Difference between revisions of "1895/You Are Old, Fake Avenger"

Latest revision as of 04:11, 29 March 2015

Reiji Arisu has posed:
This has been a long time coming.

    The city is empty. The streets are filled with vehicles seemingly frozen in time. Its sidewalks are lined with lifeless skyscrapers and vacant storefronts. Their lighted displays and extravagant showcases still advertise to a public who no longer walks this boulevard. In this lifeless city, even the streetsigns have lost their meaning.

This place is Shinjuku. Or rather, a Shinjuku removed half-a-step from the Shinjuku-that-is.

Somewhere in the distance and far too near, the land and air tremble. A quake peals out through the very fabric of space and time.

    This is Shinjuku, the City of Quakes. A proxy metropolis that endures so that its half-step-removed citizens may yet live in peace. This makeshift frontier is a battlefield- one place among many where a secret war still rages. Today, however, it is tranquil. A few wayward spirits drift through the gaps between buildings. A kamaitachi lurks behind a dumpster, snacking on viscera that is better left unidentified.

    There is only one man here. A frequent visitor to this place. He waits near an empty crosswalk the size of a city block, reclining against a glass window behind which a trio of modelling dummies stand lifeless in clothes nobody will ever purchase, ten years out of date. He takes a draw from his cigarette, letting the blue-grey smoke trail away into the clear, twilight sky as he waits for his guest to arrive.

'Guest' here is used very, very loosely.

Fake Avenger (662) has posed:
     Time is an illusion to someone like the guest.

     Not that there are a lot of people like the Guest. Such people, for whom time is something that quite literally happens to other people, don't come along everyday. Even in the Multiverse, a place filled with immortals and those unstuck in time, the Guest's perspective is one that ordinary people simply don't possess and simply don't reach. Whole civilizations have risen and fallen in his lifetime, before his strange, black-flecked purple eyes.

     And through it all he has been, as he ever will be.

     His 'brother' in the Grail assured him of that.

     The Guest appears in an instant. There's no delay, no rush of wind, no sudden announcement of his arrival, no telltale ripple of space or time where he was a moment before. In the space between the other man's blinks, he simply appears, without fanfare, as if he had always been there. As the eyes shut, the space is empty. As they open, it is filled with a slender, purple-haired man in a lavender kimono, covered with unsettling black tattoos that seem as if they're writhing into some new configuration. On his back is a sword longer than logic should allow. On his right arm are two Command Seals and the imprint of a third. On his left is a strange, scrawling pattern that sticks out even amidst the black tattoos.

     Kojirou Sasaki has arrived.

     Avenger's gaze is unfocused, as it ever seems to be. It isn't fixated on Reiji, nor on the Kamaitachi, nor even on the ruined city. Reiji was an opponent. The city and the kamaitachi were fixtures. No, whatever Kojirou's eyes are gazing at, it isn't of this world. It may not even be of his own.

     A moment later, his gaze focuses, like lenses of a microscope suddenly twisting into place. His peaceful smile takes on a hungry quality to it as desire fills his thoughts. The transformation is instantaneous - in one moment, he goes from a man who looks as though he is little more than a drifter in the wide, cosmic universe to a predator seeking a very specific kind of prey.

     "How nostalgic. Even covered in concrete, Edo cannot help but be Edo, can it?"

Reiji Arisu has posed:
    "The spirit of a city never really dies. It only changes with the passing seasons," Reiji replies, releasing a thin cloud of tobacco smoke. His gaze fixes on the man in the kimono- on the tattoos upon his skin and the blade in his sheathe. A man who wasn't there a moment ago. Who, like a wraith, appeared from nothing and nowhere.

But he is not a wraith. Even a ghost would leave some sign of its arrival.

    With a shrug, Reiji pushes himself from the window and casually flicks his cigarette to the ground. Its cinders are smothered beneath his heel. He lifts a rack of weapons from its resting place between his legs and the wall.

    "Though this place isn't really Edo. It's not even Tokyo. It's just... A dream of that city, I suppose," his free hand falls to hover dangerously over his weapons. Each one promising a different avenue of attack, each equally likely to emerge. "But I don't think either of us came here to talk about history."

Fake Avenger (662) has posed:
     "Cities die," Kojirou replies distantly, that predatory feeling slipping off for a moment as he drifts backwards into his own mind, "They vanish from the world when they are forgotten, like all other things. The castles in the sand inevitably collapse with no one to think of them."

     The swordsman watches Reiji lift the weapons, and that predatory feeling returns. It isn't even a change in his eyes, or his smile - no, it's much more subtle than that. The air around him becomes sharper, like a blade. The area around Avenger simply seems oppressive, predatory, /hunterly/, when that hunger comes out.

