Description: The Louvre: a place where the very architecture treads a line between the archaic and the modern. Atop a glass pyramid sits a solitary guardian; approaching along a leyline comes a wanderer. For the second time -- and perhaps the last -- time in their lives, they meet to clash ideals at the end of the world.
An otherworldly strumming fills the air.
He has a certain love affair with disaster, a prince of bad omens by any other stripe. It would make perfect sense that the ninkou shinobi, perpetrator of the subversion of Taizhou and mastermind behind the "terrorist" Jinchuu tournaments would be drawn out of his seclusionist hiding by the end of the world.
As of right now, the young man is sitting atop the pyramid, on an unfurled piece of paper four feet by four feet wide, with a 'crows amongst the lotus' patterning. The paper is as flat as a piece of newly sawn wood, still wet from the blade. It holds its shape perfectly, and more appropriately its balance--the shinobi sits cross-legged in repose on the piece of paper, which itself balances perfectly as if rooted to the top of the Louvre's glass pyramid.
In his lap is a lute cut from stone and marked with arcane symbology. It is this thing he tries to play. Though his attitude is best described as 'serene,' a strum in his pattern causes a note to be torn off-key, and a single piece of glass at the base of the pyramid develops a crack from the errant tone. It is a fine thing, no wider than a hairline.
Seishirou Ryouhara notices it.
And frowns.
What a week.
If Frei's life were an Indiana Jones movie, the past week or so would be a map with an incredibly hard to follow dotted red line that even STARTS in Austria, swings around to France, heads back to Japan, and then makes an increasingly erratic path back to France, with stops in India, Egypt, Italy, and even the Netherlands. A student of more prosaic and less supernatural history would realize that Frei has been traveling the history of warfare, and it probably is no shock that when he started his journey back west in Japan, he began in Hiroshima.
Everywhere he's gone, the flow of chi that most people would call a 'leyline' has been irrevocably damaged. Things are out of whack everywhere, but they are *intensely* Wrong around these spots, much worse than normal. Had he bothered to look, he'd have found this fountain of Bad Juju to be erupting under Justice High back in Southtown, the site of a mass suicide. Long story short: things are getting worse, and Frei's evaluation of if a solution can be found is getting less hopeful.
Eventually, here he lands: Paris, again. The last time he was here, he met a ghost from the past in the form of the returned Jiro Kasagi. Now?
Now he stands at the edge of the vast pool surrounding the glass pyramid, surveying it. Two things loom large in his senses: the flow of corrupted chi just below the surface, and a presence... a powerful presence.
He reaches down and removes his shoes, carefully, and then steps into the water, one foot at a time.
Whether he notices it or not, faint blue light ripples out from his footfalls, for a fraction of a second, and is gone.
The history of warfare has only interested him on an academic level. While the rumors and details have been idly tracked and noted by Ryouhara, the simple fact of it is, it was a side project for him. These events and catastrophes are, despite his studies, beyond even his understanding, and beyond his ability to correct. Even he was forced to admit this--'ruin is ruin,' he concluded, and was forced to return to his studies.
Of course, there is always the obvious question..
Even if Ryouhara did have the ability to stop the end of the world, would he want to?
"As you stand on the precipice, be aware of the stone on which you perch," he warns.
His voice carries far. It is at once a warning and a precaution, telling the monk to mind the broader world in which he treads so imperiously. And at the same time, warning him about the dangers of entering the notice of a shinobi. His tone carries both meanings at once--a dualist's train of thought for someone who dislikes repeating himself. Slowly, Seishirou stands atop his paper platform, the paper proving no more unbalanced or unyielding to his movement as a plate of steel on the mountain would be. He knits his hands together, with the body and neck of the lute cradled neatly in the crooks of his arms. A gestural and somatic command as Seishirou rattles off several seals wordlessly. He uses his right hand to take the lute by the neck, and then sets it in the air beside him, a gyroscopic trick of the hand throwing the lute in place, causing it to hover in the air for at least three or four seconds when Seishirou releases it.
Then the shinobi jumps straight up.
By the time he lands, a moment later, it's on the point of the pyramid. This is because the paper platform he was standing on folded itself around the lute a score of times in a second, binding it tightly in a sealed package. This package... dangles in the air, anchored to nothingness. It is a ninkou of particular effect and protection. At any case, Ryouhara leaves it there, well convinced of its safety as he leaps to the ground level to meet Frei.
