Location: Unknown [Space Time Disturbance Detected]
Last GPS Reading: North Sector - Training Field Septa
Last Recorded Time: 1402
Warning: Chronal Dilation Detected
User: Itsuki Homura
[Assessment: Anomalous Brain Activity]
Where am I? No, better question. Who am I? What am I? There was a pause, a moment to navigate the mire of muddled thoughts. Finally, his name revealed itself. The word came like a drop of water returning to the ocean, rippling in a cascade of waves that spread, then stirred, and churned into an unforgiving maelstrom. Itsuki. My name is Itsuki. And this is.. My mind?
He wasn’t sure if that was the right word. He turned to his sensations, and felt the weightlessness across his body, like he was in a zero g environment with nothing weighing him down, or up. He wasn’t falling, he had jumped out of enough dropships to know the difference by now, because this.. This was.. It was.. Peaceful.. It was.. Calming.. There was no rush of wind in his ears.. It was empty, empty space, empty air. Nothing here could disturb him, nothing for him to do, nothing at all.. Nothing..
Just nothing.
For the first time, in what he thought was a long arduous while, he found himself desiring this state of being. To not.. Need to worry.. Or care.. Or be anything.. Or be alive.
But..
The mission.. Yes.. The Mission.. I have to complete.. The mission.
It was coming back to him, the fragments of memory he had stored and then forgotten, to then only be pieced back together when he needed them. They gave him knowledge, gave him strength, and stoked the fire in his lost heart. His eyes opened, and the pitch black of the void greeted him. He still had no idea where he was.
A heartbeat that ran from deep in his chest to up to his head broke the undisturbed veil of bleakness. The edges of his vision blurred as colors threaded in like an untangling of cut strings. The clink of glass shards assembling themselves, and the shifting of the grains of sand on a beach, filled his senses with familiar scenes coming into light. He was remembering the knowledge he had kept at arm’s length.. The inevitability. The horrible, tragic, inevitability of what he had seen, and knew could come to be.
A screen of framed visages appeared, a scene of war playing out like a movie.
“Go, Go, Go!” An urging voice shouted over the thrum of war. “Get to the shelters! Hurry!”
Under a gray sky, bombs fell, bones broke, blood sprayed, bodies fell limp, and all was being buried in a sickeningly black dirt. In the face of it all, men and women charged upon an endless field of carnage.
“We need to push forward!” Said another man, this one with wolf-like features. “Come on! We can..” His words fell short as his head split open. A thorned claw pierced and spilled his brains, its matter joining the bloodied ground. The body fell, and something enormous loomed closer to prey upon the little humans in its path.
“No! Dad!” Shouted a young girl, her fiery eyes a flood with tears and canines bared in anger. “Damnit! Damnit! Damnit!” She seeked revenge, her claws igniting in black hellfire.
“Don’t! We need to run.” Said an older woman, “Sinder! You need to calm down and..” Alarm crossed her features as she pulled on the girl’s arm and threw her out of the way. An oncoming horde of beasts the size of several enormous boulders trampled without care. The woman was swept away, lost, her arm sinking under the thundering wake of bodies.
Itsuki reached out, his hand piercing the scene of disaster and calamity. His urge to join the battle gripped him. But all he had done was block the image. He could do nothing, he could only watch as Sinder cried over the corpses of her mother and father. A cruel fate, a fate that was never supposed to happen, and didn’t happen.
No.. This isn’t real. Itsuki shook himself, denying it. Another drop of long forgotten knowledge fell into his ocean of memories, and he realized the grim truth. It was real, or it will be, or could be.
“Do you remember?” Said a calm voice beside his ear. “You've seen this before, through me and my power. You asked for my help, and I gave it to you. I gave it to all of you.”