     Speaking of blades...

     Monohoshi Zao slides out of its sheathe with an ominous /shnnnk/. It looks ridiculous - a man not even six feet tall, wielding a sword nearly five feet long with one hand? Absurd. But nonetheless, it settles into Kojirou's hand as naturally as if it was part of the arm. He gives it no test swings or slices or anything else. He doesn't need to. He's been using this sword as long as he's existed in this current form. A thousand years is more than enough time, with the monomaniacal focus he has, to get things done.

     "So, then. Shall we begin?"

Reiji Arisu has posed:
    "True enough," Reiji responds, allowing himself a moment of conversation to steady the throbbing of blood against his ears. "But there will always be new cities, as long as there are people to gather and build them. And sometimes, those new cities are not so unlike the ones that stood before."

The sound of grinding steel.

    Reiji does not reply to Avenger's question. He doesn't need to. The aura surrounding the apocalyptic wanderer meets a resolve of steel. Cold fire pools in the pit of his eyes- his breathing slows to a steady, almost hypnotic rhythm.

Avenger asks.

Reiji acts.

    The click of a latch falling away is their starting gun. The roar of enchanted buckshot is the first blow. Reiji leaps as he pulls the trigger- but he doesn't jump forward. Glass shatters into a million glittering pieces as he throws himself backwards into the storefront behind him, sliding into the space between two of the dummies. He doesn't turn as he retreats, firing a second, then third shot. The air is filled with falling, cutting shards and expanding clouds of shrapnel.

    He pushes between carousels of clothes-on-hangars, darting between rows of pants, shoes and shirts. In the near distance is his goal- a set of elevators, and a staircase beside.

Fake Avenger (662) has posed:
     Reiji responds with steel and fire. Kojirou is glad for it. They could've sat talking philosophy all day, and in truth, Kojirou was perfectly capable of it - but it wouldn't make him *happy*. Very little made him happy these days. Nostalgic, certainly. Wistful, absolutely. But happy? No, happiness was a rarer treat. Happiness was found in bloodshed.

     Not slaughter. Not bullying. Such things brought Kojirou no pleasure. No, only honorable bloodshed, the dance between life and death engaged in by two people of skill, brought Kojirou some fleeting measure of joy. The One Exiled From Avesta hadn't yet figured out how to taint that pure moment.

     The gunshots roar. Shrapnel and glass mingle together as the force of the shotgun carry them at the ancient Servant. Three shots, a cloud spread across the field as Reiji retreats. The flechettes would tear a human being to shreds if he tried to pursue. They would rip through a person and leave him bloody and broken even at the best of times. And Kojirou could not block all of them, not even at his speed. Even Servants have their limits.

     So Kojirou takes a different track.

     The explosion of spiritual power is unmistakable. Even as far away as he is, Reiji can feel the overwhelming well - no, the /ocean/ of might that flows from the Holy Grail into Kojirou's body. As Kojirou opens the floodgates and pours them into the Magic Crest, Reiji could probably not *help* but sense the force behind the mysterious Servant.

     The flechettes move at supersonic speeds.

     Magic is faster.

     Kojirou is faster still.

     Before the Reinforcement is even complete, Kojirou's arm swings downwards for the ground like a hammer. It hits the ground just as his arm fills with mystic might, transforming that slender arm, which nonetheless belongs to a Servant, into a perfect machine. Muscles redouble in might. Tendons and bones harden. The force of Kojirou's punch goes from something like a jackhammer to something like a bomb.

     Inside the building, Reiji likely feels the impact.

     Rock swings upwards to meet the cloud of flechettes. The sidewalk becomes Kojirou Sasaki's sword for a brief instant, sending the flechettes directly in front of him spinning wildly away to embed themselves in walls and stalls and pavement. As the magic dies, Kojirou starts walking forward in that small aisle of safety he'd created for himself, ignoring the debris, the glass, and the deadly little darts flicking past him. They brush through his hair, they tear at his kimono - but none of them reach his body.

     The exchange happens over the course of an instant.

     The rock falls away. Kojirou enters the storefront, his eyes catching the light outside and shining with a brilliant purple.

     Where was the next attack going to come from?

Reiji Arisu has posed:
Supernatural swordsmanship was to be expected. Impossible strength, a burst of magic from a source so primal that it could be nothing else but divine.

Or perhaps, profane?

    Had Reiji continued to fight out in the streets, such an attack would have been the end of things. But within the store, at his position near the middle of the first floor, Reiji has ample time to react. The shockwave knocks down several rows of clothes, but buffets against subsequent racks. The fabric twists in the supernatural gale, absorbing the impact and dissipating it harmlessly into the chaotic motion of cloth in a sharp breeze.

