Description: In the middle of the night, a massive firestorm blooms. Trapped with no where to go, Alma and Tran must finally settle their old scores with the ranks of Kagero.
The City of Lights has dimmed.
Alma races forward through Paris's darkened streets, the city unrecognizable in the absence of its inhabitants. Whether the disappearances have caused residents to cloister themselves in their abodes or the phenomenon itself has extended so far that all have vanished, none can say. The eerie sense that the latter is possible, that he may be one of the last to walk these streets and that even his enhanced senses offer no evidence to the contrary, sends a shiver down the psychic's spine. His features betray only dire resolve.
If there are no cabs, he will run. If there are no planes, he will swim. When facing a foe beyond reason, one's conviction must transcend reason to match it.
The absence of activity results in a near absence of electric light, leaving all that illuminates the street the moon above and the Time Sphere in Tran's hand, its milky luminesence mirroring the orb above. With Tran no longer synchronized with the Sphere and its manipulative effects suppressed, its power and presence have greatly decreased, but its mere existence adds to Alma's unease. Perhaps it shall summon more phantoms from the depths of their memories. Perhaps they shall stride unknowing into a world of their own imagining. What more of the past will return?
"It's not much further," he declares to his longtime frenemy without breaking his stride. "Even if there are no cabs, surely the Metro still operates."
The burn scars upon his face and chest begin to throb.
SOME TIME AGO
FRANCE
"This is too dangerous," Dr. Tran (international celebrity and secret agent) calmly states to Alma (asshole), the Timesphere of Memory held aloft like a softly glowing beacon, "So as not to risk your temptation, I am left with no alternative." Bringing it closer to his face, he examines it with a critical eye, seemingly weighted down by resignation at what he must do.
Tran deliberately sets his tongue on the world-alteringly powerful artifact and gives it a good lick.
NOW
STILL FRANCE???
Dr. Tran runs alongside his arch-fremesis, and he looks cranky.
"It better. This city has been nothing but one disappointment after another." Eyes turned upward, but still following his technically friend, he begins counting them off on his fingers.
"Not a real rapturing, stupid bubblegum people, the croissants are all stale, it's impossible to understand any of the movies, CAN'T GET A CAB..." He leaves that word dangling in the air, sharp. /Accusatory/. /Alma/.
A slow glow begins to eclipse the moonlight.
The warm glow is of the sort that kindles a hearth, letting the warm scents and fragrance of the fire tease the sensations, and a smoke is in the air. One might think it at first glance a campfire in the distance. One would be wrong. The scent as one gets closer becomes more and more evidentiary of an aberration of accepted norm. The taste of burning motor oil in the air, and the electric tang of an energetic reaction in the air. Of chakra. There is so much chakra...
As the pair approach, the source of the scent and the glow becomes quite clear. The entire street has been gutted at an intersection, revealing a collapse of the street of the subway below. And the fact that there is at least a 5 car pileup in the tunnels therein. But that's not where the fire's coming from. That honor belongs to the lead car of the group that's clearly been derailed below.
The lead cab of the Paris Metro is burning, flames licking high into the air.
And it's suspended thirty feet off the ground by a system of wires that, impressively, manage to hold the toppled cab without being melted in half. THe entire array burns, as if a funeral pyre has been set up.
That's about when Seishirou Ryouhara makes his appearance, at the opposite end of the intersection, striding amongst the rubble along the periphery of the torn street. His silk haori curves and turns in the hot wind baling from his ninkougakujutsu. Looking up at the car absently, the shinobi knits his hands together, rattling off a series of sutra in quick succession.
"Katon: Yontou no Gokujinjou..."
He slams his palms flat against the ground.
This is it. The culmination of weeks of globe-wide travel. She's passed through regions once inhabited by mankind but are now barren wastelands. She's looked upon the nightmare born out of Metro's ruin; felt the volcanic intensity of Fuji's wrath, relived years of her past, and even braved a close encounter with Zach Glen's parents. All in the pursuit of information and to feed just enough of that precious knowledge out to keep all the pawns in play. But the game is hurtling toward its conclusion and the time for play fast coming to an end.
"Hm..."
It will happen any moment now - their quarry will come this way. She made sure of it. The Master Engineer has special surprise prepared for the two and she isn't about to miss another demonstration of his prowess.
Conversations with the man, if they can even be called that, are always an intrigue. "Oh, did you know Schugerg is going to blow up Southtown? Someone let that guy get nukes." Wait, didn't that happen... "Again." No response. She understands. He does have to concentrate on what is about to happen. It will be a spectacle to remember. Too bad the world is on the cusp of forgetting.
Wait, here they come. The two coming this way aren't exactly the most stealthy duo.
"It looks like shutting down the cab service for the night worked out as expected." she observes, standing up straight on her fire-escape perch. He will descend first to welcome them.
A long, black coat is draped over her shoulders down to her ankles. But even though the evening started out as a crisp European Fall, it isn't the chill she's worried about right now.
One of them has it. Of that, she has no doubt. Her time in Metro before its fall taught her to read the patterns - a continuous rhythm, ever so subtle, constantly changing but in predictable ways. One of the two men definitely has one of five such artifacts to be found in the world if her research is accurate. And now they are about to be relieved the burden of carrying it.
A Time Sphere.
"It's not my fault we can't get a cab." Alma briefly sees a mental image of Tran seated in an empty movie theater, stuffing his face with stolen pastries and spitting crumbs as he rants at the unsubtitled screen, and regrets his psychic powers. "It's doubtless due to your own shabby appearance. Cab drivers like me. I always listen to them--"
The Scarred Angel's voice trails off.
The subway car dangles before them like a hanged man from his noose, the flames rising up before them reflected in the depths of Alma's eyes. His adventures have made him privy to the horrors of humanity, and his gentleness and restrait typically make him master of his emotions. But something in Alma's throat constricts at this display, his eyes widening and pupils appearing to shrink, catching himself clenching his jaw. This elaborate construction, built by some mad logic beyond the ken of common men, is aesthetically familiar. Some internal elusive principle governs what produced the devastation before him, a principle he has never understood but which he has encountered before.
"Ryouhara..."
Alma's burns throb again, this time causing him to flinch slightly, and only then does he realize that he is faintly trembling. If he were holding the Time Sphere, it might have slipped from his grasp. Emotions are welling up within him, all in turmoil, such that even he cannot constrain them. He allows them to bear him up itself.
"SEISHIROU!!"
The shout erupts from Alma's lips, shattering his mild manner, spirit surging without delay. The man whose existence is agonizing to him, who even were he banished from the world would continue to haunt Alma's memories. The narrow path that Alma walks, his conviction to love this world and make meaning of what it offers, involves a sacrifice of more radical possibilities. It is a path he has always walked, and has become essential to who he is. It is the path his sight has always told him he should walk. And he has always trusted that sight.
"At last you've appeared before me," Alma murmurs then, before abruptly turning to Tran. "Tran, they surely mean to seize the Sphere. We absolutely cannot allow it to fall into their hands!" During the fight with Tran, the Sphere whispered to him of its possibilities, as it does to all it seeks to bring into its thrall.
He always trusted that psychic sight, which speaks so richly of links unbroken, but trust is not proof, and faith is not certainty. Facing someone with a will which seems to him opposite and equivalent--
"We must never allow them to shape the world to their wishes!"
Alma is afraid.
"...and a terrorist blew up our stupid train." Dr. Tran slows to a jog, then halts entirely, hands on his hips, to admire the spectacle before him. He exhales, long and tired, oblivious at first to Alma's explanation of who this jerkoff is and what he wants.
Tran /remembers/ him.
And yet his own reaction is much more muted; no outbursts of rage or indignance. He doesn't even really seem /that/ upset; at least, not at Seishirou.
"You see? This, this is why I had to lick it, because otherwise this would happen and you'd get all into it and then we'd be screwed." Dr. Tran steps away in disgust, shaking his head and pacing in a small circle. He stops as abruptly as he started and stares at Alma.
"You owe me for this one." He gestures wide and inclusively, at the train and the fire and the ninja. "This. Right here. I don't like it and I don't like being the sidekick."
"Aa," the Ryouhara scion had responded, mentally absent.
Truthfully, he had heard every word of the smaller prodigy's banter. The idea that Schugerg got ahold of another nuclear device--and brought it to Southtown--is one of the many things that would have concerned him deeply had he heard of it only a year ago. He would have already known, might have already been driven to act. But the loss of one city--especially for one who has lived his entire life isolated and without family or friends--seems to pale in comparison to the loss of the known universe. Now it's just a footnote.
Just a footnote to the intensity of that young man's laser-like concentration.
As he lands lightly, stepping forward beneath the crotch of the inferno, he is alreadying drawing great amounts of chakra to seals scribed in the flats of his palms, as he rattles off the extensive formula for the technique he's prepared. The subway car is suspended by his ninkou sealing wires, which each connect to their own foci. The entire display is the central focus for a massive chi antenna, gathering great amounts of chi for Seishirou to use in the named technique. You can almost see the red spheres building in his hands when he slams his palms into the street.
KATON: Yontou no Gokukinjou.
Fire Release: Four Towers of the Invincible Castle of Hell.
A massive explosion rocks the concrete. The street becomes a fluid thing as Ryouhara's palms inject into it the stored energy from the ninkou array above. Cripplingly hot, flames rip straight from the boiling tar of the blacktop, steam jetting forth from every crack in the cement. A massive curtain of flame rips across the battlefield, four stories high and propagating as fast as an arrow's flight. Everything in front of the fire dissintegrates into nothingness--cars are cut in half, trucks crumpled, windows cleaved. He was careful to draw the array against abandoned and empty areas, and the flames suck all of the air from the side streets of Paris, curtaining up as far as the eye cares to see. They flank Alma and Tran in eyeblinks. A massive conflagration array, on the same scale as some of the ninkoujutsu used at Taizhou China, encircles the buildings and side streets. The subway car forms the center of the arrangement.
All in all, it encircles an area roughly the size of the grounds of a collosseum. An ancient castle, built in an instant.
With inescapable walls made of fire.
The shinobi steps forward to invite the two in. Staring dead forward, he chances only the faintest shimmer of familiarity with the two. Seishirou's mind is impossible to read--he is only an ideal at this rate, nothing else, a grand curtain the same as the fires he just unleashed. He doesn't bother talking at length with Alma, doesn't bother trying to convince him to give over the Time Sphere, or giving reasons or concerns or appeals. The shinobi stands, his haori shifting slowly with the change in his attention. With deadly seriousness, he looks at the two, focus shifting from one to the other.
"There's no time for games. Your end has already been predetermined..."
Ryouhara Seishirou unseals the weapons array from the pack at his back.
A slight shift in his weight is all he does to make room for Ayame's expected arrival.
"Come at me with everything you have. Or disappear reasonlessly into the fire."
COMBATSYS: Seishirou has started a fight here.
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Seishirou 0/-------/-======|
COMBATSYS: Seishirou has joined the fight here on the right meter side.
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|======-\-------\0 Seishirou
COMBATSYS: Alma has joined the fight here on the left meter side.
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Alma 0/-------/-------|======-\-------\0 Seishirou
COMBATSYS: Tran has joined the fight here on the left meter side.
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Tran 0/-------/-------|======-\-------\0 Seishirou
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Alma 0/-------/-------|
COMBATSYS: Ayame has joined the fight here on the right meter side.