Itsuki didn’t need to turn to see who it was. The memory of this person’s face was already locking itself into place, so he already knew. The man’s closed eyes in that hood of his, the sliver of golden hair revealed from under his hood, and the golden colored book clutched to his chest.
image [https://i.postimg.cc/QCx0dfC4/1719529126405.jpg]
“Yes,” Itsuki said. “I remember, I always remember. It’s no wonder I locked this all away.. I.. I would’ve.. Gone insane.. Every day would’ve been a living nightmare.”
“Do you know the other reason why?” Asked the voice.
“I do,” Itsuki paused, then sighed as he muttered, “But every day I feel as if nothing changes.” He moved on, he wasn’t going to go down that dark line of thought, even if deep down he wanted to, to take the path he and friends had believed was right. “So? Do you have anything to say?” He asked.
“Are you proud?”
“Of who?”
“Sinder, what do you think of her?”
Itsuki rolled his eyes. “Well, she’s pushed me this far, of course I would be proud of her.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Well, what did you mean?” Itsuki said in a rush. “In any case, can we move on? It’s coming back to me now, I have things to do and this is my head we’re in. This is also my fight.. So don’t butt in.”
The voice went silent. Itsuki turned to the images of memories floating around which were like frame pictures spread in a galaxy of stars. He had activated one of his abilities derived from his Perfect Memory ability. The human mind could only store so much in one lifetime, in his case he could store an unlimited amount, making his own consciousness his best asset as an explorer. There was an issue though.
Having too many memories would tax any person. If Itsuki let every moment of memory fill the surface layers of his mind, he’d go mad, insane, and drown in an ever-deepening pool of consciousness. To fix this, he stored part of it away and only brought the needed bits of information out when he needed to. His initial confusion was a side effect of using the ability, since all abilities had their drawbacks.
Pushing past the discomfort, many more memories flashed in front of him arrayed in boxed frames. Some of the past, some of the present, and some of potential future surmised through.. External help. Itsuki’s gaze focused on all the figures of Sinder, from the moments of her youth to the most recent recordings of her escapades as a top explorer.
He analyzed the relevant memories, taking down the details of her abilities, strengths, weaknesses, flaws, and lines of thinking. One frame of Sinder, a somewhat older visage of what Itsuki knew her to be at present, was wiping the tears from her eyes. Accepting a hand up, she went on ahead and joined in to continue the fight, to continue the legacy of her family, on a battlefield that had yet to be recorded in the history of the real world.
This was fiction but was real enough for Itsuki. She fought fiercely, slashed down with claws wreathed in fire, with unparalleled agility, and fervent vengeance in her eyes. Others–explorers, real explorers–fought side by side with her, pioneering and securing the future of humankind. They bellowed war cries of hope and victory, and the battle seemed close, too close. Itsuki could tell what was coming next.
Desperation.
“On your left!”
“Arielle, Cover me.”
“Watch out, we got a big one coming right behind us!”
“Take cover!
“Haruka! Get over here!”
“I’m cut off! Go on without me!”
“No, we can make it!”
“We can’t leave her!”
“No! No! NO!”
A burst of light overtook the sky as the recollection turned to static for a few seconds. The picture cleared as a familiar mushroom cloud overtook the air. A nuclear explosion, Itsuki grimly noted. The landscape, once crowded with clashing life, was now nothing but a hellscape of ash, blood, and death.
Laid splayed out in pieces were people Itsuki had known. All of this was fake, but real to him. Among the carnage, Sinder gazed up to the bleak gray sky with lifeless eyes. The lower half of her had been torn away and all that remained was a grotesque display. Her once brilliant flaming tail was snuffed out and in tatters, laying like a piece of junk amongst an ever-growing pile of debris.
They were all so young.
Itsuki looked for Arielle within the scene, and found only a lock of her blonde hair, its vibrant color stained with soot and lacking its past luster. He found Haruka’s antlers buried in ash, Ikki’s hand missing from his body, and so many more he recognized.
