JULY 23rd, 2014.
Just before Keith’s two blades impact against Seth’s forearm, a large panel of armor slides down it, clashing against them.
“Oh?!”
Keith tilts the blades down, scraping the edges at an angle as the sword makes its way past the newly formed armor and toward Seth’s waist. Before they can impact and cut through him, he grabs them with his other hand, now armored and clawed. They struggle to cut through the hard, almost scaly armor, and Keith keeps pushing the sword further against it.
“Yeah… now… this is a flame!”
He releases the pressure of his sword, stepping back with it held to his side as he opens his arms wide, encouraging Seth to go even further.
“Burn! Burn even brighter! Bright enough to blind anyone who sees it!”
He places the last segment of his right index finger underneath the runed bandages across his left arm, pulling against one wrapping of them as they begin to unravel, splaying like ribbons around his arm. As he speaks, Seth slumps over, his stance widening to maintain his balance. The spines continue to jut out of his back, as the rest of the armor plating covers his body and reforms his figure.
“Show me! I want to see it! That threshold, the roaring of your soul! Honō no…” Keith begins to say, reciting a thread of words in Japanese.
“...Hōtai! Ichi!”
As he finishes yelling out the last word, the bandages sprawled around his left arm whip themselves toward the sword, wrapping around the hilt tightly as he relinquishes his grip on it. They reveal seared, heavily burnt darkened scars throughout Keith's arm. As the bandages continue to unravel, a circle of runes and symbols on the thickest part of Keith’s forearm, akin to something like a summoning circle, shows itself. In the middle, the bandages have no end as they seemingly continuously generate from the circle, finally stopping as the dropping sword stops, hanging mid-air off of his arm. At the same time he did this, Seth had finished his transformation as the upper form of his head clasped its teeth against the lower jaw. The eight eyes opened, all searching independently of one another for just a moment, before settling on the man in front of them.
“Ah… there it is… There’s your raging flame.”
He takes the hanging bandage in his hand, gripping it and swinging with his wrists as he turns the sword into a medium to long-ranged weapon… the same concept as a chained blade, but the bandages are much thinner and offer less resistance than chains would. Keith shows off a wide smile, taking off his glasses with his free hand to reveal his piercing green eyes, looking absurdly satisfied.
“Not bad, kid! Not bad at all! But…”
He swings the bandages in front of him, making a horizontal “8”-shaped pattern that Seth stares at, wondering how to break through his newfound defense.
“...You won’t surpass me like that.”
As Keith ends his ultimatum, Seth rushes forward with an open palm, attempting to get in close with his clawed fingers. Keith puts his free hand against the bandage slack above his arm, abruptly pulling it before swinging his other arm all the way behind him, with the sword following to slice Seth’s head off if he had dodged any later. Seth animalistically grunts at the sudden attack, not knowing how Keith could’ve pulled that off. It shouldn’t be possible to finely control something that stretches to that length.
“What the hell…?!” Seth exclaims, ‘his’ eyes staring up at the bandages.
But Keith, unfazed, pulls them back with his free hand as he catches his sword with the other.
“Pneuma isn’t just something a human uses… Spirits have souls too. They burn just as bright as ours.”
He throws the sword up as Seth stares, dumbfounded. Though he’s much more powerful while synchronized, he isn’t stupid enough to blindly rush something with that amount of mobility.
As he watches the bandages connected to the sword suddenly turn into sharp angles as if they were made of a hard, sturdy material, creating a labyrinth of directions the sword follows above Keith’s head, he realizes his caution was well-earned.
“While your synchronization with Yggdrasil’s one hell of an impressive feat…” he says, as the bandages go limp above him and the sword falls back into his preferred hand, “...Your souls have no harmony. They blaze against each other, sure. I’ll give you that…”
Launching the sword forward, Seth hadn’t anticipated the speed of it as he raised his forearms and stepped backward to evade the bandages seeking to capture him. Despite his quick reaction time, he fails, and they catch up to him quicker than he can move.
Dammit, these bandages!
Keith follows behind shortly after, striking his right palm against the bottom of the sword’s hilt, launching it forward as both blades sink halfway into Seth’s side. He monstrously groans in pain, opening his jaw to reveal his tongue as his eyes widen, but before he can grab the hilt, Keith tightens the bandages and pulls it back out of him.
“...But even just using these, you’re no match. If you fight something, or someone, that can exploit your weaknesses…”
Before the blade can fully return to Keith, he picks his right leg up, rotating and picking up momentum in a circle, before fully extending it and kicking the bottom of the hilt forward with his heel. It flies off past Seth to his right, as Keith tugs on the bandages with his arm, flinging it backward. The recoil makes the sword swing around Seth, wrapping him up in bandages and constricting him as the layers continue to pile on.
