, such that it appears he himself is peeling into pieces, grotesquely shedding his skin. In agony, in blind protest, the man who once knew himself as Alma Towazu cries out to the heavens, and seems to go unheard.
Confused memories sear him, the storm outside mirrored within. Jiro Kasagi kneels at his bedside, "Ullr's" helmet under one arm, smiling with roguish warmth and a hint of nostalgia; Hotaru Futaba rests a gentle hand upon his burning forehead, soothing his bestial, senseless pain. Did that happen? Was that real? Frei's grim visage, Tran's half-hearted sneer-- his friends-- were they here? The bonds forged to bind his heart to this world have come undone, and what was once the proof of his sincerity -- the eternal presence of his loved ones, the fearless comingling of their selves with his own -- has become indistinguishable with delusion and madness. His power is overflowing. Having identified himself with that power, he has become unfamiliar to himself.
Only now, on the brink of insanity, in a rare and perhaps final moment of lucidity, does he find himself perceiving it: perhaps he, in his own idiosyncratic way, had identified truth with power himself, even if not quite in the manner as the villains he opposed. The radiant quality of the life he lived, being imbued with the lush colors and comforts of the spirits about him intimately intertwined with his, justified his ideals and reminded him continuously of his purpose and the force of his personal narrative. WIth a faith born of tragic loss, the foundations having been torn out from under his identity at the very instant that the inner light he wields rushed in to fill that void, what Alma would come to call Soul Power seemed in that context merely a natural consequence of his circumstances and his fate. But that was not enough: convinced that what he had experienced resonated with the human condition itself, encouraged by the testimony of his second sight, the young champion, unfolding newly sprouted wings, expanded to fill the larger world he had come to inhabit. The fire within him burned uninhibited, and it-- purified.
Purified, and consumed.
Higher and higher he flew--
Did he reach the limits of his self, or the limits of the world?
He can no longer distinguish between the two.
Screaming like a god betrayed, Alma stretches his fingers upward, blind to the blasted concrete that separates him from the crystal-webbed, evening-shrouded sky-- until lightning streaks upward, or downward, and annihilates that final barrier. With that ultimate fulmination, the ghosts of memory are enveloped by an rapturous light, obliterating once and for all what remains of Alma Towazu's waking reality.
Light.
He has been here before.
Long, long ago.
"...M..."
After an eternity, a word unspoken emerges, ex nihilo, within the stillness. Like the surface of a pond, the brightness trembles, providing the first clue to his own place amidst it, reminding him that he is there.
"Mother?"
The first fragment-- as though he has returned to that day.
Alma Towazu glances down at a hand unbandaged. It gleams with a mirror sheen, revealing his perfect, beautiful, unmarred visage. It gazes at him with gentle, soulful feeling. Love-- and resignation-- and pity.
"Forgive me," he whispers. "But it... doesn't make sense anymore."
The light about him begins to fade. He leaves this place, the place where it all began, slowly reforming, lucidity returning, as though it had never left. And it occurs to him, in what seems to be the first true moment of clarity in perhaps months, that he could withstand the failure of his ideals, even if it were due to his own personal weakness or limitations.
But--
As an unfamiliar landscape begins to reveal itself about Alma's surreally gleaming form, the Radiant Angel and Hero of Taizhou reflects: if his /story/ collapsed into meaninglessness, the narrative of love and loss that gave rise and substance to his ideals trailing off into a senseless, disconnected nothingness--
He could not go on.
Alma lifts his gaze, calm and courage in his eyes, to regard his new surroundings.
Everything falls away.
The cause, the reason for it is, like many things involving this Nirvana of his, hard to describe. The energy of this world is tumultuous in nature, and its ebbs and flows are one of the things that a wandering soul simply cannot deny. Clarity--comes hard and fast, like a rush, the twisting influences of the world-altering weapon drawing the Soul to another place.
The shrine has been pummeled to the point of unrecognizability, but the scent of legends can still be tasted in the air, below the coppery tang of blood, of death. Is it entirely illusory?
A flash of light fills the senses--like a cold knife to the skull.
Clouds roll past, tumbling as a silk-wrapped missile called a man carries you into the embrace of earth. Another flash--the air is almost choking with livid power, as men and women lay in still form all about you. Another--a man making a soft and irritable noise, turning to leave the bridge. Flash. The heat of Nenzhao bales forth like a furnace, towers of steel red hot and extending into the ceiling above. Flash--
Ryouhara steps past you, his footsteps echoing on the stone grounds of the shrine.
Flash--a golden eye--he turns--he passes you--he grips you by the throat--
Flickering, Seishirou's 'body' alights delicately on the grounds across from Alma, voluminous sleeves billowing at his sides. The distant ocean seems to be made of curtains of fire looming high into the sky. Here, in the ruins of the shrine, with a shining blade laying consecrated in a vast depression of a ruined forge, surrounded by sealwork, is the grounds. A massive Ryouhara seal, the same kind that was once burned into Alma's chest, is burnt into the grounds here, leaves twisting around the depression, of which Seishirou stares down into.
"...You know.. I had a thought."
As he speaks, whispers, growing increasingly angry at Alma's presence, underlie and phantomize his words.
defiler, betrayer, despisation.
"My poisoned mind tells me I only have so much time on this Earth to realize my goals. For those goals, any price must be paid. Even if it violates my laws, I will not leave this world to be further ruined by fat tyrants and lazy whores."
"I do not wish to kill."
A curved blade of razored steel, silver as the shining light of Nirvana, slides free from the sheathe horizontal and hung from his hip. "...But we are the unrelenting will of history."
"I will kill you."