Voluminous white sleeves bound with black tasselling obscure his hands entirely as he sets them to his sides. He faces Frei directly, and explains. "This area is underneath my control and stewardship. There is no need for you to interfere with it. A choice is presented. Either turn away and find a new 'place,' or take your life into your own hands once again. Please decide, it would seem that I'm very busy..."
Well, that explains a lot.
For all that their paths have crossed, depending on your point of view, Seishirou and Frei have only met like this once, and once only. To say that they didn't exactly get along at that moment is probably the understatement of the century, and what the sage has heard and experienced of the ninja technologist's handiwork since does not lead Frei to think they'd get along any better right now, either. But for all of that, he can't bring himself to hate Seishirou. At least, not any more than he can bring himself to hate anyone.
Most of his adult life has been an exercise in forgiveness flying in the face of logic, after all.
Once the ninja is standing in front of him, the redhead seems to come out of... not exactly a trance or a daze, but maybe a moment of looking at something that is JUST over Seishirou's shoulder, perhaps, to focus on him. "Somehow," he says quietly, "I had a feeling it'd be you."
A sigh, and then Frei goes to continue, taking a breath. "I don't want to argue ove--"
He trails off, the sound dying on his lips, and now his gaze isn't figuratively askew; it's obvious that his eyes darted to the glass pyramid and stared, unblinking, at it for a long moment. Apparently, whatever he's seen made him forget the very dangerous individual who basically just threatened him if he doesn't leave.
The shinobi focuses keenly on Frei, eyes flitting fast and quick. He's always had that distinctly crow-like stare. The fact that slight motes of light trace across the monk's footfalls isn't lost on him--very few details are. But when Frei begins to speak with him, the shinobi tilts his head down, to stare dead forward at the monk, weighing his adversary. When Frei freezes, his attention directed to something just over Ryouhara's shoulder, the ninkougakusha's eyes half-lid, as he appears to mull a thought.
..but he doesn't flinch, staring dead at Frei.
Slowly, deliberately, he forms words.
"A question you don't have time to answer," Ryouhara states levelly.
The next moment is cut from steel. Ryouhara smoothly steps forward, releasing a score of shuriken and kunai into the air in one fluid sweep of his right hand, the exact motion motion obscured by his wide sleeve. Despite the single motion used to throw them, they appear to be on different trajectories and moving at different speeds entirely. Part of this could be the fact that they are differently weighted, but that alone couldn't account for that level of variance. It will remain a mystery.
The second step, Ryouhara leans forward, revealing his left hand, pinching together his thumb, middle and forefingers to blow an invisible projectile through the gap between his fingertips. It hits like powder--moving much faster than the shuriken he threw, which are still in flight, if it hits Frei, it will make a soft 'paf,' and a glowing 'TAG' mark will form on Frei's clothing. A fast eye will notice that each of Seishirou's thrown weapons has a 'hunting/raid' kanji seal on them. If the mark lands and the moment it does, the shuriken will begin to curve their trajectories towards him.
..Even the ones that are behind him.
COMBATSYS: Frei has started a fight here.
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Frei 0/-------/-------|
COMBATSYS: Seishirou has joined the fight here.
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Frei 0/-------/-------|======-\-------\0 Seishirou
COMBATSYS: Frei blocks Seishirou's Shuriken Emperor.
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Frei 0/-------/------=|======-\-------\0 Seishirou
A child with red hair stands in a hospital room, looking up at a bed that's almost too tall for him to clear, height-wise; he is just tall enough to be able to see over it, to see the smiling -- if tired -- face of a man lying in said bed. The resemblence is immediate and obvious, and not just the red hair; something about the kind turn at the corner of his mouth, the expression in the green eyes.
"Please! Please, don't go..." the boy says, but his heart isn't in it. Despite how young he looks -- no older than 8 -- it is clear that he knows what is about to happen. The tall, stoic-looking Japanese woman standing next to him does too, but either can't or won't show it. Her hands are folded in the sleeves of a long traditional kimono. She holds neither person's hand; she is reserved, and calm. The boy... he's trying. But desire is fighting against reality, and even now he can feel it. The ebbing of something at the edge of his consciousness. The fading of life.
"Be good," the man in the bed says with a smile.
There is a hellish pause, and then the man in the bed looks forward, and asks: "...were you?"
The glint of steel reflected in a green eye, reflected in glass, reflected in the mind's eye.
Reality intrudes.
"I don't owe you any sort of answer," Frei says aloud. He's looking at Seishirou, but it's not entirely clear that's who he's talking to.