“...Then your flame’s going to die out real fast.”
Seth lowers his head, closing all eight of his eyes as the sword continues to swing around his form.
Are you finally going to get serious?
I’m trying to concentrate.
You are capable of more than this, at least.
Listening to the sound of the binding cloth cutting through the air, Seth finally opens his eyes and his jaw, chomping forward and catching the bandages between his teeth.
Keith chuckles, letting the bandages have their slack tampered with. He takes on a confident, almost too confident smirk, acting like he knows he’s far above Seth.
“Kid, you aren’t biting through those. They’re strengthened by—”
The sound of clashing teeth rings through the arena as Seth rips through the bandage between his teeth, and the rune it contained begins to fade from the cloth. Keith’s eyes widen in surprise as Seth yells, clawing at the other bandages, loosening their hold on him.
“Huh. Would you look at that… maybe your fire’s a little different.”
Seth doesn’t manage to rip through the other bandages, but he does manage to loosen them enough to pull them off. As soon as he does, he rushes through them, barreling right at Keith.
Keith, amused, lets Seth reach him before placing a hand on his shoulder and vaulting over the top of him, his legs fully bent while he launches forward.
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“You nimble…!”
“The only thing you do is rush… put some more care behind it! Do you even know?!”
Keith picks up his sword off the ground with a crazed, excited look in his eyes, as the bandages dance throughout the air in response to his arm’s commands.
He’s enjoying this far too much for Seth’s comfort.
“Being stronger than your opponent? That doesn’t matter!” he yells, slamming his arms forward to emphasize his point while widely opening his jaw as he speaks.
“Whether you’re weak, whether you’re strong… kicking ass is a form of art! And right now…?!”
He brings his sword into his chest, angled low to his left as he grips the hilt with two hands, his movements causing the bandages to spiral around him up into the air.
“You’re nothing but an empty canvas! You think you’re even an ‘artist’?! Sit your ass down, junior…”
He slips his index finger under his left hand’s bandages, still holding the sword with both as he loosens the tight hold they have on his arm. They slowly unravel, cascading to the floor as more burnt scars are revealed. He widens his stance, lowering his upper body down as he bends his legs. Even with just that, Seth could tell he was a master at sword-fighting.
It was unconventional, but it had no discernable flaws. And even if it did, he was too inexperienced to be able to tell. Keith widely opens his mouth, yelling his next words out.
“...And let me paint my soul over yours! NI! AOI!”
Less than a moment after the final word rang into the room with a boom, the bandages surrounding him, even the ones wrapped around his sword, burst into bright blue flames covering every inch of the cloth. They crackled as the hottest area of the fire burned white-hot, covering the room in a faint blueish glow. As he moved his arms, the blue dragon of fire surrounding him followed suit, obeying every movement his body offered. Keith leaned forward on his right leg, the one closest to Seth, and launched forward off of his back foot, bringing the sword in for a diagonal slice.
MOVE!
Yggdrasil’s sudden and urgent exclamation forces Seth’s body to instinctively jump out of the way, barely missing the sword being brought down upon his silhouette. Replacing it was Keith’s excited, hungry eyes, open wide out of satisfaction.
“Good! Again!”
Keith taunted Seth as they danced back and forth, weaving through ribbons of azure flame floating between them both, as blades clashed against armor and sparks flew, but they were outshined by the blaze.
“Again, my pupil! Again!”
Barely dodging each strike, each slice, each thrust, each string of flame, Seth used every bit of agility he had at his disposal, with only small chunks of armor being cut off during close calls. They would regenerate moderately quickly, though he was vulnerable in the places they were absent from for the amount of time it took to heal. He used his hands to push the sides of the blades away whenever possible, not worried about shallow cuts with the amount of pressure that Keith was putting on him. But the longer they fought, the better Keith got.
“That’s it! Burn! Burn your soul until it’s ash, and then burn it even more!” he yells, bringing the sword down close to Seth’s head as he continues to just barely dodge. The swings get even more erratic and fast-paced as he continues to try and cut into Seth, barely missing and chipping small pieces of his armor off each time.
“Douse it in more gasoline, pull more fuel out of your heart! This passion, it’s what makes life worth living!”
He brings his sword down, then rotates the hilt in his hands and brings it up again, over and over again while the heat begins to affect Seth’s reaction time. The blades start chipping larger and larger pieces of armor off as Keith never relents, never tires.
“Find the harmony of your own flame, and then stomp on mine! Overpower my soul; show me which one of us understands more than the other!”
