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Edict of the Demon, Chapter 3
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DemonCitizen
Ryo : 7800
Edict of the Demon, Chapter 3
Mon Mar 03, 2014 6:59 am
It was a wary journey that had ensued prior to Asura walking into that bar. It was the sort of journey that made you want to forget about it instantly. The mission at hand was ordered by some wealthy circus owner down near the Water Country who had his eye on a few islands down in that region. He wanted a monopoly of the entertainment business on those islands so that they would have no other option but to purchase his good times. From an economics perspective it was a viable way to corner the market there and force his prices down their throats. From a humane perspective, it was a shit-eating thing to do. Turns out the man had quite the history with the islands, and he had his eyes set on them from the very start.
A few decades ago he was a student there, pretty average by all regards, and he studied mathematics and economics. He came from a family of school teachers so it was of some import that he did not follow down the family business. But no one cared quite enough to talk about him for longer than two breaths. So when he assaulted one of the girls in his father's school and brought notoriety to his family's name, it was no shock that he fled from the Islands. Unfortunately, his ambition to bent his home lands to his will had not left with him, and in a more hideous shape, lathered in the whites and reds of makeup, he was back.
The blind man knows no difference between the white angel and the black widow. This is because the difference between the angel and the widow is what difference we care for it to be. It will never be anything more than what we want to see it as, and it will never be less. This inherent deception is what is the perception of reality. Without a perception of things, we can not understand the world around us, but this perception, something like a thumbnail to each mind that sees the world, is also what makes the world around us different for each of us. We see different in good and evil and true and false and the things we understand is what shapes our thoughts.
He had hated that saying, having read it as one of the first books that Tsuki gave to Demon. Tsuki was a thinker, much more so than Asura, so Tsuki could tell that Asura would have trouble with some of the jobs they were tasked with. It was difficult at first to separate morals with requirement, but soon even that was numbed over by the ever-battering sands of warfare. But this book had taught Asura how to word these sorts of things. It was proof that the feelings he had regarding the murder and the stealing he was hired to do -- they were not completely foreign. Others had pondered upon them. Others had suffered.
Something Demon had gotten used to was working for people that he despised. This was mostly because he despised most people. The worm he surrounded himself with was the byproduct of his choice in profession. No upstanding man paid under the table for over the top brute force. In the eyes of the devil,t eh angel is not so white, and in the eyes of the dead man, the widow is not so black. Reality is a form of our perception and the distinctions we make are lines drawn by our own judgment. So when we call a man evil for his deeds, are we not just as guilty for passing that judgment unto him? So perhaps he deserved to sit through that meeting with the Circus freak whose name was Maboro. His mannerisms and the way he smiled and caused creases to run along his chin was all the byproduct of his person, and Demon had met many like him, fat, greedy, and sick to the core.
But something was different this time. Perhaps it was the fact that this man was an open pedophile. The rumor was that he was known to hire young women into the circus with no real circus talent, only for his own lecherous desires. But Asura was never one to dwell over that brand of morality - it dulled his senses and filled him with hesitation - so it didn't make sense for him to dwell over Maboro's actions. What did it matter if the man was right or not? He had money and he wanted a service. If not the Demon, he would pick someone else, and the job would be done. So why did it matter whose hands had to wash the blood off from underneath its nails?
It didn't. And Asura knew that.
The difference between good and evil has no meaning beyond that which we chose to see, and if we chose to close our eyes, then the difference too disappears. This is the nature of truth. The truth is something that has no intrinsic shape because it is based on the viewer, like a piece of art. And thus using words like 'truth' argumentatively will inherently run into the requirement that you talk simply about facts and numbers. Anything beyond that, any plea of assessment ,will hit the wall of relativism. This is the nature of the truth. The truth... what a joke. People saw what they wanted to see, and those that had the power to change what was, changed it. With these sorts of literature and this sort of thinking, was there anything one could be certain of? It all seemed absurd then, reading about relativism from a book when before it had been just an adolescent musing. Was it possible that people really believed this shit about there being no good or bad? Could it be true that this was a real philosophy? Others might insist, and others might condemn, but the world will not stop to wait and wonder. It, as all things, will go on, and the subtlety of your actin will be lost in the sands of time. What a dismissive way of putting it, he had thought. The sands of time would engulf everything. Then why didn't we all live in anarchy? Was it because of the money? Was it because even within the churning belly of this chaos we still liked our women and booze?