Even as the world becomes alive with flying knives, however, the sage appears to react on an almost instinctive level. Water goes flying in every direction as the air around Frei leaps to life, called into action by some invisible voice, batting kunai away left and right. He cannot stop them all; one or two thunk meatily into an arm, a leg, but Frei begins slowly stepping forward toward Seishirou, taking time to pluck them out, seemingly more annoyed than hurt. When he gets close enough, he simply thrusts his hand forward, fist-first... and that punch is surrounded by the force of a whirlwind compacted into precious little space, an atmospheric jackhammer looking to piston Seishirou right out of the way.
COMBATSYS: Seishirou interrupts Fierce Punch from Frei with Kaitaijutsu.
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Frei 0/-------/----===|=======\-------\1 Seishirou
The shinobi's chin tilts up in appraisal as Frei performs an almost picture-perfect windmill parry of the blades in his 12 point hunter array. The ninkoujutsu of the "shuu" tracking seal vs the "fuda" marking seal has neutralized most opposition who have stood before Seishirou in the past, but it wasn't expected to be decisive where the peaceable genius was concerned.
The shinobi walks forward pace for pace to match Frei. The person to which Frei is referring to isn't immediately clear to Ryouhara, but he seems to be aware that there is a second entity to be dealt with because he isn't confused at all by the disparity. Frei's mild preoccupation is obvious to someone of Ryouhara's deductive skill, who seems to be otherwise unaffected. His sharp gaze doesn't stray. "Don't get distracted," he warns. "You're on the battlefield..."
"This is the world we live in... for now!!"
Seishirou takes the blow straight to the middle, his body folding around the force of Frei's fist, ragdolling in full flailing limbs at the force of the blow. But Frei would immediately notice that even though Seishirou appeared to take the whole hit, his fist landed in Seishirou's middle, but striking something hard and unrelenting like steel instead of the slight give of flesh. It's like hitting a rock--though Seishirou's body seems to absorb the shock, the point damage is -- wrong. In a second, the whirlwind rips between them, and Seishirou's limbs are momentarily obscured from Frei's view by the hail of white silk from his rippling haori.
Almost effortlessly, the shinobi parlays the ragdoll motion into a curving blow aimed right towards the tag he'd placed earlier on Frei's clothing. The movement is as fluid as Wushu. Seishirou hits only light enough for Frei to feel it on his skin, but by the time the rest of the force from Frei's martial blow catches up with the shinobi, sending the light-framed man tumbling away, it's very clear that he's done something horrific.
Using an up-close touch, Seishirou has reconfigured the seal on Frei to be one more suitable for use with his Kaitaijuzu, an 108-bead necklace wrapped around his left hand. Using this ninkou after placing the seal requires only a one-handed 'initiation' gesture. The one that Seishirou forms as he stands, turning his right hand out of view from Frei.
Frei might be able to detect the ninkou active underneath Seishirou's clothing, each bead of the ninkou triggering in series. Each one is tied to an exact weak point in Frei's chakra. Once he makes that triggering seal, Ryouhara will begin the slow, methodical process of dismantling Frei's aura piece by piece.
There's not much you can do about it once the tags are already in place. Frei's mind is already not entirely on this fight, as Seishirou can clearly tell, but the truth is that the chi sage has never really been a fighter at heart. For someone like Seishirou who's made a point of the study of tactics, dealing with someone like the red-haired fighter must seem like child's play. And, indeed, as his plan goes off without a hitch, Frei can feel the bite of the shinobi's technique even as his hand is recoiling. He bites down, hissing a bit at the pain, pushing back against the attempt to more or less tear him down from the ground up.
Yet for all his lack of graceful finesse, Frei is nothing if not resilient. As mighty and insidious as Seishirou's attack may be, defending himself against such assaults is second nature to the young sage, and the Ryouhara genius can likely feel Frei pushing back as best he can, given the circumstances. "I don't even want to fight you," he grinds out at the ninja, staring at him across the pool of water in which they stand. "What is there to be gained by--"
'What kind of strength can be found when those around you think you're nothing but a joke? A weakling that needs coddling and protection like a small child?'
The awful red-orange glow, like hellfire, of a sphere of compressed energy in the hand of a young blue-haired girl, illuminating her face. A face filled with a calculated hatred so unlike her normal self. The ache that Frei can still sometimes feel from where that attack bored into his chest like an auger, much like Seishirou's tags are attempting to do right now.