“This is the future I have foreseen at your request,” The voice behind him said, flicking through what he could tell was a book by the distinct sound of flipping pages. “A terrible future. This time, or well, the time before, you asked me what Sinder would be like at her strongest. And this is the result. A world of tribulations hardens a warrior, even still, she could not overcome and do what was needed to be done alone in this future. This was the result.. The world fell to ruin, the monsters won, and all humanity is.. Lost.. in a way.”
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As the voice spoke, the scenery moved again, zooming out to show the visages of cheering humans standing atop the remains. This should’ve brought a smile to Itsuki. Sinder’s sacrifice, and the sacrifice of the others who died, had not been in vain. Yet his brow furrowed at how these humans jumped with glee, faces full of pride as they relished in their jeering of the dead.
Freaks. Mongrel. Degenerates. Worthless Ingrates. We won the war, not you.
Others, with fanatical smiles and garbed in religious hood, raised bloodied pikes with their fellow man strewn upon them. Humanity has really died, Itsuki thought, they all.. Died. And this is what’s left.
Richard, strung up on a cross, his spine pierced from bottom to top, screamed in bloodied pain. Below, the so-called humans torturing him cackled with an overwhelmed laughter.
Sickening. If Itsuki had control of his lips, he would’ve screamed. Sickening, Sickening, Sickening.
These humans, or what he could only say were human-shaped monsters, continued their clamor. They sang of a victory that wasn't theirs and had instead taken it out from under the real victors. These people were vultures, harbingers of false beliefs, illogical radicals, irrational racists, fascist.. The scum of the earth.
Itsuki’s eyes, disgusted by their delight in their undeserved pride and arrogance, turned cold and hollow as he saw them surround chained individuals. All of them licked their lips with ill intent, they’re eyes leering the half naked forms of.. the innocent.
Stella, knelt down in chains, was beaten, stoned, and spat on like garbage. Then he saw Shisuki. For a moment, relief welled in him to see her beautiful aqua colored eye. Then he realized, Eye, singular. His hope dropped off a cliff the next second. Her body.. was violated, broken, used.. And..
He had to grit his teeth or he threatened to throw up. He pushed on, he had to see this, there was no other choice, these memories were linked for a reason.
Monster, Thing, Filth, You are nothing but a tool! You explorers are nothing! You are weapons of war, meant to fight for us. You have no right because you are monsters, a threat, a liability. The people around hailed obscenities, eating it all up from one another, feeding each other's egos, believing that they had validity and divine right to humiliate and violate the sanctity of others.
Fucking Animals! Itsuki swallowed the vile taste in his throat. He imagined himself ripping them, all these horrendous people, to bloody pieces. He’d fill them with lead, burn them to cinders, and feed what was left to the pigs. It was rare that he got riled up, but when he did, he wasn’t idle or stoic anymore. He wanted one, and only one thing.
Kill them! I Must.. Kill them!
The silent rage inside him brewed, getting thicker as more and more of these so-called futures revealed themselves. He felt himself breaking into parts. Most of himself wanted to kill something, a second majority stayed calm and examined the battles and carnage, trying to foresee a way to destroy the enemy. The last scant few vestiges of his mind vowed a grim resolve to what he would do next.
“Are you finished?” Asked the voice behind him. “Will you go deeper?”
“No,” Itsuki replied. “I have enough for what I need.”
The voice seemingly let out a grunt of disapproval.
“Do you have something to say?” Itsuki asked, closing his eyes as he fell back to float in his imagined space of consciousness. “Because now would be the time.”
“And what would be the point?” The voice said, irked. “You’re going to lock this memory away when all is done, so why should I speak my mind?”
“It was only an offer.” Itsuki paused, then said, “Good bye.”
There was no reply. A wind whistled a gentle breeze across the back of his neck, and then the presence that had been behind him vanished from this void of imaginary space and time. Itsuki blinked, and he was in the real world now, though everything moved slowly.
The clouds above shifted slower than before, and most notable of all was how sluggishly Sinder was reacting as his hand tightened around her throat. There wasn’t a hint of fear in her. It was as if her face was frozen in time, in the moments before he had closed in.