He will need to adapt his plan.

    Reiji maintains his distance-- but breaks into a run all the same. He drops his weapon rack, kicking it across the floor behind a counter. A split second later, he darts out after it, drawing his sidearm from its place at the small of his back.

In the time it takes to bring the weapon to bear, he's taken aim at the man in the shattered wall.

And then, he opens fire.

    Fletchettes are joined by slugs of solid, heavy steel that blaze unnaturally beneath the clinical glow of the fluorescent lights above. Each is enchanted for speed and penetrating power, each exemplifying elemental Metal.

    The bolts smash into jars and bottles of fine powders, fragrant oils and a vast array of cosmetics. The air fills a nightmarish menagerie of scents and stinging clouds of dust. He dips into a roll, slinging his shotgun back into the rack as he moves.

...And then he disappears, again, into aisles. The only sign of his passing are the occasional bolts from odd angles and the clamor of his boots against the linoleum floor.

Fake Avenger (662) has posed:
     Were Kojirou someone more tactically-minded, he might be bothered that he's giving away so much of his capabilities. What the Union knew of him was vanishingly small. Certainly they had never seen him do anything like Reinforcement, nor were they aware of his true strength. Against Bedivere, he had had to do nothing but use his sword.

     Kojirou is not tactically-minded. He does not care if his opponents know something of his capabilities, because the form of his attack cannot be perceived or memorized.

     That makes him difficult to plan for.

     Speaking of plans, Reiji's is an excellent one. The flechettes and the glowing slugs aren't from Kojirou's time, after all. Muskets had only just been adapted to Japan by the time he died. Certainly no one had thought up killing means as complex as this.

     But Kojirou has lived over a thousand years of battle. His instincts are a honed blade, even against unfamiliar weaponry. In a heartbeat, he picks out the dangerous part of that attack - the elemental Metal - and isolates it. Cyan-green lines race up Monohoshi Zao as it slices through the air three times, in another unreadable arc that starts and ends at rest and goes...God only knows.

     At the end of the third swing, the air around him erupts with motion and chaos. Not, perhaps, the elemental Chaos of the One Exiled From Avesta, but chaos nonetheless. The slugs richochet through the cloud like wrecking balls, the weight of them clearing aside flechettes immediately ahead of and around All The World's Evil. The Living Apocalypse watches with a sort of distant dispassion as a few flechettes carve against his skin, leaving bloody trails along his arms and legs. They were light wounds.

     More worrisome by far were the three small cracks in Monohoshi Zao. Even with Reinforcement...well, it wasn't as if Monohoshi Zao was a weapon like *that*, after all. At the end of the day, it wasn't magic, it wasn't legendary - it was simply a laundry-drying pole.

     Heh.

     As the cloud fills the room, Kojirou's instincts take over. He wasn't particularly hampered by not being able to see, of course. But he was hampered by the obstacles in the room. Reiji had chosen a precise, perfect situation to gain the advantage, and while Kojirou was perfectly comfortable on the defensive, guns always gave him some trouble.

     Well, he could see what he could do about that.

     Reiji gets another sense of that endless ocean of power as Kojirou's arm blazes to life. He holds up his hand and waves it slightly to the side.

     A hurricane hits the shop.

     Well, hurricane-force wind, anyway. The interior of the shop suddenly just erupts into motion as the dying wind from the flechettes is grabbed and flung about without care or worry. That immense, endless reserve of magical power goes pumping furiously into that dying wind, transforming it from echoes of a gunshot to a monstrous gale, grabbing clothes racks and cash registers and still-flying flechettes and flinging them every which way. Only Kojirou is safe in the eye of it all, the center of the whirling storm, the peace at the middle of the tornado.

Reiji Arisu has posed:
What hope does one man have against a god?

What hope does one man have against a demon?

What hope does one man have against a creture beyond both god and demon?

    A vortex of wind tears through the department store. Clothing racks, glass displays, bottles and containers of chemicals of all stripes topple into the storm, shatter and break. The inside of the building becomes the home to an unnatural calamity, and Reiji is caught in the middle.

    He whispers a harsh curse as the wind buffets at his body. A metal rod slams into his ribs, sending him staggering to the side even as shrapnel, glass and debris of all kinds cut into his exposed flesh. Ribbons of blood stream out of hair's-breadth cuts across his arms and face and neck. He draws his chin down into the collar of his armored coat, protecting his veins and arteries. One glass shard opens a wide gash across his brow, filling one eye with stinging, red fluid.

The scent of perfume mixes with spilt blood, and carries along with the wind.