The pain is blinding and right now it's very, very real to Frei. For a moment, it's impossible to tell in his vision whether Hotaru wielding the murderous power or Seishirou the chi-tech wizard is one or the other. But the truth is, Frei never wanted to really do either of them harm. He fought to protect. He fought to master. Never to hurt. Never to hinder.
'But did you?' asks the spectral Hotaru, face still limned with that terrible glow. Her face is bizarrely serene, given the memory. Her eyes flat and lightless, until it becomes clear they too are glass, a fragment of that pyramid that feels like it's a million miles away and right next to him at the same time.
Blood trickles down Frei's arm, dripping from his finger, summoned from the memory.
"I don't... there's no reason for this. Just leave me to do what I must, Ryouhara," he grinds out, trying to make sense of this. The wind suddenly becomes biting, chill; with a sweep of the hand, the water in the pond comes alive, moving in sync with Frei's hands in complicated, interlocking loops, swirling around Seishirou as if to become a prison, one that -- should he not escape in time -- suddenly flash-freezes into place, the watery whips becoming all too solid chains of frost.
COMBATSYS: Seishirou dodges Frei's Hatsuyuki.
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Frei 0/-------/---====|=======\-------\1 Seishirou
There is a certain strength not to be underestimated in the strength of "resolve." Throughout his life, championing the strength of an ideal over physical strength has been Ryouhara's primary focus, so to say that Frei's strategy is 'child's play' to him is something that would earn a bitter laugh from the shinobi, had the idea been voiced aloud.
A test of will is beautiful, more so than any tactics Ryouhara could field in the arena.
"There is every reason," Ryouhara counters, his voice firm. "The world's history - the history of the world that a man invariably wishes to protect in whatever way he views as noble - has been forged on conflict. If your ideal is weaker than my own, then allowing you to proceed would only be foolishness..."
The iron bands in Ryouhara's tone temper and belie his usual soft-spoken nature. The shinobi looks on, colder than ice as Frei wavers. "Your resolve is flagging," he observes, even as the whips of water come flagging around him, forcing him to go back into a defensive posture. The sage can see a thin double-edged blade in his furthest hand as the whips of water crystallize before and around him, imprisoning him. He looks up at the reflections in the ice around him, into his own eyes. All he sees is anger. "What you must?" he asks. "... Thinking yourself as a leaf on the river, will-less to form your own path and cut your own way..." he speaks slowly...
"I won't abide it!!"
Forming a seal on the earth in front of him, he stomps on it forcefully, subsuming the prison just before it can crush him with a prison of his own creation--an explosive tower of flame that engulfs the shinobi. In an instant, he cuts the inferno down in the midst of a thursting dash right into Frei's midsection.
Seishirou has long since memorized the sequence of dismantling for Kaitaijuzu, and his aim is unerring. If Frei is even distracted for an instant, there'll be nothing to defend the sage from Ryouhara running him through point 15 on his kidney meridian at about the same time his jutsu is breaking his aura over that exact point.
COMBATSYS: Frei endures Seishirou's Fierce Strike.
* Attack Of Opportunity! *
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Frei 1/-------/=======|=======\-------\1 Seishirou
Will is everything. Seishirou is right to chastise Frei for that, even if the chi sage doesn't seem to hear him, apparently struggling with something else entirely. It's definitely bad tactics; it's certainly very close to fatal, because he still seems in a daze as the shinobi leaps at him after an entirely too-deft deflection of that watery prison that Frei conjured up. The world seems to slow down to the point of Seishirou's blade as it sinks, seemingly unresistingly, into Frei's flesh, drawing blood and working in tandem with the expertly-executed preparation to try and pry Frei's defenses open even farther.
There's a brief second where he looks down at both the ninja who just stabbed him, and the brightness of steel protruding from his torso.
'Whether the things you just said were just to soothe me, or if you actually believe them, the truth is I didn't do any of this to hurt you. I did it for me; because there was this hole in my life I had to fill.'
The words come from his own mouth. They're the first time in an eight year estrangement that the young then-monk has spoken to his mother about how he really felt. Why he left.
She wouldn't take his hand at the time his father died. For her, the blade was everything. A family of some of Japan's most peerless swordsmen, a tradition Frei chose not to follow, and look at the consequences. He abandoned his family, drew Hotaru into their struggles to her own detriment, got his friends nearly killed. That was how far he had to be pushed before he made this trip. Before he said anything. Before he acted for himself.
'And have you... filled this hole?' his mother had responded. 'Who have you /become/, Frei?'
'If I became anything, I became myself more truly. I didn't transform, I transfigured... I *refined*.'
He never left. He simply... was content being himself, without restricting what 'himself' meant.
