Makhus had spent the day in a state of self-induced frustration. He used every spare moment he had to practice out back, to polish his swordsmanship and attempt Fog-breathing.
Hours upon hours of effort, yet no success. Not even a wisp.
Then, a commotion - a distant shout, a blood curdling cry for help of the sort he would’ve ignored on any day other than this. There came another, a little closer this time. It was none of his business, an occurrence that was to be expected at a tumultuous time such as this - but something deep inside wouldn’t let him leave it be.
On this evening, in the wake of the approaching storm, Makhus felt an uncharacteristic sense of motivation. He was no fool, he knew to obfuscate his identity if he were to do something like this; thus, he took the emergency gas mask from the laboratory before he left, sweeping up his hair as he strapped it on so it would seal properly.
War-knife at his side and a desire to seek out combat in his heart, Makhus slipped into the back alley right next to Riverside Remedies to begin prowling the elaborate network of narrow alleys that all wove throughout the old city. Wordless yells and panicked footsteps occasionally broke the silence of night, reverberating all throughout and guiding his pursuit.
A small part of him hoped the belligerents to be locust-men that he might have an easy justification to exercise violence, but he knew it to be utterly unreasonable. When at last he turned that fateful corner from beyond which he heard two sets of rushing footsteps, he found himself faced with the exact opposite of what he’d expected.
All he could discern of the one being pursued was their body shape and skin tone, these being a willowy frame in a dress and a distinctly Grekurian bronze tone respectively. She hesitated at the sight of him, only to run past a moment later. The Pursuer that now came to a dead stop before him was, on the other hand, far more familiar.
He was damn-near a mirror image of Makhus - his skin was snow-white, his raven-black hair tied into a tall ponytail, and he wore the distinct martial-arts uniform emblematic of a now-extinct Fog-breather family. The uniform itself was just a wide-sleeved shirt and loose trousers that were tied down at the ankles, but it was abnormal enough to be recognizable.
In the pursuer’s hand, there gleamed a long sabre with an oval guard, and despite his calm facial expression his blue eyes glimmered with a murderous rage. At first, his stare followed the escaping woman. Then, it snapped to Makhus.
“What’re you waiting for, killer?” he asked with a voice soft as silk and as venomous as arsenic. “Aren’t you out here to purify our city, just as I? If we don’t go after the foreigner, she’ll get away.”
There was not a splinter of verisimilitude to his false line of questioning - the Pursuer’s well-trained gaze picked apart Makhus’s tense stance in moments, he knew the swordsman-alchemist wouldn’t let him continue his pursuit. With a sharp breath in, his face twisted into a snarling grin and Fog poured between his gritted teeth.
“Which family did you study under, before the draft?” came another question, the Pursuer slowly approaching. When he gave no answer, the last vestiges of false benevolence vanished from the man’s face.
“It doesn’t matter,” he growled. “You’re just another race traitor.”
The Pursuer surged forward, trailing Fog as he lunged at Makhus with a straightforward slash.
A step to the left, a thrust past the Pursuer’s blade. Makhus felt his sword stick - the Pursuer had grabbed the blade, and with a sharp yank, pulled Makhus towards him in an attempt to get him to impale himself.
It was dishonorable, it wasn’t what he’d been taught, but Makhus defended himself with a forceful front kick to his opponent’s gut. The Pursuer let go, stepping back with a wheezing exhalation of Fog.
Before he could inhale again, Makhus stepped forward and placed a shallow cut across his chest. A grave insult to his skill, a wordless declaration of, “I consider myself so much better than you that I won’t even take the opportunity for a killing blow.”
Combined with the dishonorable strike he’d used to get this opportunity, it was like he’d just spat in the Pursuer’s face. In reality, Makhus had used the brief moment to mutter a technique under his breath, “S.S.S.S. Arts: Sensory Enhancement!”
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Invoking it to its fullest potential he felt his eyes dilating, his ears filling with ambient noise, the air currents moving past him, all the while his body’s reserves of Rubedo burned away to fuel it. He had perhaps half a minute at most before he made himself fall unconscious - an eternity in a swordfight.
A twitch of the eye, a sharp inhalation, a sudden assault of strikes. Makhus could feel and see them coming, but he lacked the inhuman speed bestowed by Fog-breathing. He blocked some, dodged others, backpedaling through the alleyway as he watched for any gap in the Pursuer’s savage assault. With his senses entirely overtaken by sensory overload and his reflexes doing the vast majority of the work while he looked out for an opportunity to break the pattern of reflexive defense, Makhus had brief moments here and there to analyze his opponent’s combat style. This was familiar, it was a combat style he recognized - one of the styles taught by a family he’d once aspired to join, one named after the pseudonym of its enigmatic founder.