COMBATSYS: Seishirou has started a fight here.
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Seishirou 0/-------/------=|
COMBATSYS: Alma has joined the fight here.
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Alma 0/-------/-------|=------\-------\0 Seishirou
That man.
He ruined everything.
The glorious phoenix set free manifests, through a haze of preternatural luminescence and the mists of memories not his own, on an island poised between the waters and the flame. Before him, a symbol burned into his heart as it was into his body -- a sword, gleaming with a secret purpose -- and a man, that he once called his nemesis. With them, all returns. Though he shimmers with an unearthly glamor, Alma Towazu, released at last from the prison of his body, experiences the perfect clarity of the real. All that had been confused may be now viewed from afar. All that had tormented him has been shed like shackles. Reduced to the invincible faith that is, if anything is, the essence of his being, and arisen from it anew-- in whatever world this is, Alma, mortality abandoned, feels complete.
Gently he regards his foe.
His mind is working as never before. Quickly he reasons, overcoming the distortions in his surroundings, that this must be the place where Ryouhara has been said to have met his fate, that he is visiting the resting place of a deceased dreamer. And in his newfound objectivity, Alma seriously contemplates, for the first time, that Seishirou Ryouhara may in fact be dead. For all his sincerity, the champion of passion simply could not accept, in his heart of hearts, that his mirror messiah could have been crushed by another man. Perhaps one of those many antagonists simply driven by a lust for power, for all their cunning mere narcissists. And perhaps, having left the world behind, Alma has arrived at the place where he belongs: in the presence of his fellow idealist.
In silence, he bears witness.
Loathing: he had felt a tremendous loathing, something utterly beyond hatred. A pure and complete inability to accept a world where both he and Seishirou Ryouhara existed simultaneously. Like matter and anti-matter, he felt them destined to cancel one another out, the hot flame dousing its cool counterpart. Equivalent faiths, born of entirely different views of humanity and its destiny: the Zero Law, and the Law of One. And even then, equivalent values, perhaps, and emphases upon the will, and the individual, and his responsibility.
A blade is drawn, reflecting his own gaze.
In it, the angel, having ascended, comes face to face with history.
And at last, Alma speaks.
"I understand."
He does not turn away.
"My poisoned mind," the phoenix says, "tells me that I have exceeded my limits, that neither my body nor my self may any longer withstand the demands of the flame that burns within me. Even if it contradicts my every principle, I must accept that this power of mine is no longer proof of the validity of the man I once was -- and that it seems my earthly self must now be content to release that flame, having been shown inadequate to the task of steering history."
His body gleams like crystal; his eyes shine like diamonds.
"But I have left that self behind."
He raises his hand, and like fingers the divine flame unfurls.
"And history yet steers /me/."
Like the hearth of the hall of the gods, the fire of his soul.
"My very being," Alma murmurs without malice, "strives against you."
Despite his mental clarity, the reasons for their discontent blur together, like threads woven into a tapestry forming a far more significant picture. This is a matter of identity. The content of their opposition is subsumed into near irrelevance. In this moment--
"And it is you--"
Cosmic forces are at work.
"I will destroy."
Flashing forward in the blink of an eye, Alma blurs with the aid of an impossible force, transcending all lesser laws. From his outstretched hand emerges the essence of absolution, the pure force of his belief -- no, of his very self, of his /story/, which those beliefs embody -- to smash against Ryouhara's own.
This tale is not yet over.
No--
"Ryouhara!"
These final threads must intertwine.
"Suffer-- and repent!"
COMBATSYS: Seishirou fails to interrupt Self Expression from Alma with Kaitaijutsu.
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Alma 0/-------/------=|=====--\-------\0 Seishirou
The blade of the weapon Seishirou carries turns in one hand, shining in the light.
He is silent for a time, as Alma declares his individuality to him, sings his own praises. The only face he shows to Alma is the face of Ryouhara itself; the symbology of the clan resplendent across the back of his prstine, white hoari. By now, his presense, his passage, is no longer a knife in the skull, but a dull pressure, the lividity of the world surrounding him making itself known as Seishirou always has; by pure force. He shifts, his attentions waning as he steps to the side.
"You..." Ryouhara states, succinct, "do not yet know about poison."
One hand raises.
The clash is immediate, the force of the armor of idealism meeting Seishirou's hands pressing the shinobi back as he attempts to literally dismantle the young man's self energy and rip it from his hands. The discharge is great, and the young man is thrown to a side, kicking off and away from the blast quickly, his body flickering with the motion. He was hit, but he shows no blood. The gleaming crescent of his blade lifts slowly, an elaborate act..
Ryouhara faces Alma now, but his eyes--cannot be seen.
They are lost in the dark of his bangs, shrouding his gaze in shadow. His blade comes slowly to rest between the two as arcane runes crawl up it from the passage of Seishirou's hand, leaving the weapon to displace the image of itself briefly as he touches it. Even in its reflection, his eyes cannot be seen. Only a seething countenace far beyond what the young man has expressed ever prior.
"Nor the steerage of history."
You are not yet complete.
Alma Towazu, hand curling about his eternal flame, smiles-- softly.
"You think so?"
Where Ryouhara's eyes are hidden, the Radiant Angel's eyes have hardened into jewels, as though bereft of their humanity. Yet whatever changes he has undergone in the trials he has passed to reach this point, his heart does not seem to have hardened as his body has. On the contrary, though the fire in his fist burns brighter and clearer than ever, if anything the hero's intensity has, at least on the surface, seemingly lessened. Where once he might have been implacable, face to face with this murderous man, Alma instead evinces sentiments almost at odds with the certainty of his words. His posture, while straight, is unassuming; his eyes, though pebble-solid and lake-calm, possess within their depths a gentleness that verges on humility, a nigh self-deprecating resignation or grace.