The world snaps back into painful clarity in the span of a second.
The glassy confusion of Frei's eyes evaporates as he turns his gaze to meet Seishirou's. He doesn't even speak. He simply snaps his fingers.
The air between the two fighters literally explodes in a withering hail of intense fire. There is nothing else.
"Asserting your dominance on the world isn't the only way to show will," Frei says sharply, in the aftermath of the blast, removing the blade from his side if he must. Wounds close literally before the eyes of those present, and Seishirou -- whose senses are assuredly as sharp as Frei's own when it comes to chi -- can feel it.
Corrupt chi literally being purified before his eyes, as if the man standing before him were a filter.
"I don't blame you for being upset. But my will is my own. Always has been, always will be."
COMBATSYS: Seishirou blocks Frei's Reiki.
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Frei 1/------=/=======|=======\-------\1 Seishirou
The flames continue to burn long after Ryouhara cuts them in half. As his blade hits home, Ryouhara drives it deep, putting his left palm on the pommel of the blade to force his body weight behind it. Every levering motion is perfectly tuned to erase any idea of a simplistic defense, from the weight shift on the balls of Ryouhara's feet to the drop of his shoulders behind the attack. There is little mercy to be had from the shinobi, not in a test of wills. No quarter.
But then, the two are seperated in a massive explosion of Frei's own chi. Ryouhara is forced to guard with his blade at the last second, the explosion's force absorbed across the length of the blade only due to the fact that Seishirou quickly enervated the weapon with his own chi, and when the sword breaks, the release of that chi cancels out much of the immediately harmful force behind it, leaving shards of the cheap production blade in Seishirou's wake as he tumbles backwards and away, landing against the glass pyramid without going through it only by the boon of slowly rotating himself back and alighting onto it. Stll, his impact is hard, causing the entire structure to shudder with the impact, and forcing Seishirou to stand at an odd angle when he straightens, clinging to the sheer surface.
When he stands, he stares dead forward at Frei. The young man is healing..
"An ideal exerts a will all its own... you don't have the ability to tell it to stop when it begins to change the world. WHat do you think you're attempting to do by taking another step towards me at all?"
He has, thus far, not been afflicted with the same visions as Frei has, it would seem. But, Seishirou seems to know exactly what Frei is hearing and experiencing. Has easily read every one of his distractions thus far. He knows exactly when and where to time his blows. He seems immune to the same melancholy visions that afflict Frei.
But appearances are deceiving.
On the contrary, when Seishirou stands on that pyramid, he is surrounded--as he always has been--by visions of himself, and of memories of those closest to him. In one pane, a young boy sits in seiza, the Ryouhara emblem on his jinbei as an older woman combs through his long hair. This boy asks Seishirou a question. Another boy, a moody youth wearing a headband and hefting a backpack over one shoulder stands alone, asking him another question. A laughing, jovial man carrying a massive scroll on one shoulder asks him a third. A dark-eyed woman with long wavy hair smoothly asks him a fourth. A young girl with a panda backpack asks him another.. a blonde with wings of fire, asks yet another...
Ryouhara's entire time in meditation has been spent ignoring these images of times long past. They are louder and more insistent than anything he has ever encountered before inside of his own mind. But through will and perseverance alone, he dispenses with them entirely.
Seishirou discards the broken hilt of the cheap sword to one side. "An ideal isn't something you own. Will isn't something you control. They are you. You are them. With no regret," the shinobi states firmly, his eyes dead forward, "I've left everything that was important behind me. Because I exist. And I don't exist. I will now do you the favor of the same."
Seishirou bites his thumb, and draws a long trail of blood across the length of the pyramid glas underneath him. A series of handseals later, he slams his palm down flat on the glass. A sealing array blooms across the length of the glass, long inky lines scribbling in a grand circle surrounding Seishirou. Then, leaping atop his own ninkou, the wrapped lute still suspended in midair, Seishirou triggers the seal, and jumps high.
Without any further delay, Seishirou explodes the pyramid of the Louvre.
A massive thermal bales into the air above him from the resulting conflagration that scatters the glass in every direction, turning the entire glass structure into molten steel and haunting glass. Deep below them somewhere is the source of the chi that he looks for, but those voices need to be silent now. In the folds of his silken haori, the ninja catches the heat of the thermal, kiting in the air on spread arms. But it's different than it was before. The Katon Citadel technique is the one he broke out of Frei's prison with--breaking out of an ice prison with a fire fortress. However, the walls of fire are melding, the fast-burning fires of one technique moving towards Frei, and merging through planned lines with the slow burning fires of the Citadel. He's linking two seperate techniques together.