The Black Horse Family.
He’d never been talented or of high enough birth to even have a hope at joining them, and so his spiteful younger self chose to join their rivals, the Sanger Family. Where the Black Horse Family taught myriad methods of overwhelming an opponent and breaking any guard, the Sanger family taught defense and counter-attack specifically geared to counter such assaults.
Makhus hadn’t paid attention in these lessons. His defense was lacking, instead fuelled by the very technique he had come up with on his own for the sole purpose of passing examinations without needing to learn proper form - Sensory Enhancement. Even his personal Arts were a bastardization of the Sanger Family’s teachings.
Where the Sanger Family taught “Soul Sword Arts” and thus caused most of their students to name their techniques as such, Makhus’s younger self had decided he was better than that. Out of youthful defiance of authority, he’d given his techniques a ridiculous name; a name he hadn’t changed so that it would always remind him of all the things he wanted to do and all the things he’d wished to be.
This small infraction had been the very thing that resulted in his expulsion from the Sanger Family, long before he’d been drafted.
Unfortunately for Makhus, there were no gaps in the Pursuer’s assault. When one slash ended, there was only a brief exhalation of Fog and a flash of light as he burned some of the arcane substance to nullify the remaining kinetic energy and transition to another swing instantaneously. Unlike the Pursuer, Makhus couldn’t just take a breath to replenish his reserves, he was running on borrowed time. Fifteen seconds left. Fourteen. Thirteen.
“Come on! Fight back, you filthy fuckin’ Grek-lover!” the Pursuer laughed. That maddening, barking noise served to spark the powder-keg of frustration in his heart, and Makhus made a decision. It didn’t matter if he got hurt, or even killed - he wanted this bastard dead.
Makhus sucked a breath in through his mask, delivering another front kick to the Pursuer’s chest in favor of blocking a strike. The sabre’s razor-honed edge sank into his left shoulder, severing tendons and musculature as it was dragged by its owner’s backstep. Pain shot through his entire being, only to be washed away by an intoxicating burn as the inside of his gas-mask filled with Fog. Somehow, it didn’t obstruct his vision.
As he stepped forward and readied himself to riposte the Pursuer’s next strike, Makhus felt his perception of time slowing. The world came to a near-halt, he could see the individual muscles in the Pursuer’s arm contracting, he could see a dozen ephemeral outlines of potential attack paths that his saber could trace. With every passing moment these dozen paths became half a dozen, and half a dozen became one, the possibilities of the Pursuer's attack narrowing.
Knowing this to be the birth of a technique that would either save his life or be his last, Makhus chose to name it something his hot-blooded younger self would like. With a roar so loud it could be clearly heard even through the gas mask, he exhaled every bit of Fog in his lungs and lashed out with a strike that was faster than even he could see.
A strike that made his tarnished, chipped War-knife gleam brighter than the most opulent of blades.
“Soul-Sword-Single-Strike: Evil-cleaving Slash!”
The Pursuer’s blade clattered to the ground, his sword arm severed at the elbow. His head soon followed, sliding off his stump neck as his blood fountained upward.
In the final six seconds of his life, the beheaded Pursuer laughed a voiceless, breathless gurgle, his face frozen in a grin of surprised amusement.
Sheathing his War-knife, Makhus took another breath of Fog and channeled a Purgation Arts technique he had once needed outside assistance to perform, for it burned Fog to fuel itself. It would’ve been what carried him to a career of success and eventual execution of a war criminal, had he learned Fog-breathing during his time in the military.
Now, it was what would save him from exsanguination.
“Purgation Arts: Instant Coagulation,” he murmured into his mask as he dug the fingers of his right hand into his open wound. Pins and needles thrummed through his hand, and he felt the flow of blood staunching. Slowly, ever so slowly, he pulled his fingers free, repeating the technique three more times until his wound was fully sealed.
When he departed the place of his suicidal endeavor, he took nothing and did nothing, leaving no evidence beyond the body of a murdered martial artist that wouldn’t be found until it began to stink.
The next morning, Sigmund found him unconscious in the bathtub, the water muddied by blood and the tub surrounded by six empty seal-bottles. He was still wearing the gas mask.
Sigmund hoisted his friend out of the ice-cold water, put him in bed, and asked no questions, running the store for most of the day on his own.