"Is it not your own creation that has poisoned me?" he murmurs, even as he watches carefully at the process Seishirou and his weapon are undergoing. This man has changed in death, is different from the man he faced before, long ago, when this story seemed as though it might have ended all too differently. "The symbol you burned into my chest extinguished my dreams. Without them, my body clings to life. And the storm now awakened in that blasted land you left behind-- I am not sure I will survive it. From my tortured perch, I watch as you end the world."
That humility fades from his eyes, leaving only a mild cast to a grim seriousness.
"How am I not poisoned?"
Stepping forward, with caution but without fear, Alma delicately tests the balance of space and power between them, manuevering smoothly about his nemesis, navigating the ethereal battleground. Never has he felt so in tune with the field of conflict; there is no need to comingle his spirit with his surroundings. His spirit rarified, every iota of power he requires may be found within him. Those soulful flames lick and dance, and travel down his body, suffusing him yet further in a halo of sanctified light.
"As for history--"
He lunges in, one with his flame-- nothing /but/ his flame.
"--if yours will not submit to mine--"
And rises, a true phoenix, flecks of spiritual energy falling behind him like lost feathers as he spins into swift, achingly graceful arcing kicks, aiming to slam them against the ninja's ghostly form, his body and his head.
"--it is enough that I end yours, once and for all."
COMBATSYS: Seishirou dodges Alma's Rising Fury.
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Alma 0/-------/------=|=====--\-------\0 Seishirou
"Hmph. When a man clings to his illusions, it's called 'delusion.'"
The reach of Seishirou's gaze is without measure--but it seems to emanate from nowhere. It's less that Ryouhara's eyes are hidden, and more as if they simply to not exist. Attempting to come eye to eye with the young man--as he is now--is like trying to stare into a bitter abyss, deaf to Alma's pleading.
"Believing in the contemptible idea of his own superiority, and lamenting his fate."
This form of Ryouhara feels the space where Alma struck him only a moment prior, before his hand slides away, disappearing into the white folds of his haori again. He doesn't buy Alma's absolute humility, the bleeding the man is doing before him remarked upon only with a flat expression, lips pressed together in open scorn. He steps forward as Alma meets him trepidation. Indescribably angry, the young man meets Alma, his blade slowly spinning forward as he sets it across his shoulder, and bolts for Alma. His left sleeve trailing behind him like an angel's wing before it disp down behind his back at the last moment, Ryouhara strides into his fire openly as he is struck--his body lifting into the air as the phoenix collides with him, one, two of the the painfully graceful arcing kicks finding purchase against his body. ... but it's like kicking nothing.
The last kick meets not Ryouhara's head, but steel, the length of his blade curving across his back, as Seishirou shows him the seal on his back, the same as the seal burned into Alma's torso.
"Sob all you please. But this is the only thing you need to believe in."
There was no indicator of movement--Alma is simply introduced to the closest look he'll ever get of the Ryouhara clan seal: three pale green leaves in an endlessly repeating circle, surrounding a 'void' of wind in the center. The wind that blows the leaves--that is the Ryouhara clan.
"This seal is the image of consequence. What you face for your criminality."
There was no indication of movement. Ryouhara seems to just shift from one position to the next with no intermediary, and the unreal part is--that is exactly how he moves even in life. But now, when Ryouhara speaks, his voice takes on an imperious declarative aspect, seeming to echo from multiple places at once. That is because it is coming from multiple places at once. By the time Alma's offense breaks against Ryouhara's sword, Ryouhara's image flickers. It shatters away, revealing a /massively/ dour expression, as a tengu forged of black fire and odd white squared patterns over the majority of its body forms in Ryouhara's place. It is wearing armor of fire, blocking Alma's last kick as the two drifts in the air..
The beast whips around, whipping it's own (!) katana of fire around to stab straight through Alma.
It is gone before it even lands, but Seishirou still stands there, some ways away from Alma and behind him.
"If your dreams were extinguished... then they weren't dreams at all."
COMBATSYS: Alma blocks Seishirou's Kagensana.
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Alma 0/-------/----===|======-\-------\0 Seishirou
"...Maybe so."
Alma's refulgent eyes flicker with surprise as much from Seishirou's final words as from the splendor of his counterattack. A halo of sworling flame, white but rich with veins of royal indigo and variegated shades of magenta, suffuses the arm with which he parries that intimidating tengu's blade, but even as he torques in midair with the inertia his gaze remains mild and thoughtful, even troubled. For all that he now is -- or believes himself to be -- the distilled essence of Alma Towazu, body and mortality and earthly limitations abandoned, whatever purity of heart has been revealed does not seem to be one that rejects his opponent's claims out of hand. However strong his convictions in his state -- and that is not yet clear, even to him -- Ryouhara's statements seem cause for concern.
"My ambitions... were just natural consequences of living my ideals in a world that defied them."
He rises, flames still flickering about his fist, and turns to regard his supernaturally agile dream-foe, tilting his here still-handsome profile sidelong toward the enemy that has landed behind him.
"Maybe such dreams cannot endure. But what about you, Ryouhara?"
Slowly, thoughtfully, Towazu begins to unbutton his shirt, lowering his gaze toward his own chest as he continues, as though the action is not at all incongruous with his words as he continues.