And so it begins. Itsuki thought.
Right now, core energy permeated every cell in his brain, overcharging the rate of incoming and outcoming signals to an unbelievable rate. In conjunction, he allowed the unconscious parts of his mind to have full control over his body to handle the new load of memories and actions while the conscious part of him was now the passenger. While dangerous to let go of the reins of his own body, his reaction time and other physical abilities were pushed to their effective maximum.
Now, show me what you can do, Sinder.. And don’t disappoint me.. Itsuki held his breath, wondering if he should say what else was on his mind. He whispered, knowing no one would hear what he’d say in his thoughts. And.. if you could.. Please.. Try and kill me.
***
“I.. Itsuki,” Sinder coughed, choking out his name. “Stop.. S-Stop.”
Nothing. No reply, no response, not even a reaction. Itsuki's eyes only shone with those slit silver colored irises. Tighter and tighter, his hand closed around her neck. She was a lot taller than him, yet now he pulled her down to her knees and towered over her imposingly. She wrenched at his arm, trying to tear loose a finger, but his grip was like iron.
Sinder saw the silver energy waver off of him and noticed the density of power growing inside him. Recognizing what this meant, she understood Itsuki was going all out and that this wasn’t going to go as easy as it had before. Was he testing her?
Maybe? She thought. He's done it before. And he never was subtle about these kinds of things. Screw it. If I don't fight back, I’m going to pass out.
Sinder focused, letting her core energy seep into every part of her body. The tips of her long reddish-brown hair glowed an amber red as her body transformed into flames that slipped from Itsuki’s fingers. In a bright explosion of flames that flung Itsuki back, Sinder reappeared at its center, attired in a lacey black, sleeveless leather top. The fires burned away her clothes, revealing her delicate skin clasped by the scant laces of her stockings that hugged her thighs and around her wide waist. Replacing her red heeled shoes, an obsidian black set of high heels boots clinked as she stepped.
image [https://i.postimg.cc/26x0YskL/1704970075210.jpg]
She flourished her hair, her fingers brushed flecks of dazzling flame into the air as the brown hue of her locks became dyed a fiery red. Manifested armor. Sinder was sure she was going to need hers for this fight. It wasn’t armor per say, but she could feel the connection with her abilities heighten. As the brilliance of the flames in her eyes grew, Itsuki silently backed off, unfazed, yet affected by her imposing power.
“Awaken!” Sinder called, raising her hand as if commanding an army. “We live for the Hunt!”
Circles of flames shaped across the ground. Claws and fangs reached out from the centers as ashen black hounds arose from plumes of smoke. Without commands, they roared magmatic gouts of flame at Itsuki. Landing direct hits, the flames burst into smolders of smoke. Sinder tasted satisfaction for a moment, then tempered it with patience.
Not letting down their guard, she and her hounds waited with baited breath. The hounds growled; their maws full of sharp burning teeth. Of the 16 she had summoned, the one at the front suddenly leapt into the smoke. Sinder didn’t so much as see but smell it coming. The metallic odor was uncannily familiar. A hand, gilded in silver, reached out from the smoke to grab and slam the leaping hound into the ground.
A loud snap resounded as Sinder felt her connection with it fade. The other hounds lunged, pacing around Itsuki on all fours, coordinating attacks as they clawed and bit at him piece by piece. Itsuki backhanded one that lunged too early and then threw it into another that was too slow to dodge. As he snapped one of their necks at an odd angle, it fell away and dissipated into black particles.
Just as Itsuki aimed for another, Sinder intercepted, giving her hounds time to reform their ranks, and to give some pay back. Manifesting her weapon, metallic claws formed at the tips of her fingers. Their metallic shine changed into an ignition of red heat, she slashed and stabbed a dance of arcs. The air sizzled in her wake, every molecule in their path combusting into a trail of fire.