What hope, indeed?

That is the question that Shinra was created to answer.

    "Karin," one word, growled into the gale. It disappears into the hurricane- but what comes next does not. There's a spark- then a flame. A cloud of fire shines bright into the tornado. Oil and powder, the dust of a full decade and scraps of fletchette enchanted with the elemental nature of Wood spiral through the vortex.

And Reiji has just lit each and every one of them on fire.

    He hunkers down, rolling through the flame, darting toward the corner of the room as smothering smoke and oppressive heat fills the room. Together, they reach the ceiling, the heat pops light fixtures, scattering yet more glass shards into the storm like a crystalline rain.

It also reaches the sprinkler system.

    Flame meets water. A deluge of liquid pours down from on high. Steam mixes into the wind. Water dampens its force. It floods, covering the floor in pockets of oil-flame that burns even atop the quickly bulding lake.

Reiji crouches atop a raised platform, his body covered in burns and cuts and bruises. Upon his lips is a prayer.

No, not a prayer. Only men who need the strength of heaven must pray.

Reiji is a man who fights with the strength of the world and those within it, not by borrowing that from the ones who stand over it.

    "Tsuchi wa kin wo umu," he drones as metal pelts the walls and pounds into his body armor. "Kin wa mizu wo umu," he continues as the pipes unleash water to quench the flame. "Mizu wa ki wo umu," he says, as the fletchettes drink of the water and the powders mix with it, filling the air with sickly-sweet, toxic, and all too flammable fumes. "Ki wa, hi wo umu," Reiji murmurs as the oil and perfumes and fletchettes still burn on. "Soshite--"

    "Hi wa--" Reiji growls, sliding Karin back into its sheath. His hand fixes upon the last weapon in his collection. The final blade-- the wakizashi. It comes away from its saya, shedding sparks and electrical mayhem. The elemental forces unleashed in the room seem to reverberate, then blaze with the power of the endless cycle that powers this world. "TSUCHI WO UMU!" Reiji swings his last blade in a thunderous, overhead strike. Its edge carves through the hurricane, mixing with ionized gasses and clouds of swirling flame and steam. Its tip cuts into the floodwaters coating the floor.

This is no mere magecraft. This is not magic. This is an expression of one of nature's most fundamental laws.

    Its name, roared at full strength despite the blood dripping from his wounds. Its name, reverberating in the tremendous shockwave of electrical power that surges through the entirity of the store like the fury of a thunderstorm. Its name is--

"SHINRA BANSHO!"

Fake Avenger (662) has posed:
     Can a man become a god? Can a man become a devil? Can time, over its endless course, transform someone who was once neither into something more than both? Can clashes with such beings as defy the imagination, as /sprang/ from the imagination, turn a man into something divine, something profane, something other?

     Kojirou is one of the few who could answer such a question. Of course, his answer would be couched in riddle and nonsense, because that's simply how one who has attained enlightenment and become unstuck from the world is.

     You can't really answer the important questions.

     You can answer the important answers.

     The tornado of absolute command explodes through the shop. Fire, water, metal, lightning - everything mixes together in a whirling tornado of flame and destruction around Kojirou, filling vision, filling hearing, filling scent. Were Kojirou literally anyone else, he would be overwhelmed to the point of passing out. Were Kojirou anyone else, he would've given up. This technique is something that is both a perfect offense and a perfect defense. The lightning tugs at Monohoshi Zao, pulling at his grasp. The fire licks at his kimono, lighting it - for he gave up the Holy Shroud's benefits for that boy from the academy's sake. The air blinds him.

     Still, Kojirou Sasaki does not change. The world is powerful, true - but Kojirou Sasaki has killed the world before. It was by accident, admittedly, but it is an event that changes a man even as it changes and warps his legend, and he is not about to be dissuaded by this.

     The fire races up his kimono as he comes to a decision. The lightning threatens to tear Monohoshi Zao from his grip and drag it uselessly into the tornado as his feet, for the first time all battle, shift. He pulls off his ribbon with the practiced ease of a man who is completely at home in the midst of elemental chaos, letting his hair explode freely into the tornado of flame as he lashes his sword to his arm with the purple ribbon.

     For a god would answer such impudence with smiting. And a demon would answer such impudence with fury. But Kojirou is neither god nor demon, neither angel nor spirit. Kojirou is something more dangerous.

     Kojirou is a man.

     And a man answers such impudence with his best.

     The apocalyptic swordsman takes up a stance. The sword wiggles a bit as light flares along it once more, that strange cyan coloring arching along it to hold it together. The ribbon, too, alights, adhering firmly to the sword, and that silences the wiggle of the magnetism.