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Tran 0/-------/-------|-------\-------\0 Ayame
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Alma 0/-------/-------|======-\-------\0 Seishirou
From her perch above, Ayame can see everything playing out according to plan - that the wall of fire is part of any 'plan' is clue enough as to the nature of the man she fights alongside. A flicker of a smile tugs at the corner of Ayame's mouth as Ryouhara Seishirou activates the seals prepared ahead for this fated moment.
"Alma Towazu... yeah," she had remarked when the guardians of the sphere were identified. "Only saw him the one time... seems like an eternity ago." She was different back when she had stormed the YFCC and was close to inflicting grevious harm on the miko, Mizuki, when Alma had stopped her assault from going any further. He had been so different back then, she considers, watching the reaction to the Ryouhara scion play out on his face.
Of course, there was the wildcard accompanying Alma. "I know of him," she had remarked earlier, the tone of her voice shifting. That was another time too. "We used to run together." Only someone as completely psychotic as the deranged Elle Belmounte could have pulled together such a mismatched cadre of weirdos the way she had. "There's no way to know what he'll do." Out of everyone she ever tried to get a read on, Tran was definitely one of the hardest. "I'll deal with him." she had offered. He hadn't said no.
Memories of the conversation are discarded, the contest of wills has begun. There will be no esaping the battle once the seals are released. Fighting at his side is a thrill unlike any she had expected. The girl crouches slightly, right hand slipping into the pouch at her belt to draw Anathema - an intricate blend of chi technology and modern engineering.
Legs brace and then she leaps, landing at the space cleared by Ryouhara only an instant prior, the black coat draped over her shoulders doing a little to ward off the intense heat of the hellfire arena. A flick of her thumb, a spark of chi invisible against the wall of fire surrounding them, and her trusted weapon jolts to its full six-foot length. There's no need to say what they're here for. Alma made it clear he already knows. If not them, then Those others will be after it. That won't be allowed to happen.
Staff in her right hand, she leans forward. Crimson runes ignite along its metallic surface - sigils crafted into the weapon with precision care.
A slight glance is cast at her side before looking back toward Tran and Alma, "I'd say something about how this isn't personal... but even I can't sell that one." Even she can't hold a grudge against Alma for his actions that long ago. But the man at her side would be inspired by more recent affairs.
"...Tran."
Alma's voice has grown quiet. Just as his passion erupted forth from nothing in a moment, so he grows subdued without apparent effort. This is because nothing has been suppressed, and those who know the telltale signs can see the glimmer of light that remains in the psychic's eyes, unrelated to the conflagration that rages before them.
"I owe you for more than this."
Walls of flame explode around them, a deafening inferno hemming them in on all side. Alma's well-tailored clothes ripple about him in the hot wind, his gaze unflinchingly focused on the figure before him. There is no negotiating with Seishirou Ryouhara. Not because Seishirou is insane -- a puerile platitude that would serve only to comfort those who, like Alma, cannot fully comprehend him -- or because he is otherwise unreasoning. Rather it is because the two of them are, in some fundamental sense, antithetical existences. Alma cannot fully justify this intuition of his, and is sure that Seishirou is more significant to him than Alma is to Seishirou and his inscrutible plans. Nevertheless he knows it to be true. And yet still--
When Alma's eyes shift, it is of his own volition, turning his gaze to Tran and smiling faintly, forlornly.
That doesn't mean this fight is all about him.
"Thank you," he says softly, "for choosing this path." In the moment when he and Tran clashed to break the hold of the Time Sphere, the good doctor stepped into a void. What Tran saw there, Alma does not know and could not control. But when Tran emerged, they were resolved to fight together and face this reality as one. He won't patronize Tran by apologizing for this turn of events. "I can't promise you won't regret it. But with you here, I will swear--"
Neither of them may be synchronized with the Time Sphere and able to draw upon its power. But Alma can feel beyond a shadow of a doubt that he and Tran have synchronized in a way that transcends the manipulations of eldritch artifacts.
"We'll win."
Alma trusts that feeling.
The woman by Seishirou's side elicits a twinge of recognition. It's been a long time, but he remembers her as a cunning and sophisticated fighter, and whoever is Seishirou's ally will surely be a formidable foe. But with no obvious strategic openings against opponents that have chosen the battleground, Alma trusts in his resolve, and, spirit singing, lunges toward Seishirou. The burning pavement caves beneath his feet from the force of his sudden advance, form flickering as he teleports short distances in a scattato rhythm, utilizing his overflowing psychic energy to minimize his predictability. The strike offers itself to him unbidden, a lance of light kindling about his fingertips.
"We are the ones who will determine our end."
He has a vow to uphold.
"Neither of you will bar our path!"
With the world at stake, Alma brings the psychic lance to bear, pearlescent soulfire trailing up his arms, and with scarred features bright with determination called up by the presence of his foes, a resolve unchanged even if so much else about him has transformed, he strikes at Seishirou's chest, piercing toward where on Alma's own chest the ninja's seal remains.
Even a man like Dr. Tran has to give respect where it's due. To Alma, for admitting that he is wrong in all things forever and that Tran is mega great, and for Seishirou, for creating a flaming battle deathmatch arena in the blink of an eye.
Although the doctor /would/ prefer to observe both events from a safer distance.
But there's no helping it now that he's in the thick of things, with yet another familiar face in the mix with him. There is no mistaking the serious, down-to-business threat of violence in the air. Not even a threat, rather it is just a dangerous fact.
"You know, I'd forgotten you exist." Tran will let Alma start off his dramatic confrontation with his idealogical nemesis. He can have a good time all by himself, if he wants, and Ayame's going to help whether she likes it or not. The doctor dashes forward a few beats after Alma, rushing toward his poorly known acquaintance headfirst. Shortly, his fist takes the lead. "Congratulations on living."
COMBATSYS: Seishirou blocks Alma's Self Expression.
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Tran 0/-------/-------|-------\-------\0 Ayame
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Alma 0/-------/-------|======-\-------\0 Seishirou
COMBATSYS: Ayame dodges Tran's Strong Punch.
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Tran 0/-------/-------|-------\-------\0 Ayame
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Alma 0/-------/-------|======-\-------\0 Seishirou
As Ayame lands next to him, snapping open her quarterstaff at his side, Ryouhara very barely shifts at all in response. Really, there has never been an elaborate visual cue as to when Ryouhara is in battle or not. Simply put, when a boy fights all of his life until he becomes a man, he knows not the difference. When giving up is laying down, Ryouhara is the one who stands. It's as simple as that.
He'll never understand the fascination that Towazu has with him, but Ryouhara understands, more so than any other, that the career confidante's winsome drives and motivations represent some of the most clear and present dangers to his ambitions. With the monk dead and gone, Alma will only devolve further into insanity, from the ninkougakusha's perspective. There is a man who stands, and then there a man who simply cannot fall. There is no other alternative for him at this rate but to face Alma fully and bring about the taste of his Nirvana once more.
"Ayame...." Ryouhara allows.
"Over the years.. I trust your ability above all. Do not allow Tran to interfere."
It is all Seishirou had said to her, before striding towards Alma, separating the two. The shinobi attempts to track Alma's curtaining seismic attack with fast eyes, but the opportunity to do so is minimal, and the movements hard to extrapolate. Even so--Ryouhara is fast. As Alma tries to run him through with a psychic spear, the shinobi interposes himself in the midst of the attack, one arm raising to strongly block the double handed stab by forcing it to one side of him. His sleeves spread wide as he moves into the motion, absorbing the shock and the enervating charge of the other's heart. His focuse remains unbidden. In that closeness, the shinobi bares the faintest of glances at Alma...
It's like looking at a ghost.
An eyeblink later, Alma can see that a shadow of the shinobi is standing some distance behind the iteration that he just attempted to run through. An iteration that is rapidly deteriorating. In a flash, Seishirou's copy will detonate, with Alma at the focal point of the blast.
To the gifted eye of the renown psychic, his features marred by reminders of the past, the girl at Ryouhara's side is cool - a contrast to the inferno in which all four are now trapped. There will be no room to flee, no room to cower. Here ideals will be put to the fire's forge with only the strongest able to bear the consequences.
She enters this battle with weapons already drawn and visible - a change from her usual deceitful approach to combat. The glimmering weapon in her hand is a threat and a promise that she will not shirk this challenge no matter the danger.
Only when the Master Tactician speaks her name would there be the slightest change in her aura - a flicker, there and gone in an instant. The faint smirk worn into the beginning of the battle melts away, her stance tightening, left hand lifting to rest fingers lightly on her weapon. "So shall it be," she replies as the Doctor goes the distance to engage her head on. "But I think he's actually a Doctor." With a fist.
This might be their last fight if the patterns are to be believed. Time is running out for all of them.
"Thanks," she answers Tran, tone shifting to just shy of being uncomfortably chipper for the circumstances. The staff flares to life in her hands as she appears ready to meet her once-cohort's forehead with its unyielding surface. But when his fist takes the lead, she responds as quickly, moving out of the path of the strike while staying within tight proximity.
"I'm pretty good at it." She's already spinning, the crimson glow of weapon bright enough to illuminate the street around her even with the wall of fire so close. Her coat flares out behind her as the metal weapon tears through the air in a horizontal trajectory for the side of Tran's head. "So you'll have to do better than /that/."
The momentum of the weapon doesn't slow for an instant before the other end is brought around and overhead, gripped by both of the girl's hands as she attempts to bounce one end of it off the top of his head!
COMBATSYS: Seishirou successfully hits Alma with Bunshin Suicide.
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Tran 0/-------/-------|-------\-------\0 Ayame
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Alma 0/-------/---====|=======\-------\1 Seishirou
COMBATSYS: Tran blocks Ayame's Power Strike.
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Tran 0/-------/------=|-------\-------\0 Ayame
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Alma 0/-------/---====|=======\-------\1 Seishirou
Perhaps it is inevitable that Alma remember Seishirou every time he looks in the mirror, and that the enigmatic engineer persist in the champion's memory. Yet a scar has been left not only upon Alma's beautiful features but upon his soul. Contact with Seishirou's Nirvana, in that battle of dreams he fought at the edge of life and death, may be what has produced this fascination, this overpowering assurance that he and Seishirou's ideals cannot dwell together in the same world, and that when the fate of the world is at stake they are bound to clash. One with the will to change history, and one with the will to love this world.
This world is no longer what it once was thanks to the interference of the Spheres. After the last battle with Seishirou, on the border of life and death, Alma met the slain Ullr -- Jiro -- one last time, and returned to the world from whence he came. Now Jiro is here as he once was, with none of those memories, and still Alma cannot fully make sense of his own place in this collapsing universe. But with Kagero opposed to him, Alma's eternal passion is called forth. He will restore the order of this world. He won't allow it to fall.
Not so long as he stands.
When Alma makes contact with Seishirou, in a breath he realizes that something is wrong, and it is a breath too long. The psychic makes eye contact with the puppet and grits his teeth, attempting to summon his concentration to redirect his momentum, but the blast catches him and hurls him back. Moments before he is to collide with the ground and leave a groove in the pavement, he vanishes-- and then reappears in the air before Seishirou, his velocity reversed, now hurling towards him. Still trailing smoke from the impact, soot-blackened but implacable, Alma descends like heavenly judgment, twisting as his leg ignites with soulfire. Feinting a kick, he instead attempts to hook his leg around Seishirou's neck and then, pivoting with the force of his whole body, hurl the ninja explosively toward the funeral pyre of his own making.
It is maybe the best, for dramatic purposes, that when Seishirou does not afford DOCTOR Richard Tran the simple courtesy of acknowledging his hard work at Definitely Real Medical College, Tran does not hear it because holy shit there is fire everywhere and it is /loud/. Even now he has to kind of half-shout to make himself heard over the roaring inferno and now also the clash of fervent battle.