Itsuki weaved between each lick of fire, his silver slitted eyes unblinkingly training on her every movement. It was creepy to say the least, and Sinder understood how his power worked. Even now, he was examining her, finding the weaknesses in her attacks, the flaws in her form, and identifying what he needed to look out for.
To him, she was as easy as reading a book, and the longer he read, the closer he came to beating her. Already, he effortlessly countered her, ducking under one of her claw sweeps to deliver a punch to her gut.
“Ugh.. What the?” The sudden jolt of pain that pushed into her stomach confused her. The aura she’d been putting up should’ve been able to counteract any physical attack Itsuki dealt out since her affinity was higher. That didn’t seem to be the case anymore.
As Itsuki swung in for another punch to her side, she caught a glimpse of what looked like silver fingerless gloves wrapped around each of his hands. She caught that metallic odor again; it was the same as that silver gun he had used earlier.
A second manifested weapon? Sinder didn’t have time to speculate on why he had two, she just needed to win. But that was easier said than done. Itsuki was moving before she could follow through. Every fake out she tried, he’d see past it and get off a punch.
Again, he went for her side, the core of her agility. The pain sent her gritting in pain. She bent down and swept low. Itsuki jumped up, and as unhinged as always, he pounded a kick that was followed by a back handed punch. No matter how much flame or claw she threw, he barreled closer and closer. Sinder made a trade, landing a slash at his side while he landed an upcut to the bottom of her chin.
The results were lopsided. Sinder staggered, her brain rattled, while Itsuki didn’t even let out a peep of pain from the bleeding wound in his side. Wait? A second of shock took her attention. Her eyes widened as she watched the wound close on its own. In seconds, the wound was gone. What was supposed to be a bleeding slash that hemorrhaged blood was instead a web of silver lines branching from where she had struck. Where did it go?
A strike from Itsuki threw her mind back into the fight. He clearly had no issue with punching a girl. Sinder felt the world spin as Itsuki hailed another and another. Sinder jerked her head back and leaped back in a flip away. Flicking her tail, a line of fire covered her escape.
Itsuki followed, rushing through the flames with his arms crossed against his chest as if he were a living battering ram. Sinder would have no rest. With red lips pursing in pain as a line of blood touched her chin, she landed then spun around on one foot to deal out a countering spin kick. The flame infused blow cracked the air like a whip creating a sonic boom that violently threw debris every which way.
The hit was dead on. Good as it was, Sinder’s face paled as the smoke cleared. Itsuki took it like a champ, stopping the quaking strike with his forearm up by the side of his head. For not even a second did his gaze falter or waver a single hair. He stepped in, grabbed her leg and threw her across the ground.
Sinder flipped right side up in the air and stabbed her claws into the dirt as she skidded to a stop. After wiping the blood from her nose, she hurriedly rolled as Itsuki brought his fist down on her. He buried it elbow deep. Sinder shuddered if he got too clean a hit on her.
Itsuki pulled his hand free and lurched into an instant sprint at her with astonishing speed. In retreat, Sinder maneuvered to get her position aligned with her hellhounds. Closing in from all sides they pounced, pouring gouts of flame from their mouths as others swiped at Itsuki.
A wolf’s claw came within an inch of reaching Itsuki’s throat before it was beaten and torn in half at the stomach. Itsuki turned his attention and began ripping into each one of them. Claws would’ve made it easy, but with only his hands? He snatched them from the air as if they were helpless lambs to the slaughter, throwing them aside like bags of weightless sand. Sinder grimaced at the sheer brutality of it all. She reasoned she could run, leave the battle and let him have the win. Abruptly, the strum of strings rang in her ears.
She cursed to herself after hearing the message left in her earpiece.
Oh, come on! Exasperated, Sinder dug deep for the hard fight ahead. She could either let Itsuki knock her out or stand and fight. In the end, she chose to stand and fight. She’d get an earful if she didn’t at least try, and deep down she wanted to get a few good hits in.