The entire whirling curtain is moving towards Frei.
Seishirou answers his younger selves decisively.
"There's no time for games!!!"
COMBATSYS: Frei blocks Seishirou's Atari.
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Frei 1/----===/=======|======-\-------\0 Seishirou
The world is fire.
It is a blast wave of glass, steel, and flame that is converging on Frei's position with terrible speed. But more than that, it is the fire in which Seishirou Ryouhara has been forged. It is as if the crucible that bore such a man into the world was formed into an assault and hurled at the red-haired fighter. It's not exactly the fullest flower, maybe; it seems unlikely that Seishirou would expend everything he has in one terrible burst like this. But certainly, it is his turmoil given some sort of form, birthed into this world as a token of his seriousness.
Facing it, Frei smiles.
'Seishirou Ryouhara is dead!'
Ayame's own words, thrown in Frei's face on the eve of the second Jinchuu. It was the first and only time Frei had ever seen the infuriatingly calm criminal acting with something approaching human emotion. And even then, she probably felt she was keeping it in check, but Frei felt it. She cared. Somewhere inside, she cared, and felt betrayed and hurt.
His response had been, 'His body, perhaps.' What he had meant, at the time, was: the IDEA of Seishirou Ryouhara would continue into the future so long as someone who cared about him existed. As long as love for what he stood for was a real thing.
As the wall of fire approaches, the sage's arms move in complex circles, almost like a dance. On cue, the waters of the pool around him -- those that haven't been immediately vaporized, anyway -- suddenly rush forward, becoming a wall of rushing water that surges in front of him.
The shield is makeshift, but Frei's response is uncannily swift and intuitive. The wall becomes thinner and thinner as debris is kicked aside and fire merely churns it into an ever-expanding cloud of steam. Eventually, it's entirely gone, and the remains of Seishirou's technique slam into Frei's guard, making him wince. Cuts, burns, other wounds... added to the closing-but-still-bleeding stab wound in his side, the lingering effects of the chakra tags. Bowed, but unbroken.
"I don't think I gave Alma enough credit for understanding you," Frei says aloud, between gasping breaths. He's kneeling, trying to get his bearings. That was not easy. He did not come out unscathed. He MIGHT be lucky to even be alive. "But he's always been better at that than me. It's why I appreciate him. In your own way, you've suffered. I can accept that. I can understand it. I can even appreciate it."
He closes his eyes -- a dangerous thing, to a casual observer, given his foe -- and smiles. His hands come together above his heart, palms inward, and a glow begins. Frei's toes point, and then he's not even standing on the ground, instead hovering just an inch or two off it instead. It is no raging fire, no blinding star that he gathers. If anything, it's the antithesis of something used for attack. It's a gentle, warm light.
"Maybe you suffered more than people knew. Maybe it did hurt you inside to do the things you felt you had to." Frei's eyes open and he regards Seishirou carefully, trying to see him as others would have. As Alma had; as Ayame had.
The result is a bizarre but elating sense of peace.
"You were loved all this time."
COMBATSYS: Frei charges his next attack!
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Frei 1/--=====/=======|======-\-------\0 Seishirou
Across the distance, Frei tries to gauge his opponent, and perhaps more importantly what Seishirou actually *wants*. That the shinobi is seeing something akin to the visions that plague him is apparent, though not obvious. If anything, it feels like the shinobi is waiting for the 'right person' to arrive to handle whatever it is that's waiting below. Now, whether or not Seishirou thinks that he himself is the 'right person'... there's an interesting question.
'What do you think you're doing by attempting to move toward me at all?'
"Living," Frei says in answer, perhaps in a seeming non-sequitur. "Just like you are. Being myself, for as long as I can. If I doubt that -- if I pretend my reasons are anything bigger than what I feel right now -- then what was the point of any of it? Being me... that's enough."
The fires burn hot still, settling on the surface of the water in burning motes that never entirely go out. The steam and smoke curtain high, but they part as Ryouhara drifts on the thermal, his light frame bouyed easily by the force of the colliding chis. His face is long and drawn, finally showing a hint of fatigue from the onslaught both mentally, from the visions, and physically, from the exertion the battle takes on his body.