"Don't I know it." All sorts of memories remain fresh in the doctor's mind; good ones, bad ones, a few painful ones in which Ayame played no small part...
He doesn't remember her stick being that badass the last time he had to fight her for some stupid thing, but he discovers that it is not, at least, /overpoweringly/ badass as it smashes painfully into his forearm. At least, not yet. He decides to keep an eye on it.
"Anyway, I was being polite. But if that's not enough..." Tran's fists snap tightly in front of his face, like the world's sloppiest boxer. "I'll try a little harder to keep this from getting boring for you."
And then the doctor's fists explode outward, blurring into one another as he rains a cloud of jabs right into her.
COMBATSYS: Seishirou dodges Alma's Sea of Flame.
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Tran 0/-------/-------|-------\-------\0 Ayame
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Alma 0/-------/----===|=======\-------\1 Seishirou
COMBATSYS: Tran successfully hits Ayame with Dr. Tran's Buttle Punch.
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Tran 0/-------/-----==|=------\-------\0 Ayame
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Alma 0/-------/----===|=======\-------\1 Seishirou
"Aa. My apologies..."
Dr. Tran. He'd almost forgotten.
Hands remaining boneless at his sides, Ryouhara supervises his detonating copy quietly. The slight drain from activating his prepared ninkougakujutsu has left him with only a few ninkou to deal with Alma, unlike the array he devised against Makari, only a few days previous. Luckily, the advanced weapons and preparations of his style are not his only competencies. He has spent a lot of time on every aspect of his techniques, honing them to deal with the likes of those such as Alma.
The psychic flickers into existence in Ryouhara's celestial noon--the young man slipping quickly to the side of the leg, apparently falling for the feint long enough to allow Alma to flank him with a sudden attempt to hook him around the neck. The shinobi notices the subterfuge in an instant.
"As always.. you spend too much time daydreaming."
Suddenly, Alma's leg impacts a rapidly expanding wall of paper from that side angle of Seishirou, seals criss-crossing over the length of the expanse and absorbing the shock from the hooking leg with the same ease as a steel wall anchored into the ground. THe paper is a form of ninkou made for emergency defense and crushing attacks. Even with that alone, the expanding shield cuts off Seishirou's movements from Alma's view for chance seconds. It is enough for Ryouhara to move.
Enough for Ryouhara to alight gently on Alma's shoulders.
If the psychic feels Ryouhara's weight on him, it is the only opportunity he'll have to stop him. Because in the next instant, Ryouhara will have run up the far wall with Alma's entire body in tow behind him. He's dragging him up the wall, attempting to garrotte the psychic on a stray ninkou cable with the force, velocity, and sheer heat of his shimmering wave traction dash. Ryouhara gives his consent; he moves quickly to take the battle to the air, where Towazu can fly, or fall.
To others, the battle on the ground is concluded in mere eyeblinks, and the two combatants move so quickly that the earth between them appears to shrink to nonexistence.
His block proves solid enough against the two rapid strikes aimed at maybe knocking some memories out of his head. With each point of contact, small flares of that crimson chi are scattered to the ground where they seem to bounce and come to rest like embers from a sparkler. Ryouhara always said she was wasteful with the energy that answers her call - of course, she didn't just set a city street on fire to trap to men in this contest.
The fluid motions with which she is able to manipulate the metallic weapon allow her to recover from the unsuccessful strike without missing a step, already whirling it up over her head to put it back into prime location for a second pass at knocking it against Tran's skull. It's only when he adopts that vague semblence of a boxer's stance that he'll see her hesitate - once again, his inscrutability proves to be a powerful weapon against a fighter who calculates every step of her attack plan with a precision understanding of what responses she will get from her opponent.
The hesitation is brief before she continues, sliding a half step forward, eager to re-engage, to convince him that his role in this conflict will be a brief one. She discovers in an instant, however, that for as ridiculous as the man has always come across to her, his ability to fight is not nearly the joke one might have come to expect.
Her staff was already mid-swing when he connects with the first jab, glancing off her cheek as the girl snaps back, weapon lifting, trying to ward off the punch that comes next that catches her on the chin. She rolls with the hit to keep from being hurt too bad, but that just leaves her open for another of the rapid fire strikes to smack her in the mouth. It looks like she might be sent reeling back, but her left foot slams against the concrete even as Alma dives for th eideologue at her side, keeping her from losing ground.
"That's good." she replies, teeth grit, a trickle of blood at her lip, both hands gripping her staff tightly as she lunges forward. She'll deal with the blood later. "I would hope you'd do your friend the honor..."
She swings her weapon forward - at first it seems like another overhead slam aimed for the top of Tran's head. But instead she drives it vertically against the street with a metallic bell-like clang. The energy that had been coursing over it only dimly before now suddenly surges into a brilliant flash of crimon.
Seishirou has avoided the psion's attack and is now airborn.
"...of not being a complete joke!!"
The surge of chi from Ayame's staff explodes outward into a swarm of spinning blades of red forming a cloud of sharp, slashing energy that threatens to carve a thousand tiny cuts into Tran's flesh. The window of opportunity to escape would be very small.
COMBATSYS: Alma blocks Seishirou's Shunshin Ghost.
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Tran 0/-------/-----==|=------\-------\0 Ayame
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Alma 0/-------/---====|=======\==-----\1 Seishirou
COMBATSYS: Tran blocks Ayame's By Meridian's Vain Ambition.
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Tran 0/-------/----===|=------\-------\0 Ayame
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Alma 0/-------/---====|=======\==-----\1 Seishirou
Alma inhales deeply of air hot enough to blister lungs. It is in the moments after Seishirou defends directly that the most outrageous techniques are displayed. Airborne as he is, movements limited by the impact of his adversary's explosion, he senses himself vulnerable to counterattack, and the tactician's aura is elusive as ever. But he has waged battles before in which his psychic intuition is of little use to him. Here he must rely on his experience, his physical abilities, and instincts more primal than enlightened.
"Are you so different?"
Alma's words are not the accusation they might be from another's lips. His question is not rhetorical. Even as Seishirou's form is obscured by shield of preternaturally durable paper, and Alma's peripheral awareness keeps tabs on Tran's fate against his resourceful foe, the psychic speaks quietly. "You are a man of action," he continues, hoping Tran won't hear the phrase applied to another. "But do you not act exclusively to make your dreams a reality?" Can Seishirou be said to dream? Or have his ideals taken on another form together?
The faintest of pressures thrusts Alma back into the moment. His eyes snap wide. Unable to predict the nature of the attack, he twists to protect his most vulnerable points and thrusts an arm upward, gestures which prove to be effective. He cannot prevent Seishirou from dragging him up into the air, but when the cable loops around Alma protects his neck with his arm and, grunting against the bone-cracking pain, wrenching himself so that he spins free.
Soaring through the air above Tran and Ayame's battle, Alma is returned in a flash to an old memory, transported to the deck of Adelheid's airship, a place that now seems worlds away.
Perhaps he does daydream too much.
Spinning elegantly through the night sky, illuminated by raging flames and the stars above, Alma opens his hand and from it emerges a dart of flame like a fluttering dove, white and pink against the black and red. It spirals forth, the psychic pushing himself to continue to pressure his unpredictable opponent.
To be honest, Dr. Tran doesn't really care about whatever history Alma and Seishirou share; he's pretty sure they've both done enough to deserve each other. But still, he is sometimes obligated to care about one of them, for to do otherwise would be too terrible for even a man such as himself to seriously consider.
Although he can fantasize, sometimes.
But he's fine with it as the two men take to the skies, his fists striking home with the solid force that can only come when someone isn't really expecting them. He even warned her, too. The doctor tries not to look too smug.
"Ah?" Tran appears confused at first when Ayame's incredibly swift counter-attack...falls short? The intensifying glow afterward, however, is sort of a tell. The blades that erupt are a far cry from the blast he was expecting, although in the end the doctor's defense remains the same. Crouching down and crossing his arms in front of him to protect his most tender bits, he takes the cloud head on.
It shreds through a good portion of his shirt and creates a thousand tiny cuts; however, none of them seem to be particularly deep, appearing mostly as a red scar pattern across Tran's arms. He gingerly lowers them, still near enough to be threatening, and smiles a toothy grin.
"Too late, probably." And then he lunges forward again, pulling an arm back for a wicked haymaker...before changing his mind and snaking one foot forward, looking to hook his ankle around Ayame's own and yank it out from underneath her.
COMBATSYS: Tran successfully hits Ayame with Quick Throw.
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Tran 0/-------/---====|===----\-------\0 Ayame
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Alma 0/-------/---====|=======\==-----\1 Seishirou
COMBATSYS: Alma successfully hits Seishirou with Sacred Wave.
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Tran 0/-------/---====|===----\-------\0 Ayame
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Alma 0/-------/-======|=======\=======\1 Seishirou
"No..don't. Any bridge you build between us will burn."
Ryouhara moves quickly in the face of Alma's hopeful attacks, discarding the psychic on the line to himself land gently on the edge of the building, his haori spilling over his body as the ninja sits there for just long enough to gather himself. It is a bizarre and twisting moment that he takes, stepping across the vertical surface with no more apparent need for climbing equipment than a child needs shoes when playing in the gentle creek. At least, such is the idea, just before a gout of psychic flame envelops him, crushing him underneath the weight of a great crashing wave of memory.
The ragged sensation of one-ness with all creation is enough to overwhelm Ryouhara--even for chance moments, a brush with Towazu's sparkling nonsense energy was enough to topple the young mana against the face of the building.
The blast crushes him against the building, and then curves outwards from the force of his attempted defense, accomplishing finally and at once not much more than flushing him up into the air, as if sucked off the wall by a massive backdraft. With the fireflash Forcing him upwards and spilling into the air freely above the dueling battle of Tran and Ayame, Ryouhara has no option but to spread his arms wide. The motion forces his chi along predetermined lines in his haori, molding and shaping the response of his silk clothing to take the shape of an airfoil. The ninkou "Byakuren Hagoromo" gives Ryouhara the sky for fleeting moments. Cutting across the air, the shinobi glides quickly, closing the enforced distance between himself and Alma.
"...Any bridge between us will be nothing but ash underfoot!!"
Tucking those voluminous sleeves-as-wings, Ryouhara dives for Alma.
Even the briefest of diving passes from the young man is enough to lay a person open as if cut open with a sword.
The swarm of chi proves to be ineffective against the man's solid defense, leaving Ayame to pull her weapon back up and return it to a more readied position, angled under her left arm, ready to sweep out as an aggressive defense, or be whiped into both hands to deliver a crushing blow.
Brown eyes study Tran. The distance between them is dangerously narrow and backing off now would be showing uncertainy she has no intention of allowing. "Yeah," she murmurs, her tone shifted - thoughtful almost, "I don't think so." She saw how Alma addressed him; how he make Tran an ally in this fight to keep Kagero from getting its hand on the artifact they bear. She can't know what exactly exists between the two man, but she knows without a doubt that what Alma feels for Tran isn't shame.
Tran aggresses again, keeping the pressure on every bit as she intended to do with him. Drawing his arm back gets her to shift stance slightly, staff already starting to spin up into an angle that would prove perfect at intersecting the intended trajectory.
But she isn't fighting off a punch and, more surprised than she'd remotely care to admit, she finds herself crashing down into a seated position with a flicker of surprise in her eyes before her expression shifted. The man's style reminds her of the infuratingly hard to read Roland Brown... the same seemingly clumsy but confusingly effective tactics she loathes from that man.