"It is that I believed in reform, and you believed in revolution? I sought to change the world bit by bit, neighborhood by neighborhood, individual by individual, embracing the world. In the process of living my ideals, showing their validity -- how they pierced to the heart of humanity and its condition -- by their efficacy on a broader scale. Yes... Knowing of the abyss that threatens us, I struggled to tie yet firmer bonds with my fellows, with yet greater urgency. I... wanted to make of us a raft, able to ride out the greatest storms, even if our resilience made it harder to convince others that there were, indeed, storms to ride out. But..."
Alma's shirt, half unbutton, falls open, revealing the Ryouhara seal yet burned there.
"Even if it was the only way to make myself understood... I would never smash that raft."
Eyes downcast, he traces the emblem with a slender finger.
"However feeble, however pitiful, however doomed whatever they had constructed to keep themselves afloat... I wouldn't drown them, just for the sake of the truth."
Even in dreams, it remains.
"For me... to force people to take responsibility by tearing their foundation out from under them... would be to deny their dignity in the process of recognizing it. There'd be no sense to it. No chance for a real world plan-- only the clash of souls, over and over again, until the realities already implicit in the world naturally emerge, and they are driven to act. That's transgression enough against their autonomy; that's taking enough risk. But you... in taking your ideals to the stage of revolution..."
Alma's chin rises. He turns to face his opponent. The ink-dark burn of the seal contrasts with the pale luminescence that pours from him now, the air about him rippling as though from a very real heat.
"...shows not your greater conviction, but that we disagree fundamentally on what humanity needs. But that's not relevant now. No... tell me, Ryouhara."
Though the force of his presence is magnified exponentially as that energy builds, unrestrained by normal laws in this fantastical dreamscape, the clarity -- and concern -- in Alma's eyes is not mitigated.
"Why were /you/ driven to go this far?"
Alma, brow furrowed, regards his foe, an endless swath of history between them.
"Who /are/ you?"
COMBATSYS: Alma gathers his will.
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Alma 0/-------/=======|======-\-------\0 Seishirou
He stands there, some ways away, as no attack meets him and his preparation is defended against. Countless calculations roll through the shinobi's head, countless numbers of defenses and strategies where Ryouhara's mind concerns it solely with the realization of an 'ideal' future. This is perhaps one of the only times where that future did not, in fact, include someone such as Alma. For someone who has failed to kill even the vaunted Igniz, the coldness of the shinobi is unreal now, unnatural.
As is the slow, whip-thin smile he shows to his opponent.
It is not one that savors the task set before him. There is no bloodlust in that grin. It is a bitter draught to taste, the flat, rueful expression regarding the empty humor he finds in Alma's word.
"You talk too much."
"That's what makes you a coward."
There is no indicator at all that the shinobi is even looking at Alma, but when he stands motionless before the open-shirted man, the weight of his study falls upon the idealist's shoulders, going to his chest, where Ryouhara used the Ryuuouin assassination seal on him just prior to his own death. That smile.. fades slow.
"In the end, you're right. You want this dismal world as much as anyone. That is why you vomit inaction, going to your knees and giving the belt buckles of tyrants the favor of your lips. Against us, you don't even have the right to say the word 'conviction.'"
His katana twirls through the air, a few feet from Alma.
It is unclear exactly when Seishirou threw it, as the boy moves in a lotus-white flash. Time seems to move slower for the shinobi, the end-over-end twirl of the katana threatening to go through Alma's face takes decades. His fleeting advance encroaches upon Alma just beyond, his legs stretching out slowly before him as a raptor in flight, catching the blade at its handguard and diverting it straight down until the point hums as it hits the solid stone beneath it, flickering as some unknown jutsu prevents it from bending right in half or dulling, spreading sparks as his weight hits it and it travels. Ryouhara lands on his sword, balancing his weight over its center of gravity and perching upon the guard, kneeling until his sleeves drape over the hilt, kneeling until he comes eye-to-eye with Alma, at perfect balance with his weapon for one vertiginous second.
The gold flash that Alma saw only moments prior are his. They are not brown as Seishirou has faced Alma every battle prior. It may occur to Alma that Seishirou has been wearing concealing lens ninkou this whole time. This close, Alma can see even the scars that run down his eyes like grisly tears, a disfigurement that Ryouhara has been hiding this whole time. This image, this facet of Ryouhara has no such need to hide. Alma would be able to tell--it's no genetic anomaly, no expression of the power he wields. Seishirou's eyes were bleached.
With those eyes, he glares. "I hate repeating myself..."
"I am the drive. I am the will. Every cost I will shoulder. But I.. don't exist."
"That is why I will succeed."
Dismissing Alma's question in word alone, he shifts his weight and disappears. Kicked, his blade's pont jumps out of the concrete as if hit by lightning. It flips once in the twist of the white flash, until it lands on its pommel, the point curving straight up towards Alma's torso. It happens just an instant before Seishirou flickers into being above. He intends to land on Alma's shoulders and drive him down into the ground, onto the point of his sword as if forcing the young man to commit suicide.
COMBATSYS: Alma interrupts Random Combo from Seishirou with Divine Intervention EX.
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Alma 1/------=/=======|=======\-------\0 Seishirou
For the first time, Alma's eyes harden.
The technique is magnificent, and only the depths of the phoenix's composure prevent him from being utterly mystified; fearlessly he awaits the blade's arrival, not shaken even as Seishirou darts seemingly out of nowhere to plunge the sword into the ground, perched atop it like some bird of prey. The moment shared between them requires exact timing, perfect balance-- it teeters on the edge of a knife. For them, however, it is experienced with aching slowness.
In that near eternity, Alma's eyes meet what remains of Seishirou's own. The man, if he is still a man, is possessed. It is far too late for the Radiant Angel to ask of him an explanation, let alone a justification. Yet he can still see the tear-lines that have been scarred about Ryouhara's eyes, the sickening remnant of some misbegottten past. They are symbol enough for the trials that this man must have undergone, the vastnesses which he must have purged from his soul in the name of strength, of purity, of his ideals.