His Hagoromo ninkou isn't going to allow him to stay in the sky much longer, as his Citadel has been broken down by the colossal and impressive efforts of the chi sage to negate his own ninjutsu and ninkoujutsu. The heat only stays in the air so long without Ryouhara's direct intervention. It is unlike the ninkou that he's wrapped his lute in, which sitll hangs over the flaming heap of wreckage from the glass pyramid, protected even from the intense heats that Ryouhara subjected it all to. But even so...
The words that Frei speak still reach him, distantly. He frowns, deeply.
"Stop. Don't speak to me any more of that. Towazu lives in a world of light and love and endless delusions... speaking that name to me is like inciting the firestorm. Words of encouragement... of love... compassion.... the time for those has long past for idealists. Compassion is something for the majority. It is a tool of the tyrants who inherited this world to keep their subjects complacent. And even this, on the eve of the tyrant's failure, there can be no quarter, and there can be no regrets."
"What useless thing could come of love..." Ryouhara begins, hard.
He frowns, stops in the middle of his sentence, and switches to a different tack.
Up there, he seems little more than a fixture, a firefly never quite touched. His voice is stiffened and molded hard across the anvil as he pours the heat into it. "...there is no one who can love something that doesn't exist. Enough of you. If you wish to understand me, then I will shepherd your will through the endless glow underneath the hammer of the forge."
It is a glow that Frei mimicks even now. Tucking the sleeves of his haori and swooping down, Seishirou dives, driving for Frei at full speed.. and beyond. With his body seeming to flicker through an intense aura of heat, Seishirou intends to blow Frei right through the ground by grabbing him, in the process turning the sage's body itself into an explosive bullet, carried on the end of his own almost-lethal dive.
As he goes, it is hard for him not to think of Riko, of Suzume, of Ayame.. the people who were under his protection.
COMBATSYS: Seishirou successfully hits Frei with Shunshin Reaper.
[ \\\\\\\\ < > /////////////////////// ]
Frei 2/<<<<<<</<<<<<<<|==-----\-------\0 Seishirou
'What useless thing could come of love?'
His spirit may be stronger than it's ever been, but in this moment, perhaps Frei's body has reached its limits. One completely overbearing assault by Seishirou, who has brought to bear considerable force, more than most mere mortals can manage. A second is far, far beyond what he could possibly endure. And realistically, that light that continues to gather even as Seishiriou dives at him, preparing for the final blow. It was Frei who started this fight haunted, but slowly and surely it's become the ninja who, perhaps, is the more aggrieved by whispers of the past.
Seishirou grabs Frei's practically unresisting body and effectively hurls him like a flaming meteor across the plaza.
As he sails through the air, Frei's eyes close.
There is a tremendous explosion as that final attempt to silence the sage's voice... succeeds, apparently. And if the shinobi looks into the impact crater there is, in fact, nothing there at all. Seishirou literally incinerated his opponent, totally and utterly. Burned away until there was nothing left.
For a long moment, everything is silent, or at least as silent as this suddenly apocalyptic hellscape can be. But that silence is broken, eventually, by a voice from nearby. Not in the crater, but instead at the point where the leyline bursts into open, not far from the now-destroyed pyramid.
It is a voice that says: "Love creates miracles."
If you look at the speaker, it IS Frei, objectively; the same shape, the same appearance, the same voice. But something... SOMETHING is different. You can FEEL it, right down in your marrow, if the power of life touches you at all. And though he stands there, he looks as confused as anyone about it, glancing at his arms, even tapping his toes on the ground, briefly. He's "real"... but anyone's definition of what real is, that's probably up for debate.
He takes a step toward Seishirou and grass springs anew from the ground in his wake.
"I'm not Alma. But probably from a certain point of view, I believe in things that might be confused for what he believes, from a distance." That warm light returns, suffusing this being's entire body, and for a moment he looks reflective. "Love is a bond that cannot be broken. The compassion you describe isn't the sort of love I mean. What I'm talking about are the pieces of ourself that live on in others. The ways that everything about us that makes us who we are comes to exist inside them. Not because we forced it on them, and not because they agree with us, but because without us they're incomplete, and vice-versa."
Before the white light was gentle, warm, but indinstinct and hazy. Now, it becomes blinding, a living thing sweeping around Frei like a halo, barely controlled. "You never stopped existing, Seishirou. You can't be erased as long as someone loved you. Real love is unconditional and eternal."
He releases the power he's been holding, which unfolds from him in glowing, concentric petals like the opening of a lotus flower. The second time Frei's used this power, and this time on a far greater scale and at far greater cost.
It's not clear what this will do, but it's also not entirely certain that matters anymore. It is a wave of absolute, unfiltered life force. The stuff of creation. As it passes, grass and flowers erupt in its wake.