"Always suspected," she grunts, pushing against the ground with her right hand to lunge toward Tran's legs feet first, left hand occupied with keeping her staff in place. "You were stronger than you let on..." this statement made in earnest as she reconsiders her approach to dealing with the man on the fly.
The trajectory of her lunge is intended to allow her to slam her right heel into his shin, her left leg snaking between both of his feet before she would twist her body, scissor her legs together, and attempt to trip Tran to the ground much the same way he just knocked her off her feet!
COMBATSYS: Alma fails to interrupt Quick Strike from Seishirou with Divine Intervention EX.
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Tran 0/-------/---====|===----\-------\0 Ayame
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Alma 0/-------/-======|=======\=======\1 Seishirou
COMBATSYS: Tran dodges Ayame's Random Combo.
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Tran 0/-------/---====|===----\-------\0 Ayame
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Alma 0/-------/-======|=======\=======\1 Seishirou
Alma's gaze flickers at Seishirou's words.
He hadn't even been conscious of his effort to understand his nemesis. The psychic had spoken naturally, focused entirely on the fight, giving voice to his unfiltered feelings. Only once rebuked does he realize that he was attempting to embody his own ideals: to reach out and make connections, to affirm the bonds of light he sees with his second sight, a vision that has become a philosophy. But if Seishirou truly is the antithesis of that vision, if the revolution for which he strives -- whatever its goal or reasons -- would shatter all those precious bonds in the name of a new future and change entirely the paradigm of meaning, then he is beyond these efforts.
Understanding Seishirou is besides the point.
But this realization induces hesitation in Alma's own powers. His will is not merely a sledge with which to crush the mind of another and compel them to submit. Even with his most potent pronouncements of flame, Alma seeks to burn away the surface and reveal the uninhibiting, to fragment the self just long enough for the subject to see themselves from afar. Violence has always been for him the forging of bonds, not their sundering, or at least the production of the possibility of those bonds, though he may be rejected in outrage or spite.
If that is impossible here, what is it he is doing?
A foolish question, as flames rage all about him and his friend fights valiantly below, but that brief hesitation -- one which Seishirou's mirror ideals seem all too capable of summoning in the otherwise famously resolute psychic -- costs him. Alma calls the light to his hand too late to catch his sparrow-swift assailant. He cries out as his body is sliced in Seishirou's passing, blood flashing from the wound, Alma's beam of light firing uselessly into the darkness. Propelled both by Seishirou's slash and the rocket-like force of his own haphazard strike, losing control of his momentum, Alma is momentarily knocked from the sky, spiraling down toward the melee below.
"What can I say?" To say he doesn't understand how Alma feels about him...well, he can't do that. He can't refute it at all, as much as he might like to still; it is simply no longer within the realm of possibility, the knowledge seared directly into his heart. That part is complete.
The part where he does mutually respectful battle against someone else is a little weird, though. Usually, by this point someone's irrationally outraged to the point of madness, hurtful things are said, and at the end of it all Tran wakes up naked in a dumpster.
"But you're one to talk. I bet--uh, hang on." Even as Ayame is lunging forward for his feet, Tran's feet are moving away from her, swiftly delivering his well away from danger and toward a certain someone who SWEAR TO GOD the doctor cannot take his eyes off of for even a minute.
With a soaring bound, Tran intercepts Alma before he hits the ground, nimbly spinning about with his newfound cargo before skidding back down onto the street below. One hand clamps over the scarred something-or-other's mouth, forcing two pills (aspirin) inside, before the doctor sets Alma roughly on his feet.
"You suck." His hands blur, a roll of bandages produced from somewhere inside that billowing white coat, swaddling Alma's recently received wound. With a chop of his hand, he severs the end and tucks the end away, high-speed first aid completed. Tran finishes it off with a heart pat on the back (to make him swallow).
"But get back in there anyway, champ. Lord knows I don't wanna deal with the guy."
Landing on the ground, Ryouhara looks up, standing and moving after Alma. His cool gaze and dark eyes narrow in vague annoyance as Alma crashes into the earth a few feet from Tran, whom proceeds to practice his Real Ass Doctoring skills on Alma. He frowns, inclining his head just so. He doesn't run to stop Tran, or interrupt him, though he very well could easily interfere. Instead, he looks to Ayame, assessing her condition. She stands fearlessly against the doctor, but he's proving to be a more wily opponent than expected, and she is clearly having trouble reading him.
"Ayame."
He never says anything else.
Darker than black eyes look to Alma, Ryohuara returning his trained-keen focus to him. He moves quickly towards the newly bandaged fighter, breaking out into a full run, his sleeves billowing out behind him as he slowly accelerates into a full tilt bolt towards Towazu, with a heaven-sent killer's intentions and conviction. From the pack that hangs behind him, the shinobi draws a long tsurugi, the blade flashing behind him, held horizontally in the middle of his assassination run. He rushes down Alma without conviction, staring at him--staring through him...
--And then Ryouhara is gone, a group of blackbirds made of fire fluttering around the young psychic.
Seishirou moves like lightning, instead of trying to kill Alma, flashing right through him in a single stride. Though he was concerning himself with Alma primarily, his attention was drawn away the moment Tran took a moment to heal him, which allowed him to more accurately rate the condition of his own subordinate. Now, Seishirou's laser-like focus goes past Alma--and to the doctor that loves him.
If violence is about bonds, Ryouhara will sever the bond between Tran and Alma--instantly.
Seishirou moves ridiculously, gut-wrenchingly, sickeningly fast. There is no subtlety to his movements when he elects to dispatch the medic. He doesn't even bother to use his blade when he attacks Tran from Alma's shadow, all of his momentum built up in mid stride to simply interpose an arm between the two--and try and catch Tran by the throat in the crook of his arm.
If Tran can't read his movements in time, Seishirou going to carry Tran all the way to Ayame, leaving him no room to mount any defense at all. He's going to carry him to Ayame--and then his ghost will carry Tran the rest of the way. Ryouhara will fix his momentum and stop dead in his tracks, skidding only four inches to arrest all of that momentum. He'll straighten.
And an exact copy of himself will drag Tran the rest of the way, to the next world even if need be.
Sliding to a stop, her lunging leg takedown evaded expertly by the, well, surprisingly spry Doctor, Ayame comes to rest in a half-crouch, staff held along her side in her left hand, tucked under her shoulder. The hasty escape has her curious for a moment until the moment her eyes chance a moment to glance at the orange heavens above just in time to see one of the two airborn flew too close to the fire this time.
The falling angel is caught by his reluctant partner in this fued ironclad wills; each party determined that the other will not leave this flaming arena with the sphere. What follows is one of the most impressive, rapidly executed field healing operations she's ever seen as the most certainly certified Doctor hastily prepares Alma to return to the heat of battle against the man who seems to be so strongly opposed to everything he stands for.
The girl's expression becomes grim. He's turned his back for the sake of mitigating, to no small degree, his friend's pain. In an ideal world, such an act would not make him a target for a violent combination of deceptive attacks.
The girl's hand tightens on her staff, the runes along its surface igniting once again into a brilliant crimson flare.
This isn't an ideal world.
Speaking her name is enough. No more words need be said between the two members of Kagero. She knows in an instant what will be done and what will be expected of her, and it will be up the girl to act without reservation in this crucial moment.
With perfect timing, she bolts forward. The energy in her weapon coalesces into an almost liquid form coating the surface of the staff, concentrating more heavily at one end. "This will come to an end," she murmurs, striking from Tran's back from low behind her into an upward swing. The energy on her weapon begins to take shape even as she swings, chi taking on psuedo-physical form, a thin, long crimson blade of a scythe now curving in violently for Tran.
The upward swing would be the first of three, aiming to slash up between Tran's shoulderblades. Following the momentum of her swing, Ayame would take to the air as she whips her staff around into a second strike, this time with the blunt end of her weapon... "If you just give up the sphere!"
The third swing is an overhead slash with both hands. The chiblade has grown even larger as the lithe fighter swings it down hard in time with her own descent back to the ground. The carving edge of the scythe is large enough to cleave right through a man, leaving only the magnitude of his own Aura to spare him a gruesome wound. Also caught in the swath is the shadow of Seishirou himself - the moment her chi carves through that unliving simulacra a detonation of burning hellfire will engulf place the Doctor stands!
Because of course it explodes.
COMBATSYS: Tran successfully aids Alma with The Dr. Tran Who Loved Me.
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Tran 0/-------/---====|==-----\-------\0 Ayame
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Alma 1/-----==/=======|======-\-------\0 Seishirou
COMBATSYS: Tran fails to interrupt Shunshin Reaper from Seishirou with Dr. Tran Goes For Broke and is struck by Double Reaper from Seishirou and Ayame.
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Tran 1/--=====/=======|==-----\-------\0 Ayame
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Alma 1/-----==/=======|======-\-------\0 Seishirou
All of a sudden, things are moving pretty fast. In one moment, Dr. Tran has Alma, who obviously is pathetic and needs help at every turn. In the next moment, Tran is the one who is had. He can tell because of the sudden, intense pressure on his neck, the way up is horizontal, and the pain hasn't kicked in yet.
He does not notice when Seishirou stops being real because it does not matter on his one-way train ride to paintown. There is, in fact, just enough time to process that fact that he's heading back toward Ayame, and also that she's looking to hit him out of the park. There's almost a plan, a brief shift of mid-air momentum that suggests something more -- but he doesn't have enough time, his body doesn't react quickly enough, and Ayame's scythe rips through him. It has no trouble cutting deep, shredding a red path across his back. With no time to recover, the doctor takes another quick shot upside the head, and stumbles for a moment. Then Ayame chops him in half.
And /then/ he explodes.
When the dust settles, Tran is standing in the exact same position as before, except his shirt appears to have been obliterated. Curiously, his coat seems unharmed, flapping dramatically as air swirls about in every direction.
"Didn't hurt." Tran's voice is perfectly neutral except for the burble of blood that he doesn't seem to notice spitting out.
Then blood explodes out of him in a line from head to toe where Ayame /bisected/ him, and he falls flat onto his face. But already he's stirring, insisting his body move despite how completely /wrecked/ it just got.
"S'fine, I can...just gonna...walk it off?"
Alma's mind spins with his body as he plummets. The pain of his wound is matched by the disarray of his thoughts, his spirit still surging but now without direction. Deprived of the clash of souls, his resolve cannot for the moment reassert itself and push him through to recover.
His landing is unexpectedly gentle.
Blinking in surprise, regaining his coherence, Alma looks up at his savior with a kind of wide-eyed innocence. "Tr--" He is immediately silenced by the pills stuffed in his mouth and then unceremoniously righted, half-choking as he feels his torso swathed with stunning swiftness. A firm pound to his back and Alma is at last able to gulp the pills down, coughing a couple times before looking down at himself and then back at Tran again.
"Right."
Of course. How could Alma be so oblivious, after all this?
"Thank you, Tran."
He fights here not to forge a bond, but to protect one.
The ties he cherishes are nothing so abstract as psychic power might make them seem. It is for moments like these that he fights, here, right now. How hard won was this friendship? No matter what possibilities a new world holds, Alma will treasure this one, will believe in the transformative power of love to take a land of misery and injustice and make it meaningful. He will never allow it to simply disappear.
He will always remember the Dr. Tran who loved him.