It had all made sense the way Tsuki explained it. There was no questioning the logic, and the logic in the book was just as sound. The things they did was not their actions. They were the hands and the when we murder, it's not our hand that gets dismembered - it's our heads. Let judgment and punishment fall on those that deemed an action necessary, and not on the vessels through which the sizzling acid of evil was spread.
So we do not look back, we move forward as if the past was only a matter of academics. And when we look ahead, we become blind to the evil that grew from our steps. Not because we are afraid of this evil, but because we recognize it as a figment of our contraptions. We are soldiers, a business model thought up to address the needs of this age, and thus we are a service provided to quench a need. The evil lies within the need, not within the method of fulfilling this need. A murderer is evil because he wants to kill, not because he managed to kill. Actions are consequential and if that can be said, then so are motives. Those who waste their time throwing judgments around such as evil and good will surely think that the soldiers are of the same cloth.
But let them think that, for it does not phase us.
The Demon slammed the empty glass onto the bar counter and hiccupped. Every time he exhaled was like a fireball of whiskey in your face. Not many patrons would go near him and he didn’t see any point in mingling with idiots. Only slightly tipsy, he shouted at the bartender for another drink. He was bored here, nothing in this village to amuse him of any sort. He downed the second dose of alcohol, slamming the glass onto the counter again so violently, that the glass itself shattered and cut into his palm.
“You’re going to have to pay for that.” Demon looked up at the barman and grunted dismissively, “Whatever.”
He heard a soft laugh from behind and turned around on cue. Crimson red eyes flirtatiously peeked over at him with a coy smile. The young woman sauntered over and slid into the seat to Demon’s right, to which he averted his eyes back onto the broken glass cup in front of him. Maybe it was the alcoholic flush on his face, or maybe she was that attractive to him. Her blue black hair fell to her shoulders in soft waves... average height... slim figure with a cute little black dress and heels... but what he noticed three seconds off the bat was a lacking of volume around her chest. It was smaller than the majority of women around here. He looked over again at her face. She was smiling mischievously at the bartender and purchased a drink for herself. The bartender himself looked like he was wrapped around her finger with an unfathomable infatuation. Demon grinned himself and established contact.
He didn’t quite remember what he said, but he didn’t think it was anything bad. The woman started off laughing with him, engaging in genuine looking interest and in the next minute, instead of the typical slap across the face or a drink poured all over him, his head was smashed against the counter and broken glass. He groaned and lifted his head, grasping onto his bloody forehead. “What the fuck, you crazy bitch?!”
The bartender chuckled himself and asked, a little bit to sickly sweet and kind as a foolish man smitten, “Aren’t you being a little harsh, Yume-chan?”
The woman now known as Yume pouted and crossed her arms. “I’m not a cross-dressing boy, boy.”
“What the fuck... You look younger than me, girlie-” He was cut short with something stuffed into his mouth. He spluttered it out, seeing a white cloth bandage and stared at her incredulously. “It’s for your head,” Yume stated as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. She giggled and leaned in close to his face. “You’re kind of dumb,” she shushed him with a finger to his lips before he could actually protest back in fury, "but you know, that's okay, I like you a lot~"
Was she being serious or just plain psychopathic? He couldn’t tell. Yume smiled and slid out of her seat. She waved goodbye to the bartender and with one last smile at the fuming Demon, she left before any destruction could occur. It was surprisingly tame, Demon left just as immediately, but not soon after a rough upturn of his stool and another. He ignored the shouts of the barman for the payment of the bill and even left the cloth bandage behind. Fuck it all; he didn’t have the interest to dwell on this. He’s going home and going to bed.
It was sometime in the very early morning, but the sun was already rising from the horizon. Sunlight was fucking annoying. He groaned and kicked the thin blanket off his body before getting up. It was a good as time as any to train and get stronger. After a small quick breakfast consisting of granola and apples, he left his residence to start off his day with a jog around the village. 'The difference between good and evil has no meaning beyond that which we chose to see, and if we chose to close our eyes, then the difference too disappears. This is the nature of truth. The truth is something that has no intrinsic shape because it is based on the viewer, like a piece of art. And thus using words like 'truth' argumentatively will inherently run into the requirement that you talk simply about facts and numbers. Anything beyond that, any plea of assessment ,will hit the wall of relativism. This is the nature of the truth.' There wasn’t much going on in his mind as he was running laps; he found a good rhythm in his silence and running pace. It was nice; it was not the peak hour of the village’s schedule, so not many citizens were outside on the streets and even none at all when he entered the forest training grounds. It was in complete silence, aside from the crunch of the grass under his feet and his rhythmic breathing on the run. He closed his eyes in peace for a second to relish in the quiet. Familiar red eyes peered at him in clear amusement just as he reopened his eyes.