Alma's face twists with pity. But--
"That's nonsense."
His eyes are hard.
They act simultaneously. The exact moment that Seishirou leaps, even though it is surely impossible for Alma to predict his movements in the customary manner -- the dreamlike boundlessness that seems to free Alma's power is at least matched by Ryouhara's concealment, and after all, Alma has never been able to detect that man's aura -- the transcendant beauty has lashed out with his foot to kick his nemesis's sword away, an eruption of flame briefly overcoming the jutsus in play to smash the weapon from its pommel-poised state and send it skittering across the sand. Even before he can recover, Seishirou has attacked, but with one arm warding the man off the Soul Phoenix can allow himself to fall, no longer perilously above a penetrating blade.
"I want this world... because it's the human world. I'm human."
He hits the sand with a crash, one hand upraised, the other hidden.
"Ideals only exist to serve humanity-- to combat the void that uniquely besets it. But you--"
Those eyes, glittering like diamonds, flash with a thousand colors.
"Only a monster could shoulder /every/ cost!"
His rising hand, roiling with flame, shines with the light of a thousand suns.
"You've no use for ideals anymore, Seishirou Ryouhara!"
The beam that emerges, a focused sword of that unrelenting flame, tears through the figure of his enemy's flesh, lifting him up and away, hurling him toward the pit where the sealed sword lies, as Alma rises with that fire mirrored in his eyes.
"Because..."
Only then do they soften.
"...You're dead."
So this it what it means: to cast aside one's humanity.
Now, here, in this dream world-- has that, too, become Alma's fate?
Ryouhara glowers as Towazu hits the ground beneath him.
"Che."
Pity? Save it for someone who exists.
He's not impaled, and moreso, he's rising against Seishirou, the shinobi's body lifted through the air on a beam of imperious light beyond his own will. He is briefly aware of warm pain, searing gently as it rips his body open. But even as he sails away, his eyes fix on Alma in the consumptive darkness eating the light of his assault as surely as any other.
"Bakemono..?"
Ryouhara's body distends as Alma's rayblade slowly cleaves through it--but a creature rips into it from behind--eating through Seishirou and causing his form to bloat considerably. His body arrests in the air, as if held by a greater force than Alma's blade. Even as he's torn to pieces, he can still speak, his neck twisting away from Alma slowly..
"This world that you describe--this beloved human world of yours--is a world in which heroes cannot exist. You should thank me. Ghosts are creating the only world in which your dream can ever survive."
He's ripped in twain by the black, a chaser of black fire that trails back down the ray of light, a complicated construct held together with a rilled white pattern, but having no discernible form except a great lupine head, whose magma-formed jaws distend as they charge down the beam, intent on tearing Alma in half as well.
The howl is earsplitting.
Seishirou lands heavily in the shadow of what is left of his copy, almost falling over right there from exertion, folding a silk sleeve over his midsection from sone perceived injury. Blood shows through his silks, but he seems to bleed from no visible wound. His breath is hard, jagged, labored as he attempts to collect himself.
"...If I must die... if I must be a monster... to return this world to the time of heroes.." he looks up, and this time his grin is genuine. "Then I do so gladly. The ideal will never die."
COMBATSYS: Seishirou successfully hits Alma with Kawarimi Suicide.
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Alma 1/---====/=======|=======\-------\1 Seishirou
Alma can only watch in horror.
Some terrible force has truly taken hold of whatever once burned within Seishirou Ryouhara's heart. When the radiant light of Alma's attack pierces through his adversary's form, it is as though that darkness is awakened, a thin lid torn violently off a cauldron of boiling night. The demonic creature that reacts to the Radiant Angel's purifying force is like nothing else he has seen, the effort to cut through to the core of his opponent's being uncovering only that which has pervaded it in death. This is the essence of a ghost.
Not a dream, but a nightmare.
Unable to extract his hand from Ryouhara's collapsing copy, Alma cries out, the illusory walls of the dreamworld shuddering, as the fangs of that great beast seem to tear into him, casting him aside so that he rolls across the sand, shedding crystal fragments as he goes, the accessories of his supposedly perfect incarnation. Arms trembling, Alma forces himself to one knee, eyes continuing to glitter with an unreal light.
"Even as a ghost," he growls, "you should know that's ridiculous."
How strange. It felt as though he had left the world behind, that this was some purgatory on the path to the afterlife. But this pain-- this darkness-- it feels all too real. Though Seishirou's blades cannot exist, still it is as though the wounds they carve into him carve also channels within Alma toward the world he feels himself to have abandoned. Reminders of mortality. His form still shines, but it does not gleam like a jewel; those facets lie about him now.
"What sense can be made of 'heroism' without humanity?" Amidst the pieces of his soul, Alma struggles to his feet, to gain traction in the shifting sands. "Forcing a man to undergo trials to bring forth his essence is one thing. But remaking the world-- obliterating that essence-- the very possibility of a hero is rent asunder. Only in the human world can such an ideal take on meaning."
Wincing, still emitting glittering motes like wings shedding feathers, the angel, descending to earth, grins back at Seishirou Ryouhara.
"There's no reasoning with you. This 'time of heroes'--"
In a flash he lunges, sand exploding behind him as he plunges toward the seemingly injured genius, driving without a hint of mercy toward the man shrouded in blood-stained silks.
"--is now!"
In the instant before impact, his glimmering form flickers and vanishes.
"I'll be your hero, Ryouhara."
Reappearing behind, to smash his fist into Seishirou's skull.