Perhaps a psychic should have realized how portentous Tran's last comment sounds. Alma's lips part to say more, but he intuits danger and turns, seeing Seishirou rushing toward him with sword drawn. Eyes flashing, the phoenix summons his own sword, a blame of scintillating light, and whips it forward. But his inability to read Seishirou's aura renders him unable to sense the coming trap. As soon as Ryouhara bursts into a flock of birds, Alma's eyes snap wide.
"Tran, watch--"
It all simply happens too fast.
"No!"
Alma's eyes become fields of light. Driven by the desperate need to reach his wounded ally, inspired by the bond he shares, his spirit again finds its outlet, and it bursts forth as though from an opened floodgate. Seishirou stands in his way, having used a double to carry Tran to his doom. Without hesitation, with a single upward thrust of his fist, that gathered psychic energy is projected down to the pavement beneath Seishirou's feet, offering the briefest flash as warning before a geyser of swirling light erupts, aiming to blast the tactician away. If Seishirou is forced to move aside even a little, Alma will already be rushing toward his friend.
"TRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!"
COMBATSYS: Alma successfully hits Seishirou with Full Confession.
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Tran 1/--=====/=======|==-----\-------\0 Ayame
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Alma 0/-------/------=|======-\-------\0 Seishirou
It takes great triage indeed to gain the attention of Ryouhara Seishirou.
The means and methods of the scuffle that occurred allowed Ryouhara to observe from afar the use of the explosive duplicate he lent Ayame to destroy Tran's position. As would be expected and as is the stripe and color of Ryouhara's tastes, he stands passively observing it for only a moment. It is the only breath Seishirou will allow himself to take.
He spends too much time looking. Towazu is not that slow. Time and neccessity drag Ryouhara's atttentions back to the fore quickly. In a flash, his eyes slip loose of the scene and catch Towazu moving towards him. There is a reason he chose to arm himself before attacking with a weapon that remained unused--the sword in his hand was meant to distract Alma from his true intentions... and after he'd had his way, it was meant to be his guard.
The shinobi sets the blade's tip to the ground quickly, opening his hand to assume a defensive posture against Alma, preparing to cancel the attack, to keep Alma from rushing in. But it's not enough--he, for once, is not fast enough, and his stance breaks beneath the wave of love.
Burning. Intolerant. Intensity. Ryouhara's felt the bite of the psychic's energy before, but it seems particularly brisk when a friend's blood is still on the blade. His forward defenses ruined and with the smoulder and crackle of energy across his arms and chest, and even with blood trailing form his nose Ryouhara still responds immediately, appearing at Alma's side in the aftermath of that flood of understanding to attack. A single rolling blow aims to check the psychic's mad dash, the silks of his haori spreading with the commitment of that rolling motion. He tries to hook-snap-kick Alma across the back of the neck, forcing his knee across Alma's shoulderblade to unbalance him, and knock him straight into the edge of the anchored sword Seishirou stuck in the ground only a few seconds prior.
Okay, that was pretty bad. Ayame's staff crashes against the street after passing through both targets, one of which just happens to be explosive, the force of impact spiderwebbing the concrete out beneath Tran before she springs rapidly backward, fully that it's about to get really bad (because it was already pretty bad).
Sliding out of her landing, she comes to a stop, staff gripped tightly in front of her at an angle. The chi that had been surging violently moments before has lost much of its vigor, clinging tightly to the weapon, its movements slower, almost gel-like. The scythe that had adorned her polearm a moment ago has collapsed into the viscus crimson miasma coating her weapon. Holding it at the angle she is, some of the surplus energy begins to bleed off the lower end her staff only to splash against the concrete for a moment then vanish before it can completely pool.
For her part, Ayame is catching her breath, recovering from the aggressive assault against the man who's only possible error in judgement was making sure Alma could stay on his feet and keep on fighting the Ryouhara scion with the same intenisty with which they initially engaged.
From her unpressured angle, Ayame can see the reaction their combined assault on the Doctor called forth in Alma. To feel that way about someone; to hurt because they hurt, to worry because they've been wounded. She snorts softly, taking in another precious breath. Is that what means when friends fight together? Does it make them weaker to have such vulnerabilities? Or are they reinforced by each other to become stronger than the individual?
"This world is ending - you must already know that. Why fight us now, at the end of it all? What will you do with that relic anyway?!" she shouts back over the inferno raging behind her.
The energy here is strong. Seishirou's preparations saw to that. It is with ease that Ayame begins to draw upon that abundant power, flickers of fire swirling about her feet in the form of a slowly building aura answering her call for renewal and strength.
"You two alone can't keep it out of the hands of those who will put the sphere to use." If the stories she has heard are true the monsters lurking in the shadows will not relent in reclaiming one of these powerful weapons. Perhaps even now, only the brightness of the fire billowing about the four of them is keeping them at bay!
She pauses for a moment to notice Alma's charge for Seishirou in that moment. Will that be a test of what it means to fight alongside a friend? Is he stronger for it or does his passion only distract him from being effective? And what, so, if he should strike the last of the Ryouhara down? How would she feel about it? The girl frowns faintly before pushing such thoughts out of her mind. There is a bigger picture here - one they have not bothered to declare.
COMBATSYS: Ayame gathers her will.
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Tran 1/--=====/=======|======-\-------\0 Ayame
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Alma 0/-------/------=|======-\-------\0 Seishirou
COMBATSYS: Alma blocks Seishirou's Medium Strike.
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Tran 1/--=====/=======|======-\-------\0 Ayame
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Alma 0/-------/-----==|=======\-------\0 Seishirou
Alma's spirit yearns to strike.
That will to reach out toward his adversary remains inspired by love, but not of them. He has surmounted the need to form bonds with his enemy. What drives him is the need to preserve the bonds he has. It is out of love of Tran, and no other ambition, that he advances, bereft of conscious thought, compelled by a single essence.
To strike, to strike!
His fastest seems achingly slow when compared to the swiftness of his foes, but for the barest moment after his pillar of psychic energy tears into Seishirou, Alma has a clear shot and he plunges forth unhesitatingly. The Master Engineer appears to his side, invisible to his second sight but a whisper in his mundane peripheral vision, and Alma, devoted though he is to advancing on Ayame and Tran's fallen form, twists like a hunting cat in midair and manages to check the impact of the kick just barely. He cannot reverse his momentum as he is hurled toward the sword planted in the ground, nor can he summon his powers again so soon after his great display, but he does have time to notice the danger.
"Uuurrrraaaahhhhh!"
With an impassioned roar, Alma twists full circle and calms his palms around the embedded sword, tearing it from the ground as he flips in midair, ignoring the gashes upon his hands. The motion is a blur -- and so too will be the sword as, endowed with all Alma's strength, it is flung toward where Ayame stands, seeking to either drive her away from Tran or pierce her defenses.
That Tran possesses the Time Sphere has not even occurred to him. He exposes his back to his nemesis only with friendship singing in his heart.
Flopped on the ground as he is, Dr. Tran is only really tangentially aware of Alma and Seishirou's continued clash. He still doesn't really care /that/ much, except insofar as it would obviously be a complete failure without his constant intervention. Frankly, even that isn't as compelling as it was fifteen seconds ago.
But still, Dr. Tran rises. Not swiftly, or with any special renewed vigor or resolve; no, he's just doing it because he is compelled. He has no choice. What is it that compels him so, that lands him in ever greater danger, seemingly without reason?
"This world is ending -- you must already know that." Ayame's words are repeated verbatim, and if it's a /little/ mockingly falsetto you'll have to forgive him. He's gone through a lot in the immediate past, and if the way he's already up in a crouch is any indication, he's going to have lots more real fast.
"Let me ask you the same questions. What can you do with it?" The doctor is on his feet now, unflinchingly staring at Ayame. "Who are you people, to take on this responsibility so easily?" He walks forward, spreading his hands to either side, as though inviting further assault.
A sword whips past his ear. Tran does not flinch.
"It gets in your head, you know. Shows you what you want to see, what you don't want to see. Everything, drowning you in it." For a moment, the doctor appears to stare right past Ayame, eyes unfocusing as he relives the experience in his own head, ever so briefly.
"I don't think you deserve it." Tran stops dead and barks a quick laugh, hands still outstretched. The chi swirling around him can suddenly be felt clearly, his own unique flavor mixing well and powerfully with the ambient inferno. Though his position is defenseless, his suddenly spiking aura is anything but. "But if you disagree, I'm open to discussion."
COMBATSYS: Tran focuses on his next action.
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Tran 1/--=====/=======|======-\-------\0 Ayame
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Alma 0/-------/------=|=======\-------\0 Seishirou
COMBATSYS: Seishirou dodges Alma's Large Thrown Object.
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Tran 1/--=====/=======|======-\-------\0 Ayame
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Alma 0/-------/------=|=======\-------\0 Seishirou
He lands roughly on his feet as Alma pinwheels away from his kick, most of the momentum from his own attack being bled off instantly from the force transfer. Seishirou lands hard in the dirt, his sleeves just barely inches from dragging on the ground. He looks up quickly, sharply, after Alma careens into his weapon. But the angle is wrong. It should have bisected alma if he'd hit it uncontrolled at that angle. Lo and behold, Alma's thrown the sword at Ayame, turning his back on the ninkougakusha.
He frowns.
"I see.."
All it takes is two handseals.
The difference between a sword and a ninkou is illustrated thus. The blade never actually makes it to Ayame. At a precise moment in time, several of the destruction seals in the blade's otherwise smooth shirasaya tsuka activate, partially blowing apart the hilt of the sword. It causes the weapon to fly ridiculously off-target, as if deflected by the air itself. A second release blows apart the rest of the hilt, and--even worse--sends the unfitted blade, now revealed to have even more seals etched in its tang, hurtling in a laser-straight line towards Alma's neck. Effectively, throwing Ryouhara's blade rgiht back into the psychic's face.
And even worse, Alma's own shadow whispers hollow to him.
"Someone who tries to be more clever than their intellect will allow is just a fool."
Ryouhara flies out of Alma's shadow with blurred speed and agility. He is trying to exert control over the sword in every possible way, shape and form, adjusting the angle and power in flight so that it flays Alma open in passing, or even worse, punches right through his chest with maximum penetrative force. Because Seishirou is going to reassemble the sword with new fittings and seals in mid-flight, so he can flip it around and try to stab Alma right through his back before the psychic can awake from his friendship-addled drug haze to turn and face him.
Then, and only then, will Alma have Seishirou's consent to keep his sword.
Because Seishirou will have blown it into fragments with a body-rocking explosion, wherever the point lands.
Tran is back on his feet. That is to be expected. He survived the trial of fire and blood wrought upon him by the two assailants; a gauntlet that would have proven fatal to a lesser man. A smoldering crater exists at the epicenter of the intricate combination of slashes and explosions. Because the place isn't on fire enough already.
She's evaluating him then. As best as the enigma that is Doctor Tran can be evaluated, anyway. His unorthodox approach to battle has left her flummoxed more than she would ever care to admit. How fast is he moving? How much power is he channeling? What does his demeanor seem to be and how does it align with expeced behaviors? These are all metrics that can normally be used to narrow in on a person's likely next course of action and she must be prepared.
She didn't expect him to actually speak though, his voice audible over the crackle of flames not far from her back. His first words bring a flicker of a grin as if finding the mild mimickery mildly amusing. But when he turns her challenge back on her, the girl's expression calms even as the burning energy whirling about her feet builds in intensity.