“Hi!”
“AH!” He stumbled and almost tripped over. How did she get here?! Ugh, and it was so peaceful too. He only closed his eyes for a moment... but he didn’t feel any change in presence at all. Demon glared at her, still jogging. She kept up with his speed easily, though he could clearly see that she was cheating. “What the fuck are you doing’ here”
“Jogging of course. Aren’t you silly,” she giggled.
“No one calls fuckin’ floatin’ backwards as joggin’.” More specifically, she was hopping rather long distances backwards but details, details. He groaned and rubbed his eyes. ''The difference between good and evil has no meaning beyond that which we chose to see, and if we chose to close our eyes, then the difference too disappears. This is the nature of truth. The truth is something that has no intrinsic shape because it is based on the viewer, like a piece of art. And thus using words like 'truth' argumentatively will inherently run into the requirement that you talk simply about facts and numbers. Anything beyond that, any plea of assessment ,will hit the wall of relativism. This is the nature of the truth.' What was she doing here of all places? How did she find him here? Did she even go home to sleep and shower and change? She was wearing the same clothes as yesterday. He was about to yell at her again, but stopped short. His run slowed to a confused halt as he looked around. Yume had disappeared without a trace.
“Hey! Girlie?”
He must be hallucinating. He didn’t know if she was a shinobi herself or not but no ninja could just appear and disappear without some sort of trace chakra. Now that he thought about it he didn’t feel any bursts of chakra while she was hopping backwards alongside him. A feat like that surely needed chakra use of some sort. The Demon groaned to himself. He really must be hallucinating... the bartender probably put something in the alcohol from last night or something. Deciding to simply brush it off, he resumed on his run. There wasn’t anything interrupting him from his run from then on.
After a couple more laps around the village, Demon finished his run right in the middle of the forest. Slumping back against a tree trunk for short break, he looked up through the canopy trees. His mind didn’t stray from its core much. The low rustling through the leaves hummed in sync with his brainwaves, as he spaced deeper into his unconscious. It was a rabbit hole, his mind. What he thinks about is something most people fear to tread into should they even see the slightest hint of what.
The wind blew colder. He was still staring up past the canopy of the trees.
“Oh! I didn’t know you could actually think,” came the same familiar and infuriating giggle. His eyes widened. Yume’s face was upside down, directly in front of his. He yelled, off guard, again and within an accidental blink, she was nowhere in sight. He whirled around. There was only the tree trunk behind him. She couldn’t have positioned herself above him, even with chakra work and crouching. What was she, a fucking ghost?
“I’m goin’ fuckin’ crazy...” he muttered and picked himself up from the ground to resume his spontaneous training regime. Demon started on some push ups. He found push ups as one of the easier workouts, as swordsmanship did already help out on his upper body strength.
One... two... three...
“F o u r.” A weight on his back forced him flat on the ground purely by its sudden presence. He gasped as he fell and turned his head back to see the girl that had been somehow popping up and annoying him all morning. The crimson eyes peered down with that flirty, yet at the same time, infuriating, smile. “Only four push ups? You don’t last very long, do you?”
“Gah! Get off me, you psycho!”
She only giggled and ruffled his short red hair. “Oh come on, cutie, I’m sure you can pick yourself up. Or... are these biceps just for show?” Cutie?! The Demon glared back at her and managed to push himself back up after some readjusting. He was still housing Yume on his back and thankfully she wasn’t that heavy. The crimson eyed woman returned his glare with a soft giggle and leaned down closer his ear, hand still atop his head. Her fingernails were raking across his scalp as she purred into his ear. “F i v e ~”
Alright this was enough. Demon launched himself up and tried to flip Yume into a more subdued position. She disappeared in a blink; he missed quite obviously and fell face down with the woman once again sitting comfortably on his back. He was furious alongside baffled. How did she move around like that? That wasn’t shinobi, let alone human. Groaning and defeated just from the annoyance, he pushed himself back up and resumed his push ups. Too much time was being wasted dealing with this woman. “So you’re not a ghost,” he stated gruffly, more than questioned.