"And shoulder whatever cost-- to cut your dream down."
And again in front, to drive a palm toward that scarred face.
"This world is worth saving!"
COMBATSYS: Alma successfully hits Seishirou with Strong Punch.
[ \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ < > ////////////// ]
Alma 1/--=====/=======|=======\==-----\1 Seishirou
Passionlessly, Ryouhara surveys Alma's horror.
At some level, Ryouhara had an inkling of his nonexistence--of the pointlessness of the exchange. Logic is not something his contemporaries ascribed to readily but of which Ryouhara was ever aware. But this 'body' of his.. had been given to him for a reason, even if it was for a reason he's long since forgotten. And as long as he still had a 'body'.. he still had an 'existence.' This bitterness that seeped down into every ancient pore of his being.. was not something even he understood. But faced with this ignoble thing before him, he had no time, no comprehension to question. There is nothing about him that asks why, there is nothing about him that regrets.
"Your illusion of the world.. is persistent," he observes quietly.
Alma charges him down, the shinobi not making much of a move to fight him.
That is because Ryouhara can already tell Alma doesn't dare attack him head on.
When the form disappears, it's with a rush of force that lifts the boy's bangs, leaving half-lidded eyes to look behind him. He makes not a move as Alma appears in a silver flash at his six o'clock, curious still as to the man's attempts to defeat him--a blow lands at the back of his head, sending a flood of white into his perception. Still Seishirou does not make his move. Alma's sudden burst of speed.. Ryouhara looks about him, this way and that as he chances vagaries of his glance after the so-called Hero as he transits around him. Is it even speed? No.. if it were, Seishirou would be able to follow it flawlessly. Alma's body flickers in silver flashes of candescence around his guard. He takes one step to the side and then another blow lands on his chin, staggering the shinobi. THere is yet still no blood upon Alma's fist, though it seems to seep from the edge of Ryouhara's mouth, after that blow.
The ground that Alma finds his purchase in is sand, soft and impressionable, replete with the elements of Alma's ideology--a thing composed of so many smaller things so as to be contiguous. A unity unlike any other. But when Ryouhara stands, the only thing he stands upon is a vast stretch of smooth and polished stone.
"I should hope that there are those like you in my Nirvana..."
"...Unfortunately, you will not be the one to lead them."
He raises one hand, and makes a single gesture.
Then he detonates.
The explosion is enough to rip open the shattered pillars that lay too close in this ruined shrine, cracking the floor beneath him, and sending bits of rubble far into the heavens in every direction. A sleeve slides up, and wipes blood away from his lip. Ryouhara is, as always, bloodied but never actually seeming to move. He stands at the opposite side of the arena from Alma, all the same.
COMBATSYS: Alma blocks Seishirou's Kawarimi Crisis.
[ \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ < > ///////////// ]
Alma 1/=======/=======|==-----\-------\0 Seishirou
Alma Towazu roars in defiance.
Shards of rock shear into his glimmering arms, blood of his own flying forth, so charged with energy in this alternate reality that it briefly continues to glitter with a pearly radiance upon the sand. If that bitterness has weaved its way into the remnants of Ryouhara's being such that he need no longer question its origins, so too did Alma, in his original intense clarity, feel as though he had been distilled to his essence, the complex weave of his past bound into a Gordian knot. Yet as the battle continues, and the intensity of the dream begins to waver, vestiges of mortality displace this mysterious delusion of having shed his body. Though his rare lucidity has not begun to desert him, the man become phoenix, as he feels the grains of sand shift beneath his feet, feels too a shift within his own soul.
'It doesn't make sense anymore...'
Gritting his teeth, he shakes off the aftereffects of the blast, gaze snapping up from beneath the red-tinged bangs of his honey-blond hair, piercing through the light that suffuses him to his adversary poised on the opposite edge of the battlefield.
"Even if it is my last act..."
Put all together, it just doesn't add up.
How did it end up like this?
A boy, surviving a family tragedy, the loss of his world and his purpose; a light rising up within him to fill the emptiness, evidence of the secret ways of the human spirit. A seemingly invincible personal faith, arisen nevertheless from uncertainty and circumstance. But it grew, and it grew-- and now he is a man with enemies, a man with dreams to be shattered-- a man who has lost as many friends and he has made. The heroism that his passion gave birth to brought him into adulthood. And now--
"I'll banish you before your dream can become reality!"
What on earth has he in common with that boy?
"You don't belong in this world!"
Perhaps he will not survive the night. Perhaps the storm that has taken him will not return him. But what chaos has he been thrown into, what madness? How could anyone possibly reweave the tale that his life has told? It doesn't matter anymore. For now, at least, on the brink of it all becoming senseless, it still means something. For now, the human world -- that place that Alma, as a boy, got his golden second chance to rejoin -- seems a real place, one worthy of protecting. While he still can, while it still seems clear, he must fight.
Before he too becomes a ghost.
"Ryouhara!"
And the origin of his own passion is, too, forgotten forever.
Crying out to the heaven Alma can still envision, the fire in his hand flares up yet brighter, surging with a double defiance: against Seishirou's ideals, and against the limitations of Alma's own. He may have reached too far, may have taken his dreams and his faith beyond the place where they still made sense, were still a reaction to something real. He may have become something other than what he was best suited for. Maybe it all, even the tangled web that is his love for his friends, arose from that fundamental mistake, from that assumption that his sacred vision would translate within that greater world. But if he reached too far-- still, his reach is long. Long enough to cover the gap between them. Long enough, in this moment, to make himself heard.
"Uuurraaaahhh!"
