> I do not expect any man of the gladiocracy to place faith in words alone. Observe and understand, Thane. There are eighteen affinities given to us by the Creators. The notion that they were all created equal is a popular lie because it is easier to swallow than the truth: that this world is predicated on inequality. There are weak men, and there are strong men to rule them. The affinities go the same. Some are simple. Others bounded by rules, or menus, or options; things offered, not entrusted. True power is not something you can touch. It is an idea. A concept. This is why the Elemental is the strongest affinity.
>
> We are surrounded by the primal elements. To control them is the simplest power. It is to weave and unweave. Shape and reshape. Its only limit is the mind, and you possess one of the cleverest. Under my wing, you will come to understand the world around you down to the atomic level- every isotope, every lattice, every fold. You will understand why our people revere men like Mars as gods. And you will learn how to remind those men of a maxim they have long forgotten.
>
> -Champion Gami, then Rank 1 of Section G Major League
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I’m not sure when exactly it happened, but I knew I was losing Thane the moment he came back from that talk with Gami. Every detail of the day is still frozen in my head, down to the fresh snowflakes on Thane’s cape. The pattern his boots left in the white. The hushed admiration of the crowd draining from the stadium; the disdain of the village elders whose brightest children he’d just utterly embarrassed on the field of battle. A martial boy, seventeen and growing still, hair savage black and eyes a molten, magmatic gold. The bastard eagle flourishing beneath my father’s heroic wing.
Some would call Thane prideful. Others, aloof. At the time, I called him mine. Though that was a long time ago.
The winter tournament hosted in the villages is important for plenty of reasons, but none of them are terribly relevant to my situation now. Suffice to say, it’s a huge deal to win it, and an even huger deal to win as dominantly as Thane did that year. Technically, capital natives like him aren’t normally allowed to enter. Spending half his months out on the coast in school with me was enough to qualify him for entry in the eyes of most, but there’s some hardcore traditionalists who would never stand to let a child of the capital step into their most hallowed ground. Sponsoring Thane in spite of that cost Dad a lot of support that never came back.
Thane took first place with a perfect record. I went out in third, ahead of a few hundred other high schoolers. It was my first tournament ever. Most would consider that a pretty damn good placement, but not me. I didn’t have the kind of father who expected the world of me or would hold that failure over me as motivation, and somehow, that was an even worse motivation. He was so unbelievably proud of me for that loss. I hid it inside myself. Ashamed I couldn’t live up to his name, guilty that he was the type to heap genuine praise on me even when I hadn’t earned it. Introverted and a perfectionist; the worst combination for a girl who already spent all her time alone at home and could count her friends on one finger. It’s some irony that the latter still hasn’t changed.
After that tournament, I kept my prize cloak on a peg above my bedroom door until I came back two years later and took the win in full. Every top-four placement earns one of those prize cloaks, a trophy mantle fashioned from metallic colors of matching animals. Fourth earns bronze. Third silver, and second gold. First place is reserved platinum, the peerless color. And I remember the exact sheen of that dark metal it was that caught Thane’s eye when we stood on the field after the ending ceremonies, crowds draining from the arena around us. Across the snowfield, looming above our team’s coach, a titan whose shadow stretched for hulking meters beneath the still-twinkling spotlights.
Even when he was just a rising fighter in the major leagues, Gami wasn’t the kind of warrior that went easily missed. Huge wings like twin war banners, tail like a serpentine club dragging through the snow. Body a gargoyle visage of pure platinum metal with a simple faceless helm, over three meters of height, and all the implied malice of a loaded weapon with the safety off.
Back then, I had no idea how much he would eventually take from me. But I had a damn good idea of it.
Instincts, intuition- call it what you will, I knew I was looking at something evil that day, even if I didn’t exactly know why. People don’t use their JOYs to fashion themselves like Gami does if they’re interested in being liked. He only cares about being effective. His classes are geared solely to maximize synchronistic combat potential. His style is the anathema of my father’s famous showstopping flair. It’s soulless, calculated, and dominant. Powerful enough to be the weapon of a Champion who’s got the major league scared enough of fighting him that no one’s tried in an entire year.
If you asked me for an opinion on Gami, I’ll willingly admit he’s one of the best warriors of any Section, not just ours. But he’s not a Champion. Not in my eyes. There’s a hell of a lot more to being the leader of our fighting society than just being the strongest. Gami is a monster. A tyrant. Leading through fear and an iron hand rather than admiration. Just because the rules say that someone like him can sit on the throne doesn’t mean they’re right. But to prove otherwise, I’d have to be strong enough to show my belief is stronger than his reality. And that’s a task I don’t know if anyone can match, much less me. I’m not even twenty. Gami is a warlord who’s been fighting longer than I’ve been alive.
Still. Even the colossi have their cracks.