     A man answers such impudence with his best.

     "Hiken."

     "Tsubame Gaeshi."

     It is not an instant. It is something faster than an instant, something faster than a heartbeat. It is like elemental Time, or elemental Space. For a brief instant, as Kojirou charges through the tornado of fire and lightning, as flechettes arc across his body and carve through his cheek and keep going out the other side, as fire consumes his clothes and sets his hair aflame, as lightning arcs along his blade, Reiji does not see simply Kojirou.

     In this space between dimensions, Kojirou has shattered Dimension.

     The sounds of the real world, of surprised gasps and shocked screams, cuts through the field as Tsubame Gaeshi does the same.

     And it is three slashes. Three absolute slashes, a spiralling prison of silver and cyan and lightning, held by a blood-soaked apparition of fire and flesh. It is a technique so perfect, so refined, that even Hell itself could not stop this man from performing it.

     Reiji answered Kojirou with the world.

     Kojirou answers the world with himself.

Reiji Arisu has posed:
Hiken - Tsubame Gaeshi

    Once, there was a man who sought to cut a swallow in mid flight. Day after day, night after night, that man tried again and again and again, each time coming up short. But he did not falter. He would cut a swallow in flight. If the world would deny him, it would simply need to break before he did. And so, after nights and days and months and years, the man who spent his life upon his blade struck down the world.

    Avenger erupts from the cataclysm of elemental wrath a half-dead wraith. His blade cleaves not just the air, not just the flame, but the space in between the very motes of matter and energy that make up all things. Reiji's lone eye narrows in dread appreciation for what he's been allowed to observe.

    This, some animal part of him claims, is the end. Instinct tells him that there is no avoiding this- three simultaneous strikes, all performed at speeds beyond merely superhuman. This is a Three-God-Blade, and nothing can stand before it.

But Reiji is no mere animal. And he does not stand.

He kneels.

    Head forward, one knee pressed below his chest, toe bent and clutching at the ground. His other leg is bent forward, the plate there becoming a shield. His body is arced over both. Avenger emerges from the storm.

    In the next split second, Reiji draws his pistol. In a sliver of time, he fires. The gun blasts away, recoil carrying it into the wall. In the next fragment of a moment, he's in motion, his hand grabs hold of Karin's hilt and pulls it from its sheath. One bullet, two blades, and one man meet the sword of a creature beyond god or devil.

His lone eye focuses, the iris contracting into a tight, painful lens.

    The bullet, blessed with the will of Metal is aimed for one crack in one blade. The wakizashi, arcing with electricity and the resilience of earth strikes for one crack in one blade. The katana, roaring with flame and all its fury is drawn and slices at one crack in one blade.

One crack.

Three blades.

    In the narrowest sliver of time, in the fraction of a moment between life and death, man dares to deny the reaper his price and spit in the face of that which stands beyond the world.

Avenger has split the world.

Reiji needs only to split a sword.

Fake Avenger (662) has posed:
     It is a brilliant strategy. No one has ever thought to try. No one has ever held their sanity in the face of the Secret Sword long enough to come up with it. No one has ever been brave enough to attempt such a thing.

     Indeed, Kojirou is delighted. This is what he lived for. The swell of battle. The pulse of the unexpected. The beauty of a true fight, not simply a slaughter. Impossibility clashing against impossibility and transcending understanding. The bloody riot, the pathway to victory. These fleeting instants were what Kojirou lived for.

     And instants is a correct statement in this case. For Reiji's strategy is /absolutely/ brilliant, and would be a perfect counter to Tsubame Gaeshi...if Tsubame Gaeshi took place across three instants.

     Thereby lies his mistake.

     It is, of course, a mistake that anyone could make, anyone /would/ make. This is not a battle of planning and strategy, not anymore. This is a battle of instinct, of skill, of reflex, and of moments in between moments.

     The bullet hits the crack, and the sword vanishes, for in that infinitesmally small slice of the infinite parallel dimensions, it was shattered, and no longer part of Tsubame Gaeshi.

     The wakizashi meets the sidelong blade, and the sidelong blade vanishes, for in the next slice of infinity so small as to be less than a fraction, it was deflected.

     The katana does not meet the final blade.

     The katana meets *flesh*.

     The blade punches through Kojirou's shoulder. It should not have. It could not have. It is an impossibility that he miss. His strike was perfectly targetted. His attack was perfectly executed. His sword followed its path.

     Ah.

     But Kojirou's did not.

     For the reason Kojirou's blade was not fully blocked - the reason the sword of *this* dimension was not stopped - cannot be related to Reiji. Reiji's skill was surpassing excellence. He dared to step into the domain of one who challenges gods, and he was rewarded with the true nature of Kojirou Sasaki, a swordsman who surpasses even the idea of excellence, a swordsman who transcends the idea of swordsmanship itself.