That bolt of fire sears through the air, carving a scintillating path of light, striving to burrow into Seishirou's abominable flesh, and burn away the darkness that lingers there.
COMBATSYS: Alma successfully hits Seishirou with Sacred Wave.
> Determined Hit! <
[ \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ < > ///////// ]
Alma 2/<<<<<<</<<<<<<<|===----\-------\0 Seishirou
Seishirou, this time, says nothing.
Though his life has been one long, agonizing road, he does not think on it. Misery assumes a lack of duty. And for someone like Ryouhara, there is nothing but the duty. The ideal. The need to realize what no one else will. That is the nature of things. The world that Alma protects is in the way of history. In the way of his family's legacy. In his way. Alma, as such, is in his way. A sympathizer.
Ryouhara tilts his head. You can feel his ice cold glare.
And then the fire suffuses him. His haori blowing back, Seishirou is bleached away. As he squints against it, his words drift on the wind. "This light..."
The sparkling fire is sent away with a sweep of his hand, cut through with dark force as Ryouhara slouches noticeably against the hero's onslaught. Parts of him are charred, half of his face seared to the point of the shadows encroaching them being a blessing. Energy begins to crackle about him. "I suppose..."
"You're right. There's no sense in this world or the next."
He slides slowly, trailing dark lines off of his shoes as he twists in place, forming a circular calculation seal on the ground beneath him, the details seeming to burn themselves into the ground. "But what you don't realize... is that you can't banish the will of history. Your illusions blind you, deafen you."
Ryouhara lowers slightly, his sleeves touching the ground.
"...If I have to repeat it for you again, it's gonna be over a body."
COMBATSYS: Seishirou calculates his next move.
[ \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ < > ///////// ]
Alma 2/<<<<<<</<<<<<<<|=======\-------\1 Seishirou
There's no sense-- in this world or the next.
Alma, flames flickering about his fist, lowers his chin, eyes wounded.
He can't disagree.
That, after all, was what he fought against; that, after all, was the point. The senselessness of it all. Why they had to die, and leave him alone in this world. Why he was made to suffer so, to bear burdens beyond his capacity. He made sense of it: wielded what he came to see as the fundamentally human power to imbue the world with meaning, to weave a narrative out of unjustiable events. It so happened that power came to him as fire, a fire he could wield to help others to see the light, to pierce their very souls, to summon forth and challenge their own method of making-sense, to compel them to do so lest the darkness consume them. But then, this human blessing, even in that most radiant form, came with its own curse-- the lurking knowledge that nothing undergirds that narrative save your own need for it, save the narrative itself. Driven to make a home in the wilderness. Driven to make sense of madness. Driven.
By the human condition.
By the will of history.
"So be it."
What is his destiny?
"Then speak no more."
Alma's frame trembles with an incandescent passion even his magnified dream-self cannot seem to contain. The crystalline substance that clothes his rejuvenated, unbandaged features sheds like dew off a butterfly's wing, melting to mingle with the sand at his feet, and still more rippling power pours forth; the poetry of flame, what it was when the gods first inscribed it into the earth, a calligraphic cloak sweeping about him.
"History will decide."
That senselessness necessitated faith. Uncertainty gave rise to defiance. There could be no such a thing as Alma's passion without the possibility of despair. Of course it does not all fall together-- why he survived and his parents did not, why he and Frei lived and Jiro slumbered, why true passion is in fact sometimes denied. Only he has the power to make sense of it all, if anyone can. Only by opening his heart, and recognizing that, in the end, it was a need, a kind of desperation.
Call it a weakness if you will.
"Ryouhara! Whomever illusions beset--"
There's only one way to find out.
"This light will reveal the truth!"
He's the man who led an army. He's the boy who cried out in the darkness.
The very sand churns beneath him as though of its own accord as Alma moves forward. He does not step so much as the earth makes way for him. As if every individual grain of sand is working in conjunction with every other, forming a unified and continuous whole, propelling Alma forward, into the future, toward his fate.
Is he a hero? Is he an angel? He dreamed with all his heart.
Within the fingertips that he outstretches, a world awaits. Every second of his life, every fiber of his being, every thread of the tapestry that is the story of one Alma Towazu, burns in its most potent form and perhaps its purest, a surging souful flame. Brother to strays, friend to his rivals, with the courage of his convictions, he strives to make himself understood-- with a fist that will drive through the border of reality itself, so that he might know himself by his imprint. Here, in this moment, in the path of his soul-splintering power, only Seishirou Ryouhara stands in the way.
He roars. Wordless, but with a passion that needs no translation.
Now--
Let fate decide.
COMBATSYS: Alma successfully hits Seishirou with Absolution EX.
[ \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ < > ]
Alma 0/-------/--=====|=======\====---\1 Seishirou
As that passion rips through him, revealing to Alma his own personal truth, a tenuous force clings to Ryouhara's limbs. Defeat. That is... his idealism derided, then his body broken by his enemies. It was a familiar sensation. But Ryouhara only grins, a bloody determination originating from somewhere in his gut, where the incinerating light comes to him at its hottest. His soul--though it is an empty, hollow thing--is shot through by a million beams of light... and Ryouhara understands. It is a familiarity for which he can remember none of the particulars. He grins his own particular bloodied grin, finally figuring it out.
I truly do not exist.
This version of 'me' .. is just a servant.
This world has not .. yet .. changed.
That is why I was left behind.
Does that mean Seishirou is really dead?
Was he always dead?
No. He cannot be killed.
That is what I believe.
The enemy, however.