Her reply is a shout by necessity, "It is given to us to break the cycle imposed by tyrants!" Her hands tense on her staff. It only became clear as she studied the calamities spanning the globe. The patterns. The nature of the spheres. The ripples in time and immutable laws broken. "Those behind all of this - they have done it all before!" Her long hair, the color of fire in this hellish arena, whips about her shoulders. "We will make this time their last!" The monsters from the past deny mankind the agency to act with their failsafe cycle of rinse and repeat. Their game needs to come to an end.
The rune engraved weapon flies past Tran on direct course for the staff wielder before its casing explodes and the sharp edged blade is sent careening along a trajectory that will do her no harm. She knew she could count on that.
"We have to take on this burden..." She shifts then, the flaming aura around her feet surges up into a piller of chi that nearly conceals the girl. "Because no one else can!"
She bolts forward then, back on the offense, exploding into a dash out of the pyre of chi she had created. Her staff is ablaze - whether with real flames or the violent illusion of fire would be hard to tell in the time she closes the gap. She grins wildly as she rushes headlong to engage Tran once more. "I know I don't deserve it... the second chance that artifact represents..." Her voice would be harder to make out then - perhaps she addresses herself. "But I know the one I fight alongside with has secured this right with every step he has taken!
She leaps from a few meters out, body twisting into a tight turn, Anathema sliding through her fingers so that its weight is biased toward her left just before she attempts to bring the burning weapon into direct contact with Tran's body for not the first time this fight. "So get out of our way!!" She would aim to step out of the controlled rotation with a second one on the toes of her right as she'd bring the staff around for a second time at the level of Tran's knees with a secondary swift sweep meant to violently steal from Doctor Tran what remains of his balance!"
COMBATSYS: Seishirou successfully hits Alma with Tsurugi Festival.
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Tran 1/--=====/=======|======-\-------\0 Ayame
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Alma 0/-------/=======|=======\-------\0 Seishirou
COMBATSYS: Tran reflects The Sunrise Of Broken Dreams from Ayame with -Q- is for Dr. Tran.
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Tran 0/-------/--=====|=======\==-----\1 Ayame
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Alma 0/-------/=======|=======\-------\0 Seishirou
If only a surfeit of cleverness were the culprit. As soon as Alma emerges from his flip he sees the hilt of the sword he's hurled denotate, causing him to grit his teeth, though he has no time to waste on self-castigation. It was swifter than attempting to cast flame in Ayame's direction, and he has little flame to cast in the wake of his grand expression moments ago, but it was thoughtless. Giving himself over to his singular will betrays him in the face of a master tactician.
He must focus this fury.
It is easier to do so now that Tran has risen to his feet, having survived the previous devastating blow and his momentarily incapacitation despite Alma's inability to help. Becoming conscious of more beyond the immediate need to support his friend, the psychic hears Ayame speak and registers her earlier words. Seishirou and he have no reason to talk -- rather, antithetical, they cannot -- but she and Tran, though they have a history, are not so beyond discourse.
Alma parts his lips to speak, but only blood emerges.
At first, he thinks his scar has throbbed, but the numbness that spreads from his torso is the harbinger of an unspeakably excruciating pain. Below the indelible mark of the Ryouhara seal, where a bomb once exploded from within Alma's very breast, a gaping wound has torn through his flesh. As though an observer to his own fate, he replays the last few moments, and reflects with eerie calm that -- oh yes -- there was a glimmer in the night for a moment, there, as the blade rocketed toward him, freed from its constraints.
Even with senses screaming from his gory wound, staining the bandages about him anew, Alma contorts to face Seishirou and sees the sword having reversed course and heading toward him again.
"TRAN!"
Crimson spittle fleck his words.
"This world is the one of which we are champions!"
The fires of agony mingle with that of spirit until they are indistinguishable.
"Accept -- no -- substitute!"
Glowing eyes flare.
"None -- and not theirs!"
Tell him this world is destined to burn, and tell him he is mad for standing by it. This is the place where his bonds have been forged. These are the people who have fought and sacrificed. They lie with him, in him, from him with every faltering breath. He believes it with all his heart: so long as they stand, this world cannot end. He must believe it, and he will. All that he's gained, and all that he's lost, all its meaning dwells here.
"Ryouharaaaaa!"
He steps forward, and blurs. The sword impales him again, or so it seems. But with psychic power manipulating his momentum, allowing him to glide across the surface of the earth, he produces a twisted miracle: the blade emerges from his body no bloodier than when it first passed through. He has twisted to allow it to pass exactly through the wound which it first made, and with his sudden acceleration toward it, its explosion tears into his back rather than within him, sparing him a fate he remembers all too well. Another fate altogether bears down on Seishirou now, to which Alma's glowing form attests.
"This world," he pronounces, "will not be sacrificed!"
With exceeding righteousness and an impossible dream, Alma reaches out toward Seishirou's elusive psyche, not to touch his heart but to crush his ambitions.
Dr. Tran appears immediately contrite. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it's just been so long since I had a /normal/ conversation with someone..." He trails off, apparently unaware that the present circumstances are about as far awat from normal as it is possible to get.
Case in point, a repeatedly exploding sword tears right back where it came from.
But despite the circumstances, Ayame does him the simple service of attempting to answer him; a more complete answer than any he's offered, so far. He stands still and listens, patient for now but growing antsy. He wants to hear this, and that's not easy in the present circumstances. It's loud, sure, but more than that...
He's enjoying himself. It's completely inappropriate for the situation, with the fate of the world (partially) hanging in the balance, threatened as ever by one or more insane megalomaniacs. But he can't help it, really he can't; it's like his joy is just surging out of him, threatening to break his self-control and just--
"What?" Except as the climax draws ever nearer, Ayame forces him to make a quick correction to the record. She's a blurof motion, so he's forced to speak as he acts, chi condensing and surging around his feet, the haze of steam dancing in the middle of the inferno. "No, ha ha, that's not exactly what I was saying."
And he slams his palms down into the ground, entire body snapping forward like a spring with the most precise timing, just as Ayame leaps toward him. The built-up chi detonates, blasting upward in a swirling cylinder of shimmering, scalding steam. It sucks the staff-wielder in, seeming to suck energy out from her prized weapon, coloring the cyclone an even deeper red than the surrounding would normally allow. In mere moment it uncermoniously spits her back out before vanishing into almost nothing, a mere haze of energy still clinging tenuously to the doctor's shoulders.
"INSTEAD OF THIS DUMB ROCK, THE ONLY PUNISHMENT YOU'LL GET IS FROM ME!"
COMBATSYS: Seishirou blocks Alma's Absolution.
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Tran 0/-------/--=====|=======\==-----\1 Ayame
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Alma 0/-------/------=|=======\-------\0 Seishirou
'Some say the world will end in fire; some, in ice. For what I've tasted of desire, I'd hold with those who favor fire. But I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction, ice is also great and would suffice.'
It's almost as if Robert Frost was looking at this very moment, prophetically, when he penned that poem.
Symbolically, the element of fire has always been synonymous with passions. Likely because, as fire does, passion burns hotter and brighter by consuming us. Sometimes that flame becomes a crucible in which the steel of the self is forged and purified; sometimes, it leaves only the burned-out husk of a person unable to sustain the raging inferno for any length of time. In the wu xing, fire consumes wood to create earth; in effect, it is as with all elements a changer of states, a transmuter of life's stages. A conduit.
Could there be any more appropriate setting for such a battle? And yet, the heat and the fire have real effects on real human bodies, sucking the moisture from the air as they burn.
This is probably why it seems odd that, as Alma hurls his very spirit at Seishirou and Tran clashes with Ayame, that amid the flames there is a sudden, confusing surge of cool mist. It's a gentle rain, a light shower, nothing more, but it's there, with no warning.
A single drop hits the ground and a spiral of blue rises from the impact point like the ripples of a pond. From it, emerges a figure rather too familiar to all the people gathered here.
Floating amidst a chill mist, head bowed, Frei opens his eyes.
"Good," he says, observing the situation. "I made it in time. Alma, Tran..." he begins, turning to his long-time friends and away from the man who killed him and his intriguing, mysterious partner. "If you want to protect everything you believe in..."
There's a brief pause.
"...give them the sphere," he finishes.
Time seems to slow to a standstill for Ryouhara Seishirou.
In the distance, Towazu outpaces Ryouhara's blade, slipping it through his wound as a magician might one of his own assistants. Bleeidng and broken, the psychic boldly proclaims that the fate of the world isn't to be sacrificed, but preserved for as long as Alma and his friends yet stand. Like a great hellion spat from the pernicious sky, the scarred psychic leaps upon Ryouhara's open guard, focusing all of his fury and passion into a single, outstretched point, whose light bathes Ryouhara in the certainty that even someone who has walked in the fires of hell themselves may not actually survive this night.
But even so, Ryouhara cannot pay full attention to his battle. In the background, he is dimly aware of Ayame's words, an ideology representing absolute faith in his judgment and willpower. In the time dialation representing the speed of the ninkougakusha's own perception, it seems to take aeons for him to blink in surprise. It's been--truly--a long time since Ryouhara was believed in.
This much turns steel resolve into something more.
"Enough."
With every nerve and thought and memory in his body catching fire at the mere touch of that man, Ryouhara's left hand blurs out to catch Alma by his forward driving wrist, his haori crawling with dark fire as he skids backwards, forcing Alma--and the battle--to a standstill. It begins to rain. It causes the smoke above to clear, even if the inescapable walls of his prison, whose fires were sealed with strength commensurate to the fires of Hell itself, remain high. His grip tightens on Alma's wrist as Frei makes an appearance. Is this merely his imagination..?
" ... it is so," Ryouhara says simply.
"But fools such as these won't get off easily. I've seen countless individuals, the daughters of gods and the sons of kings take stand against our overriding ideal. Believing that they stood for justice, attached to their way of life so resolutely that they could not even see when the system they sought to uphold was the same that crushed their neighbors. Their colleagues. Their friends. Their lovers. Their family. And still, they held onto their status as 'champions.' And we are not champions. We could never be ..champions. We are patriots. And it is the way of patriots to turn trend against itself. And of all the years and all of the people I've seen persecuted, hurt and dead for your 'love...'"
"... I will show you what it is like to be them. The downtrodden. The cast aside. The roudoushakaikyuu. The proleteriat."
His hand strays to his hip, as his hand's proximity unseals a weapno at his hip. It is the strongest blade he's ever forged, and yet it has no blade at all, a shirasaya tsuka unfitted. Holding Alma's wrist still, he takes one step, unfastening and setting loose his nameless blade in one single stroke. The weapon sings as he swings it, the loneliest song ever sung. When Seishirou releases it, it cuts everything in half. A blade of pure heat blooms from the hilt of the ninkou, a shimming distortion of white, coming to an edge sharper than any steel. Leaving angry ragged red lines, it cuts through the street. It cuts down the powerlines. It cuts down the lampposts. Focused to an insane edge, it will go through steel and aura all the same.
In an instant, it cuts through... everything.
The shinobi rages openly, finally heated.
"Only if he survives judgment will he have earned my consent!!"
She sees him move as she closes distance. It's understandable. He is no stranger to the harshness of a painful strike. Given that what he already went through did not stop him, there was no expectation on Ayame's part that Tran would shirk away from her assault. If anything, he might invite it - for some it is only in the heat of combat that the truly feel alive. Whether the inexplicable man falls into that category she can only begin to guess - that detail, like so many other mysteries about him, remains as inscrutable as ever.