     In moments, when the whirl of activity dies, black blood will spill down Kojirou's shoulder, to join the black blood pouring down his face, his chest, the countless tributaries forged by the flechettes mixing into the river carved by Reiji's katana.

     But in this fragmentary moment, Reiji would understand. As the ribbon that had once been bound around his hand vanishes into the tornado of lightning and flame, Reiji would comprehend.

     Kojirou, at the very last possible fraction of an instant, allowed his katana to move.

     It is something no ordinary swordsman would ever do, for to allow your katana to leave your control for even - no, /especially/ that short a time, is to lose your life. Even the best masters would never allow such a thing.

     Kojirou is not a master. Kojirou is something beyond.

     At the last possible fragment of an instant, he allowed the wind and the lightning to move the sword. Just a tiny bit - just a tiny shard of a motion - but enough to pass the katana and allow Reiji's blade to roost firmly in his shoulder.

     For Kojirou Sasaki, history is decided by the smallest fragments of sand.

     For Reiji...?

Reiji Arisu has posed:
    Time is deceptive. What seems like an instant can take moments. What seems like an eternity may be an instant. Against all impossibility, in defiance of the overdeity of another world entirely, Reiji Arisu defeats two blades of the Tsubame Gaeshi. Were circumstances different, he may have defeated the third as well. But he did not. In that instant, where Karin meets corrupted flesh and bone, Reiji realizes that his life's hourglass has wound down to its final grains.

But it is in the domain of man to defy even death.

    For Avenger had struck out for Reiji's neck. With a blade driven by an executioner's precision, Avenger sought his head. His execution was perfect, flawless- in all Creation, few could hope to match it let alone surpass it. It was without peer.

...When he had executed it.

Reiji's mistake was allowing his own perception of space and time to cloud his vision.

Avenger's was allowing the world to dilute the perfection of his strike.

    The gale tears at the Monohoshizao, bending it and twisting it. Kojiro allows the storm to influence it- this is why Reiji missed the crack. This is why he instead struck the swordsman's shoulder. This is why Kojiro's blade was a fraction of a second slower than Reiji's strike. This is why Reiji had a sliver of time to react.

Why Kojiro's blade was centimeters off target.

Why Reiji was able to turn centimeters into inches.

Tsubame Gaeshi was born to cut a swallow in mid-flight.

Reiji is no swallow, and he does not run from this strike.

Instead he throws himself into it.

    Monohoshizao clips against the metal plates encircling Reiji's shoulder at the joint. The exorcist turns that moment of delay into a new turn of the hourglass. Avenger's sword cuts flesh, it digs into bone. But to do so, it has to get through layers of armored coat and reinforced cloth that is almost assuredly some equivalent to kevlar. The massive nodachi is rooted in Reiji's own shoulder, caught against his collarbone, in a strange mirror to Avenger's own injury.

Blood- red, vivid blood- flows down the length of that silvery blade.

Two swordsmen stand, their blades locked in place for a hair's breadth of time. Either could end this immediately.

Avenger's strength is immense. With a flash of will, he could crush Reiji's body with all the might of a landslide.

The blade in Avenger's wound is Karin, a weapon blessed by flame. In an instant, he could cause the other man's flesh to ignite.

All it would take is a thought.

But, Reiji has a second sword- and thus, a second option.

    'Fire creates Earth.' This is one fifth of the great Cycle of Creation. Karin bursts into flame, transmuting flesh and black blood and the lingering dregs of fuel still in the air into raw heat, light and concussive force. Chirai shoots up as Reiji swings it in, the tip of the blade aimed into the hollow of Avenger's chest from below his diaphragm. Electricity surges out from the blade, drawing on the heat its sister-sword emits.

The question is, at this point, will Flame and Earth be enough?

Fake Avenger (662) has posed:
     Those centimeters would infuriate a lesser swordsman. Were Kojirou Sasaki anyone but himself, he would have been angered by that tiny, fragmentary slip.

     He is not a lesser swordsman.

     Kojirou Sasaki starts laughing.

     It's a gross laugh, on account of the blood welling up in his mouth, a gurgling, sopping-wet chortle that starts in the chest and spills out like, well, like the black blood. But it's not a mocking laugh. It's a delighted laugh.

     In the middle of a tornado of fire and lightning and steel, with a burning blade shoved into his shoulder, Kojirou Sasaki is laughing.