Everyone in the Section knows Gami’s classes: Elemental, Modd, and Guardian. Each one was picked with a specific purpose in mind. Modd is used to transform his entire human body into a nonhuman shape that I’m pretty sure is just a formless blob of metal, like a slime or an ooze. Never seen it, but I can make an educated guess. Guardian takes that goop body of metal exponentially multiplies its resilience. The bow that ties the two together and also functions as his main mode of combat is the Elemental class. One of the shaping classes, Elemental lets you choose one option from the vast list of things a JOY considers a unique element of the natural world and grants you a degree of free control over said element. Because of that, it’s also the only class that gets any benefit out of selecting multiple copies. Picking two specific elements can also give you access to a hybrid element, such as Fire and Earth giving the Glass hybrid element, which you can’t normally select outright. If you want, you can even pick up to three elements with your three classes- though that leaves you open to getting wrecked by a massive percentage of the population, because you won’t have a traditional weapon.
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As far as I know, an Elemental’s elemental sense is the same as my own sense for life energy, which comes from the Ki Fighter class. Along with Magus, Elemental and Ki Fighter are united in that their basic function is to tap into wells of sixth-sense energy and transform it into our desired shape. Unlike Ki Fighters, Elementals find those wells of energy outside their body, rather than inside it. Our senses of those energies is like a nebulous field of touch and feel that extends well beyond our skin. Almost like an air current brushing against the surface of your skin, but for your mind. Not an easy thing to explain to people who only use the mundane classes, believe me.
Once you feel something with your elemental sense, you can exert will over it to transform it according to your class. Will is the keyword that JOYs use to describe the mental control over shapeable energies that’s given to Elementals, Ki Fighters, and other classes. It’s very much a physical muscle that you can work out through repeated exercise, allowing you to grab more energy at a time and handle higher volumes of strain the more you train. When two fighters with the same class try to exert control over the same object, their wills fight for control like a mental arm wrestling match, which can take up a huge amount of their concentration. It’s a blessed quirk of the system that whether you have a class with a sixth sense or not, everyone’s bodies have an insane amount of will attached to them, and that will extends to things they wear or hold. Because of that, it’s nearly impossible to directly fuck up an opponent with an Elemental class- otherwise a certain kind of Elemental would be going around turning people into water balloons on demand.
Elements are internally divided by the class’ users based on whether they’re hard or soft elements. Soft elements are ones that can be spontaneously generated from the user’s body without an external source; though it’s always more effective to find your fuel externally. Hard elements are ones that can’t be spontaneously generated. These ones tend to be less flexible and highly terrain dependent, but their power exponentially increases when they’re in a suitable battlefield. Usually this means they’re not as popular as the soft elements, as the more niche a hard element is, the lower your chance to functionally use it in a battle becomes. Even Gami would be kneecapped in a rice field back home, only able to fight with the material he brings around with him. But if you thought for a moment that limitation would make him any less capable, you would be making the same mistake that many, many people have made before you. Those people thought he would be weaker on the mountains of Olympus. They thought he would be weaker in the jungles of Section Z. In the hell-depths of the Golan desert. And in a rice field back home.
Every one of them was wrong.
Gami’s whole body is a malleable weapon of pure metal. Any part of it can turn lethal on a hair trigger thanks to his Elemental control. Like a giant, amorphous well of potential energy molded from nearly invincible material. Zero vulnerabilities. Zero weak points. Omnidirectional threat, and unlimited flexibility to deliver it. And hell forbid you fight him with any mundane weapon. I’ve watched him warp Duelist blades in U-turns to skewer their own wielders without lifting a finger. A shower of bullets just patches his holes.
Gami is the best user of his element that I’ve seen. Others allow themselves to be bounded by their human shape, and with that comes the inevitability of human frailty. Gami has no such weakness. He’s given himself fully over to the art of combat, both physically and spiritually. You can see it when he moves. There’s a laconic dread to the heaviness of his stride; how little he even bothers to look at the people who surround him. They’re gnats of a different species. Fights in the arenas are math problems to practice on.
I obsess over his old fight tapes on my JOY to an unhealthy degree. Every night after Cal goes to a bed, I take my JOY and curl up with a blanket down in the shooting range, and I watch. Even through a camera, he is unnerving. He carries himself without emotion. Analyzes without ethic. Acts without doubt. Waiting, always waiting, like an ancient weapon of a past civilization, simply biding his time until the call to reactivate arrives. A sword in the stone waiting for a warrior of true caliber to put him to the test.
Maybe that’s why he sought out Thane. I was off limits, and I had a hero father who passed his moral compass on to me. But in the boy I used to love, even I knew there was a kindred spirit with the tyrant who now rules my world. Something capable of setting its human weakness aside to pursue perfection. I can’t do the same. My bonds aren’t my binds, they’re the strength I draw on. Only time will tell if they will be enough to match the monsters of my life.
To kill a titan like Gami, I’ll need more power than I’ve ever handled before. But my power, my ki, comes from the heart- and my heart is scarred into unrecognizability. The ki I create is a shade of its former light; black and noxious. Even now it leaks from my chest in a smoky miasma. I can’t even call it an aura. It’s painful to even use for the smallest spark. Cold and bitter, just like the soul that makes it. I could explain the mechanics as to why, but honestly, I've found it's easier to explain ki by means of a story. And that's a story that can wait for another night. Tomorrow’s problem, tomorrow’s me. You know the drill.
Element
Type
Fire
Soft
Water
Hard
Earth
Hard
Air
Soft
Thunder
Soft
Ice
Hard
Metal
Hard
Nature
Hard
Light
Soft
Shadow
Soft
Gravity
Soft