She'll just have to be faster, her weapon flaring to life, an outward manifestation of the determination with which Ayame moves now. Of all the possible recourse she attempted to calculate, the technique the man utilizes was not among them. Airborn, she grits her teeth, realization hitting when she is in the position least able to contest it. Her advance is halted, her form landing, suspended in an erruption of chi. She can feel the theft taking place - that painful thrum of energy pulled forcefully from the conduit in her hands. A gasp escapes her lips as she tries to fight back against the surprisingly powerful attack with the mastery she wields of her own Aura.
Hurled free at last, Ayame twists through the air, a desperate but necessary twirl to land feet first instead of crashing down hard on her shoulder. The momentum leaves her sliding over the smoldering concrete before coming to a stop, right hand against the ground, left hand gripping her weapon, steam still rising up off of the coat on her back, the energy in Anathema reduced to a dim flicker as she is forced to collect her strength anew. Skin flush from being scalded, she forcefully compartmentalizes the experience of the last several seconds away in a dark corner of her mind so that she can remain absolutely focused on the goal.
Thus far she has only told others as much as was necessary to keep pieces in play. But what would it take to secure their objective here? Gritting her teeth, brown eyes settle back on Tran. She was charged with keeping him out of Seishirou Ryouhara's way. And she will not rest until she has succeeded in this task.
"Failure is the only punishment I'm not going to endure." Eyes flick about her surroundings as she plots her next move. Quietly, she begins to twirl her staff in her left hand, the motions smooth but patient, as if it is more than an idle way to pass seconds by.
It's then that she finally realizes what has been tugging at the back of her mind - it shouldn't be possible to feel another drop of energy in the torrent of flame empowering the entire city block, but there it is. A voice, familiar enough from a number of encounters in bygone times. What... how did... from where... Her fingers press off the ground, the girl returning to standing. The Ryouhara scion had mentioned the event at The Louvre in passing. But to hear a thing is worlds different than to /witness/ it. This is bad. She never would have wished the energy savant death. He might be a bit vengeful about what happened though... the whole being dead thing 'n all.
Most of the time she knows what someone else knows before they even speak it, able to read the subtle clues people give off, the little tells that fraudulent mind-readers can use to appear psychic. But for all that talent, she never would have predicted the next words out of the latest arrival's mouth.
Ayame freezes for an instant. Just long enough to listen to Frei and hear the Last of the Ryouhara's response. A glimmer in her eyes betrays her decision - as if there were any choice at all. She can't possibly relent. Not now. Not when Seishirou leads the charge.
Sucking in her breath, she's on the charge again, bolting for Tran. Her staff flares to life, burning dimmer now but still burning. It would be hard to detect the metallic glimmer trailing behind it - a dozen strands of steel wire pulled from the web crafted by Seishirou in the beginning, now securely wrapped around her weapon. She grips her staff at her side as she closes in, lunging forward with an unorthodox attack, treating it more like a lance than a bo, slamming it with great force into the Doctor's sternum with an accompanying detonation of chi.
The real threat comes a split second later, however - the storm of wires would snap forward with the momentum, lashing around the man's limbs, against his torso, securing a hold on his legs.
Ayame would hesitate only long enough to give the chi infused wires purchase upon her target before swinging her right leg out into a kick against her staff, attempting to hurl Tran to the left by using her weapon as the lever, the burning hot, sharp, flesh carving wires as the net!
COMBATSYS: Alma endures Seishirou's Howling Aria of the Ryouhara.
* Attack Of Opportunity! *
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Tran 0/-------/--=====|=======\==-----\1 Ayame
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Alma 1/------=/=======|==-----\-------\0 Seishirou
COMBATSYS: Tran dodges Ayame's Charged Combo.
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Tran 0/-------/--=====|=======\==-----\1 Ayame
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Alma 1/------=/=======|==-----\-------\0 Seishirou
Heaven weeps.
Alma stands before Seishirou, hand clasped and their arms upraised, as the rain falls from the moonlit night upon the dancing flames. The psychic's hair dampens until it sticks to his brow, the origin of the droplets that trace down his cheek, perhaps.
If it were anyone else--
Alma turns his head, though he knows who he will see. And as his gaze sweeps the surroundings, it is as though the world he has treasured so much has already ended.
"Frei..."
There is some distant recognition that there was truth to Tran's possessed ramblings, of who the most likely culprits are, of Alma failing once again to avert the sacrifice of a dear friend's life. But such matters shrink into insignificance. Deep within Alma's eyes is great and terrible sorrow.
"Then, through them, there is a way?"
But there is no despair.
"I..."
In the face of the impossible, Alma summons the unconditional. That is the way of a hero of this world. But if there is something, anything that can be done to avert the fate that the Spheres cry for, Frei would know. The sage has manifested in this form before them now just for this. If it were anyone else--
The extraordinary sound of passion in Seishirou's voice turns Alma back to his implacable foe. The Ryouhara scion's words pass through Alma, the psychic's expression unchanging, his lips silent. This is, after all, what he knew all along. That his love for this world and its people was always narrow-minded. That his determination to reform it and refusal to break its ties excludes any possibility of revolution, and that he lacks any justification for that other than it is the way he has always seen the world, and it has become his essence to dream that endless dream. He will forgive this world always, unconditionally, for everything, where Seishirou finds it unforgivable.
When the blade is drawn, Alma makes no move to resist.
"I...!"
But he does not close his eyes.
Blinding, it shears through all, leaving Alma in tatters, garb destroyed and flesh marred with fresh wounds atop old scars. The bandages appear to be all that holds him together as blood seeps from the gouge in his torso and mingles with a cut that seems it should have bisected him, every trembling of his fingers a horrible suggestion that his upper body might simply fall apart. Yet somehow he continues to stand, and the clean slash of Ryouhara's song has cut diagonally through the old seal upon his breast, as if negating it by a second wrong, as if to break its hold.
"I want only," he says quietly, "for the meaning of our lives to live on."
COMBATSYS: Alma takes no action.
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Tran 0/-------/--=====|=======\==-----\1 Ayame
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Alma 1/------=/=======|==-----\-------\0 Seishirou
To tell the truth, Tran doesn't even neccesarily disagree with Seishirou, especially in regards to the consequences of Alma's unflinching passion. If anyone is downtrodden, it is certainly the doctor. But he is resolute (in his own way) and this man has decided to oppose him and the cause he deems worthy.
It is a very strange feeling, and Tran isn't actually sure he likes it.
Happily, the need for action trumps the luxury of thought, and he finds himself occupied with Ayame again, equally determined for her own cause, already planning her next assault against him. He gets ready to just punch through it. And then Frei's here, oh cool wait--
"--what the fuck?" Tran, taken completely off guard, stops dead and gawks. "What is even /going on/ with you? I don't--"
And somehow Ayame is there, registering only as a dangerous glimmer at the edge of Dr. Tran's vision. Immediately he contorts his body, but tt's all too much for him at once. His concentration slips, the tip of the staff narrowly passes by his chest, and steam poofs out into a loose, pleasantly warm cloud around him.
Tran does not linger inside it, immediately diving forward. He curls into a loose ball and rolls upon impact with the street, narrowly avoiding the edge of the trailing cables and coming up on his feet. He does not notice it has started to rain, already thoroughly soaked with his own blood and sweat. He only knows that something has been asked of both himself and Alma, and his friend has ceased his battle. It takes Tran a little while to make up his mind.
"God, fine." Dr. Richard Tran holds his index finger aloft as though shielding himself from Frei's weird ghost thing. "I try to do something nice for people for once..." He grumbles, reaching into the billowing depths of his coat and retreiving a small, glowing sphere from within. He tosses it up once, testing its weight, and then carelessly wings it straight at Ayame.
"Don't come crying back to me later when you're all insane."
COMBATSYS: Tran successfully hits Ayame with Thrown Object.
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Tran 0/-------/-======|=======\===----\1 Ayame
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Alma 1/------=/=======|==-----\-------\0 Seishirou
'Through them, is there a way?' asks Alma. For Tran, well... it's impossible to tell if he's being sarcastic, or actually is worried that this is going to end with Seishirou reigning over the destroyed remains of a world like some sort of mad god with Ayame as his high priestess. Even that same young woman looks to the supposedly-dead Frei with questions in her heart. And Seishirou Ryouhara... he's as inscrutable as ever.
How does one answer this question?
"I don't know that," Frei says finally, glancing at Alma from his position, very carefully and deliberately positioned at a third point compared to both sides. "But they have a plan, at least. Do you or Tran have that much?" The question is rhetorical; he knows they don't. He was there when Tran GOT the stupid thing in the first place. Never mind the fact that from where he waits and watches, Frei has glimpses of many things... things that aren't visible from someone looking at the mortal world with the eyes of the living.
The former sage continues to appear as something more ethereal than real; his form is indistinct, shrouded in the cool mist he arrived in, and he floats a few inches from the ground, toes pointed. But his expression is serene enough, almost apologetic. "Maybe it's the sphere talking. Tran's right, you know... these aren't safe to be around. They distort the world to bring things in line with their purpose. Nobody is immune, not really," he adds, with a pointed look at Seishirou, before turning back to Alma and Tran. "Don't you see what you're doing? You're fighting to keep a thing you don't understand from others, and why? Because of their past misdeeds?"
Frei shakes his head, then continues his speech. "Is the man who 'killed' Kula Diamond really prepared to do that, Alma? Didn't you take that step so that she could have a second chance? It's not as if her crimes were any less or more than theirs. I think Tran understands. Maybe in a way only you can," Frei says, offering the doctor a gentle smile that is sure to infuriate him. "There are some places even irrationality cannot make us fully go."
A second pause, and the redheaded spirit's face falls slightly, eyes hooded. "There's no way to prevent the end. I'm here to tell all of you that." He looks up, expression still unreasonably calm. "But the land remembers. Nothing was wasted, Alma. The memory of 'us'... it's still out there."
For a second, his mind is filled with images of the spirit of Honoka, finally returning to a home she didn't know she'd been looking for all this time. Her last living act before moving on to... something else.
He'd remember.
"All we can do now is prepare."
The nameless blade -- the saber hilt that sealed within it the strongest fire blade Ryouhara could forge -- lays waste to the area, cutting down cars and lampposts in an instant. And Alma makes no cowardly move against it. That much alone saves him--the judgment of the Ryouhara's song is enough to excoriate those with even the slightest weakness in their spirit, the martial law Ryouhara lays down in an instant enough to end Alma if he even so much as flinches.
But he never closed his eyes.
When the justice of the proleteriat is fully expended, Ryouhara drains the power and force from the shimmering heat shadow, the signature of that terrible ninkou. The ground hisses with steam, and the air has a lurid distortion, the haze of where his blade passed through. Slowly, the heat dissipates from the air, and Ryouhara stands, body and silhouette shifting in the vapor as if only an illusion.
"It is a limp-willed desire," Ryouhara allows quietly.
"But if you still stand against my ninkougakujutsu... then you've earned the right to it."
A slow blink pulls the Ryouhara's attention over his shoulder, finally to regard the ghost behind him with a cold, critical eye. Some sort of chi remnant. As expected of a sage. "It wouldn't be foolish to believe that, standing against me, it was your intention all along to die," Ryouhara muses simply.
His attention returns to Alma and Tran. "Surviving against our jutsu with eyes open... that much alone is proof of your will." In the background, Tran beans Ayame with a Time Sphere. Seishirou regards it with some annoyance. "....but there isn't a need to concern yourself any longer with the will of this world. Despite the urge of tyranny, we of the shadows will not abide their attempts to erase us. It is the nature of us as stewards. The shadow war will live on... and my family willing, they will not."