     Reiji surges forward with the second sword, and Kojirou, again, does something no ordinary swordsman would ever do. He does not try and tear Monohoshi Zao from the wound in a panic. He does not try to catch the other sword with his bare hands and disable himself twice over. Lightning disables humans. Even though Kojirou is something beyond a human, he is still /fundamentally/ a man, and a man being tazered by lightning is in a bad place.

     So he does the unthinkable.

     Kojirou releases Monohoshi Zao. He tilts slightly backwards, letting the wakizashi slash past him, and thrusts his shoulder against the axis of Karin as it bursts into flame. The result is stunning - Kojirou's arm goes flying off, lost in the madness of the whirlwind.

     But, Kojirou Sasaki has released his weapon! Has he given up?

     No.

     If Reiji is paying attention, he might notice it. The way Kojirou's feet spread as he takes up the stance. The way Kojirou's body twists. The way his good arm rises into the air.

     "Hiken."

     No. That's not possible.

     But...a true swordsman...one who has given himself to the perfection of a single technique...one who has ascended beyond the confines of the sword...one who has ascended beyond the confines of reality itself...

     He may know nothing about fistfighting. He may know nothing about martial arts. But he knows this technique. He can perform this technique with a wooden spoon.

     Why not with nothing at all?

     "TSUBAME GAESHI!"

     Kojirou swings forward. It is that same technique, that same force, that same strike - except now it is three arms, three fists, each from a different direction, each spiralling in like some sort of triple haymaker, each impossible, each...there nonetheless.

     The look in Kojirou Sasaki's eyes is a look of absolute delight.

     "Refinement! Creation! Growth! Challenge! More!" Kojirou's normally-static voice has the air of a junkie, of one who has had a fix of his favorite delight after far too long, "Show me more! Reiji Arisu!"

Reiji Arisu has posed:
    Blood colors the shirt beneath his jacket. It runs down his arm, making his fingers and palm slick. But that is only one hand. Karin's explosion burns warm against his face. Somehow, impossibly, Avenger abandoned his sword, dodged Chirai, survived Karin, and is now coming at him with his bare fists. For a skilled swordsman- man whose pride should be one and the same with his blade- to abandon his sword is, itself, an impossibility.

    Once, Reiji believed Avenger to be a man. A phenomenally skilled man- one with skill and power beyond all but a small handful of his peers. The strength- the absolutely monstrous strength- that he displayed at the start of this duel proved he was no mere man.

    Once, Reiji believed Avenger to be a monster. A youkai swordsman whose skill and puissance outstripped any of his peers. He endured an (albeit improvised) Shinra Bansho, weathered the storm, and came at him with an attack that could only come from legend.

    Once, Reiji believed that Avenger was Kojirou Sasaki, the legendary archrival of Musashi Miyamoto. But this Tsubame Gaeshi was the skill of no mere mortal. It was itself legendary. It was, itself, something of divine and profane and monstrous nature.

And then, Reiji realized.

    If a sword can have a spirit, and a ship can have a spirit, and a volcano can have a spirit, then why can a technique not have a spirit? Why can there not be a creature whose nature, at his core, is Tsubame Gaeshi? When a man gives himself to make a sword, it is blessed with a soul. When a man gives himself to create a technique, so too, then.

    And thus, Reiji has Learned.

But he does not have time to ruminate on such things. Not when power made real- technique made flesh- the spirit of the man who created Tsubame Gaeshi and the spirit of Tsubame Gaeshi itself- comes to finish its work.

    Karin's explosion bought him time. It removed one of the Avenger's arms, limiting the angles of his attack. It's enough time to draw his hands /back./ To sheathe his swords once more upon his rack of elemental arms.

    Has he surrendered?

    No. Reiji Arisu was not raised to surrender. To fight until the last- to give everything and all that he has to turn defeat into victory. That is the legacy Shogou Arisu left for him.

    Avenger surges forward. Avenger draws closer, there is a scraping of metal against concrete. There's a subtle click, a sound that is almost assuredly absorbed by the flame still raging not so far away. One way or another, it almost certainly signals the end of this fight.

    Two barrels align against the body of the technique-made-flesh. One brilliant gold, one jet black. Before, Avenger had blocked what is coming with his blade. Now, he has only his fists.

    "Gold," Reiji says in reply, his one open eye cold, calculating, and yet full of the defiant /flame/ that is life. In defiance of the one-limbed horror and its black blood and its burning flesh and leaking body, Reiji merely intones, "Hollywood."

    Reiji's fingers squeeze against the triggers. Over and over and over again, he fires. Gunpowder fills the air as he releases two, three shots from each gun in the span of time it takes for Kojirou to coil back from the explosion. He grits his teeth each time the recoil shoots through his arm. Blood spurts from the gash in his shoulder- but he endures.