It is a moment of absolute harmony with everything.
It might just be a miracle.
COMBATSYS: Seishirou endures Frei's Empowered Shinra Banshou!
[ \\\\\\\\ < > /////////////// ]
Frei 0/-------/--<<<<<|==-----\-------\0 Seishirou
Seishirou steps through the flaming wreckage nimbly, the waves of heat curtaining across his haori. In his wake, the Louvre burns. The explosive finale attack--measured and planned exactly by his ability--leaves no room for escape. Even though Seishirou respects strong ideals, this was a moment in which his ability to inflict fatal damage was without a doubt. Using positioning, he was able to break through Frei's impressive command with his own multi-disciplinary abilities.
"It seems I've overextended my abilities..." Years of fighting tyrant kings have increased Ryouhara's lethality. It was a little disappointing to see that there was nothing left of Frei when his fires finished burning, but it was the fate of everyone who took to Alma's useless rhetoric without sufficient idealism to back it.
Imagine his surprise, then, when Frei isn't annhilated instantly.
Speaking of miracles, Seishirou's glance becomes flat and cold when the young man stands up before his attack, glowing, hale and hearty. It is less a disappointed gaze--to the contrary. Seishirou had not intended on killing Frei at all. But the fact that Frei is now very much alive, and whole leaves Ryouhara with a question. The cold silver-edged look he fixes Frei with is an analytical one. He knows that Frei is different now from what he was, and his eyes, even now, are calculating what those differences actually are. A question of sufficient strength to his calculating mind.. it's really the only thing that can check his all-consuming idealism.
So when the halo blooms forth from the sage, Ryouhara doesn't try to fight it at all. He is remarkably brave when he needs to be, an endless ambition causing the shinobi to take not one step towards the halo, but three. "Whatever the ougi of your foolishness wields, I'm not afraid." His silken coat blown backwards with the force, his stride is interrupted. All Creation subsumes him, an infinite warmth that eclipses the shinobi, and forces a set of eyes accustomed to the dark to look into the light for the first time.
By the time his balance recovers and his coat stills, the warmth is gone, and the Louvre is extinguished. Where it was cold night a moment ago, it is now a warm summer day. The ruins of the Louvre are covered in thick foliage, as if decades worth of nature had reclaimed the museum for her own. Ryouhara, for the most part, is not dead, his ninkoujutsu more than enough to handle most encounters of this nature. Briefly wary, briefly confused, the shinobi looks around him, his eyes fixing on a black butterfly that flaps past him.
His eyes are lost, then, to the openness of the sky, the shinobi looking straight up.
It feels to him, as if an eternity has passed.
"Hrmph..." Ryouhara scoffs.
"What a pretty dream," he decides.
"It would be easy for me to leave this place, and be with the ones I once loved. It would be easy for me to give up, and return to my family. To only protect them, and hold them close to me as I will it. That would be easy. It is a temptation that we live with every waking day. But it is not the Ryouhara's place in this world to be loved or to love. I am the shepherd of the commoner, the weak, the proleteriat. They do not know me, and I will never know them..."
He raises his hand, flexing it in front of him.
"This energy is strange. There is a feeling deep inside of me now. A feeling that I thought I'd killed long ago. A reason for which I came back from Marise's hell. A reason for which I now exist. I've tasted this miracle you talk of, through my own strength and my own perseverance. ....I think it was called love. It is familiar to me. A child once spent an entire summer searching obliviously for a brother who was never hiding. A ragged, torn thing, it is. It is painful as nothing else could be."
Ryouhara turns away from Frei, his coat drifting against the warm summer breeze. On his back lay the symbol of the Ryouhara, and despite the warmth, the shinobi tucks his chin deep into his collar as if it were the most bitter of chills. "I begin to tire," he decides. He will gather his lute now.
"You can do as you please with this place. It ill suits me from here on. But be warned. If these eyes see you, or Towazu, ever again.. I will be the end of your miracles."
With that, Seishirou's body becomes indistinct, flickering and deconstructing before your very eyes.
How long was he already gone?
COMBATSYS: Seishirou takes no action.
[ \\\\\\\\ < > /////////////// ]
Frei 0/-------/--<<<<<|==-----\-------\0 Seishirou
COMBATSYS: Seishirou has left the fight here.
[ \\\\\\\\ <
Frei 0/-------/--<<<<<|
Log created on 19:40:30 08/31/2014 by Frei, and last modified on 11:36:07 09/01/2014.