Ryouhara re-seals the ninkou to his belt. "Make the most of your time today... you don't need to know our plan. Listen for my song. When you hear it, that will be enough." With an icy countenance, the shinobi turns and begins to walk away without saying anything more. No goodbyes, no farewells, no honors. He leaves Ayame in charge, of both Sphere and the finer details. He has to tend to his wounds. However, a thought does occur to him a moment later, enough to check his gait.
A deep frown cuts across the shinobi's face.
"..This puerile feud of ours, Towazu.." he begins, offhand.
"It too, is destined to go on forever."
Ayame slides to a stop and freezes, the swish of her staff through empty air leaving a wake of crimson through the space occupied by the nimble Doctor Tran. The flail of chi-infused wires snaps out and grasps hold of nothing before falling limp to danlge from the end of her weapon. In normal circumstances, she would have drawn her polearm back quickly, preparing for a counterstrike or readying it to lash out in a second attempt to smash and flay.
But the situation has changed. The challenge of the Ryouhara is met and responded to in a way she had not expected. The corner of her peripheral vision is all she allows to observe Towazu's answer to the drawn blade. He isn't attacking back. Were the words of the mistborn really enough to bring to a standstill the momentum of such an intense contest of unrelenting wills? What connection the three men must have for his words alone to have such influence. It's enough to give even the oft times dispassionate girl cause to wonder.
Finally Alma speaks, his voice a whisper of power over the cacophony of flame as he utters the hope his heart holds for the future. Ayame risks further scrutiny, glancing just enough to look his way. This isn't the action of contrite surrender but the plea of one whos bonds with the world are strong beyond anything she can imagine.
Her eyes flick to Frei. What prompted his words? What does he know? Is he aware of the lute and its role in what is to come? It's to Tran that she finally looks as he is put on the spot - the last one to make the call on whether the war started here will end now or continue to rage until all that remain or the dying embers of the hellfire arena.
From his iconic coat, the man pulls the ancient artifact - chi technology refined over countless iterations of the timeline to reach this state and Ayame's eyes narrow. This is the first of them she's seen. Maybe she thought it would look... more imposing? Tran hurls the sphere with the kind of force that attests to just how strong he really is. The reaction on her part is less than perfect, hands occupied with her staff, right hand snapping up, bent at the elbow, as the girl attempts a last second craddling catch that only serves to rebound the orb up into her chin and send her reeling backward, seeing stars for a moment before she finally gets a handle on the thing!
Now she has it. One of the five Timespheres discovered around the world - the focus of tyrants and heroes alike... then how did the likes of Tran end up with one? No one ever accounts for the Wildcard.
Twirling her staff with her left hand, the weapon collapses to its much more convenient, portable size, a hiss of discharging chi as the weapon is returned to its rest state at last before being stowed.
Now that she has it she can't help but study it, brown eyes glancing down to the orb clasped with both hands. It's only in that moment that she becomes aware of the war the sphere itself is capable of engaging. A painful thrum beats against her psyche. It wants to reward her for her hard work, it assures her. It wants her to see everything she can do with this newfound power. It wants to give her so much if she will simply allow it.
Her hands grip the Sphere tighter, mouth pressed into a thin line. Quickly she compartmentalizes the thoughts she begins to feel bubbling up within in, engaging in a sudden, unexpected battle within the silent chambers of the soul. Another temptation, another desperate reaction as the tantalizing offer is made with renewed vigor by the artifact as she forcefully suppresses its influence.
How... she begins to wonder... how in the world was Doctor Tran carrying this without succumb to its call? Time begins to slow for the girl, a bead of perspiration rolling down her cheek, conjured not by the heat of the storm or the ardor of battle, but by the fight within.
Frei and Seishirou's statements are heard are heard, revealed word by word as this gathering at the Timeline's end begins to come to an end. Ayame glances between Tran and Alma once more, mouth forming a faint edge of a frown. Did they bear this burden together? Is that how it was done?
A faint gasp escapes her lips as she rejects the alluring promises of the sphere another time. "I-" she finally speaks, breaking her long minute of silence as mist begins to billow up in the wake of Seishirou's ending of the seals. "If-" she tries again, starting to force her legs forward. She needs to get moving. He is already on the move and there is never time to pause if she harbors even the slightest vain hope of keeping up.
"I promise we will do our part." She's striding forward faster now, forcing herself to keep fighting the bitter war within. Perhaps the Chi Technician will know how to seal the sphere's strong pull. Until then, she will resist, will bear the onus of fighting it. It is the least she can do after all that she has done. "Goodbye."
She glances from Tran to Alma, studying him longer as she passes by, willing her expression to not betray the fight against the orb clutched in her hands. She won't show weakness to the psychic's eye. "I'm ah-" She glances away. "-sorry."
Eyes land on Frei one last time. "I do not know if what we are about to do will work for someone in your..." a thoughtful pause, "...circumstances." She would love to question him about what he's seen, what it was like, what can do now from beyond the veil, but she can't stay a moment longer. "... but I believe a world where these extremes continue to exist... will still need someone like you."
A flicker of a smile is managed just in time to hide a twitch of the eye, brow furrowing slightly. She better go. "Thank you. For... trusting your memories to us." the girl murmurs, turning down the path Seishirou departed and vanishing into the blanketing mist.
Alma, clear-eyed despite his somber expression and ghastly injuries, gazes at Frei's ethereal form, his friend's frayed image symbolic of the fraying of their world. He listens in silence. Plans are for possibilities. In the face of powerlessness, there is only unconditional faith, an irrational commitment.
Really, Alma and Tran are made for each other.
It appears that death has not granted Frei divine insight, but if Seishirou and Ayame have a plan, then they are either mad or have found a possibility, and either is better than Alma and Tran's current condition. "I would rather stand with one who loves this world and lacks a plan," he says quietly, "then one who wishes to remake the world and knows how." It's simply by way of explanation, though; there's no point in justifying himself. Faith cannot be justified by reason. "But if the world is destined to be remade, as you say, then I will choose the enemy I know."
He pauses for a moment.
"And I trust you, Frei," he adds quietly, the obvious worth stating. He trusts Frei's intuitions as he trusts his own. He then smiles sadly, glancing up at the night sky, the rain still sprinkling down. "It is as you say. As she was allowed to die and be reborn, so too shall this world." That's right. Doesn't he forget, sometimes?
The fateful day that Jiro died, another fate was born.
Alma lowers his gaze to Seishirou, grief fading as he is acknowledged. The strange sensation that befalls him he at last recognizes as gratitude. It was Seishirou who showed him how narrow his vision was, proved that Alma was not a savior of the world. As it was then, so it is now. There is a place for love and faith, but at this dark hour, he must place his destiny in the hands of the true stewards. Perhaps it is natural that we feel grateful to our opposites, in whom we see ourselves and our limitations sometimes for the first time. Still, it is as perplexing as it is fulfilling.
Alma nods as Seishirou turns away with characteristically cryptic words, and turns toward the magnificently shirtless but coat-clad Tran. "I will return to Japan," he says, heeding Ryouhara's injunction. "There are people who depend upon me still. I will support them until the end." He has surrendered the Time Sphere, but not his philosophy. So long as this world exists, he will insist upon the value of what occurs within it. "What will you do, my friend?" Of course he wants Tran by his side. But the Man of Action chose to lend his strength of his own volition, and he may have desires -- or even commitments -- of his own.
Alma looks to Ayame, then, as she passes, and his brow lifts slightly, visibly impressed. This young woman too has changed. There is a discipline within her now that he does not remember from before, a sword within her heart forged sharp enough to cut through the snares the Sphere must be setting for her. He detects effort from her but none of the mental deteoriation she surely must be enduring if she is experiencing what he and Tran did. He nods again at her promise, saying nothing more. But just as he begins to think that it is regrettable he did not come to know this stalwart person better, she speaks words that take the psychic completely by surprise. Alma's eyes widen, and for a moment the pontificating phoenix is speechless. Just as swiftly, though, those eyes soften, and the lips beneath part.
"Me too."
He watches her go.
Silence, save for the droplets pattering upon the cracked pavement and the crackling of the shrinking flames, until, shockingly, Seishirou pauses and speaks.
"Yes."
Alma turns toward Seishirou, and in that moment the gentleness and the sorrow and the pain all fade from his features and leave only a direct, unblinking, absolute resolve that defies all circumscription, with which he utters his final promise.
"I won't forget."
"What? Hey, I don't..." With dramatic monologues over issues of great import in abundance, Dr. Tran cuts straight through the bullshit to what's really important here. "Look, I am not the one who set a train on fire to force a confrontation WHICH, by the way, is very much a /present/ misdeed. And, AND!" Tran waggles his finger pointedly at Frei's ghost, really intent on giving the specter a piece of his mind. "It's not like I even hate them them that bad to begin with!"
The degree to which this is praise from a man like Dr. Tran is surely the latest sign of the end times.
"I mean, I punched this dumb nerd in the face once, ONCE, and then he shot me out of a /cannon/, and I /still/ don't even care." Tran gestures at Seishirou like he's not even a part of the conversation, incapable of even recognizing the disrespect. Which he might or might not be? Tran doesn't care. "Newsflash: world ending, all bets off! God!!"
He stops, finally, although he continues to fume silently in place for a bit. Things were going so /well/, too, insofar as the confusing mess that passes for his master plan is concerned. But even he can begrudgingly see this is probably better, even if it won't be /quite/ as entertaining. Perhaps a /smidgen/ less bitterness is required.
"Save it, you're the one with the problem now." What does Tran care about a little ambush between friends? That's easily half of his entire playbook. "I'm gonna go /enjoy/ the armageddon and I'm going to do it /right/ this time." He glances at Alma. "In Japan, I guess. Anywhere but here."
"I hate this city."
Ayame displays curious resolve that she didn't before; Seishirou is as inscrutabl as ever; Alma articulates an uncompromising yet reasonable position; Tran... well, this is Tran at his most surprising.
To see all these people at their most human warms the heart.
"I wish I could tell you..." he begins, glancing between everyone present, and then falters. Whatever insight he's gained, apparently he can't share much of it, because there's every indication that he's swallowing things that were about to come out of his mouth. Instead, he says: "Just because *this* world is ending doesn't mean all hope is lost. Remember that. We think of time as something that moves back to front, but the truth is, there's been a chronicler looking after us, and I don't think it thinks of time in the same way we do... and as long as it remembers, none of us is ever TRULY gone."
Frei does not necessarily enjoy 'cryptic' as stock in trade but lately it seems like it's the best he can possibly do. So much to explain, so little time... and so little frame of reference for others to make sense of it.
"The longer this goes on, the thinner the veil is going to get. That's important. You need to keep people safe until those who are going to act, finally make their move. I..." There's a pause, and he brings his hand up and looks at it. This whole time his form has been hazy, but now he's pretty clearly fading out of sight entirely. "Oh, damn. Not enough time. Head to Ise!" he says, rushing his words. "Head to where the Sun Goddess came to earth. And be..."
And then he's gone.
COMBATSYS: Ayame has left the fight here.
[ \\\\\\\\\\\\ < > ////////// ]
Tran 0/-------/-======|==-----\-------\0 Seishirou
[ \\\\\\\\ <
Alma 1/------=/=======|
COMBATSYS: Tran has left the fight here.
[ \\\\\\\\ < > ////////// ]
Alma 1/------=/=======|==-----\-------\0 Seishirou
COMBATSYS: Alma has left the fight here.
> ////////// ]
|==-----\-------\0 Seishirou
COMBATSYS: Seishirou has ended the fight here.
Log created on 21:20:45 10/05/2014 by Seishirou, and last modified on 02:56:48 10/09/2014.