He must endure, until the end.

Fake Avenger (662) has posed:
     Gold Hollywood flls the air. Bullets roar at Kojirou in the middle of his punch. Gunpowder ignites instantly on contact with the air, filling it with fire. Kojirou must surely look a devil out of Hell itself.

     The shotgun shells are fast and strong, and Kojirou is already committed to the strike. They catch him in the chest and send him flying backwards like a ragdoll into the tornado of elements. It's all he can do, before he's flung away, to grab Monohoshi Zao and use the momentum of the shotgun to yank it out of Reiji's shoulder.

     There's silence, except for the roaring fire-lightning-metal tornado.

     But the trouble with Kojirou is that he's brutally hard to kill.

     He emerges from the tornado once again, covered in his own black ichorous blood. There are deep gashes in his body from the shotgun shell - indeed, it looks as if a fairly huge portion of his stomach was simply obliterated, torn apart by the force of the weapon. Parts of the shells are literally sticking out of his back and front, embedded deep in his body. Indeed, a few of them have even found their way into his skull.

     He also has his own arm tucked under his severed shoulder, which is all kinds of disturbing.

     "You should yield," Kojirou observes after a long moment, flicking Reiji's blood off the cracked blade, "Or you will probably die."

     Kojirou shoulders the sword with a delighted look on his face. "I would rather not kill you, since you've put me in the best mood I've been in in a very long time. Many of the people I've fought have been unwilling to shoot to kill."

     "Or..." Kojirou offers, his eyes lighting, "We could finish this in one more strike. The next blow will destroy my sword no matter what happens...and it might claim your life. Probably one of your limbs."

     "So I'll leave it up to you," Kojirou observes, "What shall we do?"

Reiji Arisu has posed:
    Reiji bites his tongue as Monohoshizao is torn away. A shard of chipped bone comes along with it, flung uselessly to the ground. His arm is somehow simultaneously numb, sore, heavy and feeling as though it's not even there. This what happens to an otherwise ordinary man when blunt trauma compounds upon damaged bone and severed veins.

    For a moment, everything is silent. Grey smoke rises from Gold and Hollywood, shell casings litter the ground. Aside from the raging tornado of flame and steel and heaven only knows what else, there is only the sound of one man's exhausted, dogged breaths.

And then, the impossible. Impossible seems to be a word with as much meaning as this city's streetsigns, today.

    Kojirou Sasaki emerges from the fire, charred and missing most of his torso, one arm, and also, it seems, a good portion of his skin in general. Reiji stares at him with a tired eye. There's no fear in that gaze, nor is there surprise- save for a brief flicker when the swordsman emerges from the fire. Instead, there's just dreadful realization that it'll take him at least another set of cartriges to finally put this monster down.

But, it seems, he has another option.

    Reiji's breaths are heavy, but they come in the exact same rhythm he began at the onset of this duel. He watches, silently, for a moment, then two. Finally, he releases one more breath and quietly shuts that eye. "You're a real bitch to take down, aren't you?" Reiji asks, sighing more than anything else, "Probably wouldn't even stay dead even if I killed you."

    He rises from his crouch, then, slinging his weapons one by one back into their sheathes. He's battered, bruised, bleeding profusely from several wounds, but still he manages to stand on his own two feet. "I screwed up," Reiji admits, "I had thought I'd just be fighting a swordsman today. But that's not quite accurate, is it?"

    His eye opens, peering pointedly at the grotesque display of supernatural resilience standing before him, "You're more than just a master swordsman. Far more." With another sigh, he slings his weapon rack over one shoulder, "If I fought any more now, there would be no point. I'd break a sword, but you could get a new one."

    "Next time," he says, inclining his head as he pulls a cigarette from one of his pockets. It begins to glow on one end as he brings its tip into contact with a passing stream of fire-wind. Reiji takes a long draw from it, releasing a thin cloud of grey-blue smoke as he exhales, "I won't make the same mistake twice."

Fake Avenger (662) has posed:
     "That's very perceptive," Kojirou agrees cheerfully as he sheathes Monohoshi Zao. The sheathe seems to be the one thing that *hasn't* taken a pounding today. His flesh, his skin, his body, his arm, his sword - but the sheathe is just fine. Mostly. It fits, anyway, and that's all a sheathe realy needs to do, no matter how firmly Miyamoto Musashi might disagree.

     And then he just...kind of vanishes. The tattoos seemed to writhe for a brief instant before Kojirou simply ceases being present. His aura, his fighting spirit - everything just disappears. If he's still present, he's not showing it. As suddenly as he arrived, Kojirou Sasaki leaves.

     He doesn't seem the type to hang around.