Again, and again, and again. Chipping, and chipping, and chipping, until small cracks begin to show in Seth’s armor. Similar to the recesses around his form, an aqua-green light shines through them underneath, visible from the outside.
“How much happiness have you felt?! Despair?! Show me! I want to know even more! What passions exist in this world?! What have you seen that I haven’t?! How do you clench those memories in your fist, and continue to fight?!”
Happiness…? Despair…? The memories I have…? Does this guy ever just… SHUT UP?!
Again, and again, and again. An endless dance between two souls, burning as bright as they can for their own, individual reasons.
“I have to know! This world isn’t interesting if you just stay ignorant! You have to live, to experience all those extremes! So don’t let me end your story here, SETH!”
Seth dodges a thrust forward from his blade, taking a handful of bandages and tightly gripping them as they burn into the alien-like flesh behind the armor, yelling as he does.
“My ‘story’?! Don’t give me that crap…! My life…”
He pulls the bandages forward, biting into them as the flame burns across his armored head, scorching it.
“...DOESN’T EXIST FOR YOUR DAMN ENTERTAINMENT!”
He rips his neck backward, tilting off to the left as he pulls Keith forward with the bandages, shrouding him in the fire of his own making as he throws a punch, putting his entire torso into it. Keith brings down his sword in front of him, placing his palm behind it as he struggles against the force of it impacting the face of the outermost blade. It knocks him back as he slides backward, cutting his sword through the floor and pressing the hardened bandages against it to stop his momentum before his back hits the wall.
Seth pants as he falls to his knees, finally having fought off the insane force of nature that was that man. As he falls, all of the sand in the top half of the hourglass embedded into his armored forehead reaches the bottom half, and the panels layered across his body begin to rescind from where they came. Keith, catching his breath, wipes his chin off with the back of his right hand.
“Hah… I get it now… You burn the brightest when you’re proving why you’re alive.”
He brings his sheath over his shoulder, sliding the tachi inside before throwing it back over, with a wide, proud grin painted on his face.
“That was a damn good blaze, junior.”
As the rest of the plates retreat behind the tattered back of Seth’s dress shirt, he sighs in relief.
“I’m just… glad that’s over.”
Keith chuckles at his response, walking over to grab his hand— which Seth reluctantly agrees to— and pull him up off the ground.
Still, I could’ve sworn I got stabbed earlier…?
Seth feels over the lower right side of his abdomen with his free hand, searching for any sign of injury.
There’s no wound, let alone blood.
Who cares? This signer was much more fun than that Stain guy.
Vain?
Does it matter?
Interrupting Seth’s genuine questioning of what Yggdrasil asked, was Kat holding two bags of packaged food as the door to the training room opened. When she realized that the two inside had reduced it to a cut-up, scorched, damaged mess, her eyebrow raised and twitched in annoyance.
“Are you two idiots done here?”
Keith grabs the hand that Seth offered him by his wrist, involuntarily raising it to wave for the both of them.
“Hey, Kat!” he says, more casually than he acted before or even when he burst into Liam’s room. Seth decides to attribute that to the fact that they were both tired. “We just finished kicking each other’s asses, it was fun! You should’ve joined us!”
Kat raises her eyebrow again in a mix of total disbelief and bewilderment.
“Say something stupid like that again and I’m tossing your food.”
Keith stayed silent, though the smile on his face didn’t leave him, even if his expression screamed, ‘No, please don’t do that’.
. . . . .
After they all finished lunch— which was just them standing around and eating as Kat judgmentally stared at them— she pulled Seth away from Keith’s clutches as he said something about calling for repairs, and started to head toward the cafeteria.
“Seriously… I can’t stand that guy,” she muttered, evidently annoyed just from sticking around him for a few minutes.
Ignoring how hard you were giggling when he dragged me there…
Seth puts his hand behind his head, awkwardly scratching his hair.
“Yeah… he’s… a lot.”
“Yeah… well, bad news: your day isn’t over yet.”
Seth’s head cocks, turned toward her, raising an eyebrow at her statement.
“What do you mean?”
She mischievously grins at him, pointing her index finger off to the front. They’re walking toward the cafeteria, Seth picked up that much at least.
“Liam said you’ll be the one looking after the new recruit.”
“Huh? I’m not even experienced—”
“That’s what I said,” Kat cuts him off, sarcastically shrugging, “But he wouldn’t let up. He said, ‘No, no! She asked for him!’, whatever that means. So… good luck with that.”
Seth stares forward as he feels uncomfortable, not knowing who could know him that doesn’t already work here at TWR, at this point.
Why do I have an uneasy feeling…?
And that feeling turned out to be correct, but not in the way he anticipated.