Hands rip through the AEther of the all consuming light, hands that barely seem to be able to hold onto to their own material form let alone someone else's, attempting to grab great fistfuls of what's left of Alma's dress shirt. The thing that faces Alma now is something that seems nothing less than the will of the Ryouhara itself, an idea given form by the forces here. The thing, barely able to hold constancy, no longer has any discernible face at all, being forged of the same white lines and black fire as the creatures its jutsu has conjured.
The voice, though distended as the anomaly begins to erode.. is still unmistakably Seishirou's.
"I think," he garbles, "that I'll send you back to heaven."
He leaps into the sky, twisting as he drags the force of the seal out of the earth with him, a shimmering haze warping the air high above them. The sky seems to boil.. as this 'chi' of his begins to return to the field from whence it came. Before it does, however, it sets the sky ablaze in a river of fire, formed of black birds that boil the air. That flood, that mass of black firebirds in flight. That is where this creation is going. Back to Nirvana.
And he fully intends on dragging Alma kicking and screaming across the precipice with him.
COMBATSYS: Seishirou can no longer fight.
[ \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ <
Alma 0/-------/--=====|
COMBATSYS: Alma fails to interrupt Shunshin Reaper from Seishirou with Blaze of Glory.
[ \\\ <
Alma 1/--=====/=======|
COMBATSYS: Alma can no longer fight.
Seishirou says, "sure"
Thus does fate decide.
With the full magnitude of Alma's very being, the remnants of Seishirou's hollowed self begin to evaporate, fragmenting and collapsing under the brunt of the avenging angel's burgeoning soul. But where a man has become a ghost, an ideal reigns as mightily as ever. The words echoing within Towazu's mind offer testimony to what has occurred here, of the origins of this lost spectre. This is not the Ryouhara that the champion once stood against. This is not the terrorist against whom he was once Hero of Taizhou.
Upward turns Alma's widened gaze.
/That/ is.
Nirvana. Final freedom from the karmic cycle. Ultimate transcendence of the frail humanities that have defined the phoenix's own ideals. In essence, even when not envisioned by that nemesis, it is indeed a heaven opposed to everything that he has stood for. They are returning there. A place he does not belong. The person that he is--
"No!"
He wouldn't survive the journey.
"I won't leave this world behind!"
Only now do those words emerge from his ethereal lips. Solicited not by a fear of death-- and by more even than a love of life. Only now does he truly understand, at this place where he is the most severed from his mortal body he will ever be while remaining alive. All that which has defied him is precisely what his ideals depend on. All that which has rent asunder his dreams are on what his faith subsists. That senseless world-- it is the human project to perpetually, endlessly make sense of it. To transform the world would be to render humanity irrelevant. It is /that/ -- the end of that /story/ -- that Alma cannot accept.
He cannot guide history.
But he will not let it die.
"This love--"
His heart swells. Even as he is lifted up into the crow-blackened sky, even as the landscape dissolves about him, he struggles to unearth his hand from the decaying corpse in which it remains buried, flames surging about his fist so that he might tear it free. Even as that looming heaven begins to consume him, Alma Towazu feels a glorious light blossom within him.
Right or wrong-- what are such questions to one outside humanity looking in? It is impossible to say whether that fruitless human effort, that being condemned to make sense of the senseless, is 'right'-- it simply is, and right and wrong emerge from it. Knowing intimately what it thus means to be human, having teetered on the edge of leaving it behind before -- and perhaps, in some way, having always teetered on that edge -- the heart of Alma's faith is to, beyond right and wrong, champion that human act. To give himself over entirely to that which gave him life.
"This love--!"
A man's love, the sword of his soul.
Towazu: confession. 'That which must be told.'
It blazes to life then, a fire to cut through the darkness.
Crying out not in defiance but in rapture, Alma scythes his arm about, fearlessly facing heaven itself with a blade of magnificent flame, like a rebellious angel, a beautiful Lucifer, scattering the crows with a sword of revealing light. It is breathtaking, awe-inspiring, terrible and true.
It is not enough.
"Nnghh--!"
To choose to be a man is to choose finitude.
"No--!"
Even his soul can break.
He is too close to heaven now. Whose heaven, it no longer matters-- the sheer magnitude of it shatters his will, even in its ecstasy. The sword does not much die as it explodes into a thousand bright fragments, warping into a vortex that begins to twist Alma's very form. He screams in agony as within him he feels a thousand tiny threads snapping-- the last of the cord that had bound him to his suffering, burnt, tormented body. It is the last fate Alma could have ever sought: to be torn from every source of meaning, a story concluded in silence.
Yet even as the flame of his heart is finally extinguished--
~ My friends. ~
The memory of that glory remains.
~ You /were/ my world. ~
Engraved upon the splinters of his soul.
~ I loved you more than anything. ~
And then that too is gone, sheared through the sieve of heaven.
It is beyond comprehension what occurs then. Who is to say what a man's soul undergoes when it is at last severed from his body? Who indeed to further know what occurs when that body yet persists? And what, most perplexingly, when heaven itself would expel him? It may be that our angel would have gone to meet Ryouhara in that sanctum of his, that what they share in conviction would bring them to the same resting place. But Nirvana, in the end, is no place for one who so treasured humanity, even if in ways he transcended it-- even if he was a hero, in both senses of the term.
Perhaps they shall meet in Valhalla instead.
Alma's dream-self descends like dust.
What is the will of history?
At the border of the world, of life and death, that which remains of his being settles, lacking the force required to pull it back into shape, to reweave it into that stubborn tale. At the border, to meet those who pass between.
And perhaps there, he will remember.
Perhaps even now, it is not too late.
This love--
It is all that remains.
Log created on 20:53:41 05/30/2010 by Seishirou, and last modified on 03:55:57 02/20/2011.