Five... Six...
Yume chuckled to herself but said nothing about it. She simply leaned back and let herself become a handicap to his push up training. What’s training without a little weight challenge anyway? “Seven . . . eight . . . nine”
“QUIT COUNTIN’!”
Pouting, the woman crossed her arms and sat in silence as Demon continued with his push ups. The rhythm of his push ups was consistent; they could lull someone on top of him to sleep if his pushes weren’t so violent and rough.
It had been a while and not one of them spoke yet. Yume mentally counted that he had done a hundred and eight. Demon didn’t bother with numbers himself. He just kept going until he thought he did enough and it was time for another break. Discreetly peeking up at the woman on his back, he decided that now (one hundred and twenty push ups) were enough. 'The blind man knows no difference between the white angel and the black widow. This is because the difference between the angel and the widow is what difference we care for it to be. It will never be anything more than what we want to see it as, and it will never be less. This inherent deception is what is the perception of reality.' As sudden as the weight on his back, he rolled over and got up quickly, expecting her to fall with a yelp. To his disappointment, she simply jumped off him just milliseconds after he even thought of getting up. He looked at her incredulously, while she blinked back pseudo-innocently. “What the hell are you doin’ here?” he asked again. The level of annoyance in him was pretty consistent with falters of spiking up into fury here and there. Yume tilted her head and smiled. “Just strolling around. Thought I’d keep you company.”
Freaky, psycho, phantom, stalker girl... Demon’s eyes twitched irately, looking like he was just this close to exploding in anger. “Well run off and stroll away from me.” It seemed that the threat blew over her head as Yume slowly rested her hand on her hip. “Did you just try to make a play on words?”
“What of it?! Scram, woman!”
She waved her free hand dismissively. “I won’t get in the way.” Somehow, that sounded like a lie to him. He twitched again. “You shouldn’t waste your training time trying to chase me off, cutie.”
“Fuckin’ stop callin’ me that. You don’t even know what my name is!”
Yume giggled to herself and simply hopped up into a tree branch, surprisingly out of his way. “Does it matter? Cutie is good enough for me.” Demon looked up at her suspiciously and jogged off deeper into the forest, away from the crazy lady. Huh. For a moment he thought she wasn’t human. Maybe he was right.
He eventually stopped jogging, finding himself at another section of the forest, alone. Well, he hoped he was fucking alone. That woman was so hard to deal with in such a prolonged period. He checked around the area until he was satisfied that she had left him to his own devices. Dropping down onto the grass, he rested for a couple of seconds before starting off on some rounds of sit ups and crunches. God forbid if Yume randomly popped up on one of his ups. He wouldn’t know what he would do if he were to be surprised again. He gritted his teeth as his abdominals burned. Why was he thinking about that? It’s annoying and fucking stupid. The rest of the morning was of his giant extended warm up of jogs, push ups and sit ups. There wasn’t any sign of Yume around.
Lunch was at a small noodle bar in the village. He returned into the forest as quickly as he could after his meal. Running into people that would dare interact with him would be pain and it’d be remarkably worse if a certain crimson red eyed, dark blue haired woman found him again. Surrounded and circled by trees and small animals, Demon reached for one of his swords and unsheathed. He exhaled slowly. A familiar giggle sounded from behind him. Once again, it was just so sudden, without so much the slightest hint of her oncoming presence. He yelped and spun around with his sword swinging. Was the woman even standing behind him? Perhaps. He thought he saw her image, but just as his blade tried to make contact, she was gone as if she never was there to begin with. His sword hit the tree trunk behind him instead. He blinked, dumbfounded and yanked his sword back, scratching the back of his head with his free hand. Was she even here at all? Yes, right? How else could he have heard her laugh? But he wasn’t sure if he even saw her just then when he turned around. Chalking it back up to hallucinations again, this time perhaps from a lack of sleep, Demon readied his sword and charged towards one of the trees. He probably would be able to cleanly slice through the trunk like sushi, due to his physical condition from last time, but it didn’t matter. He just wanted to see where he was at.
The blade sliced through a little more of halfway of the trunk. Not bad, he thought, pulling out his sword from the tree. Demon returned back into his stance in order to try again. Another laugh tinkled from his right and he snapped around to actually see the woman standing there, enjoying herself from the show he was putting on. Demon grimaced and then snarled, “I thought I told you to scram, girlie.” She didn’t reply; it was like she really wasn’t there and he was turning crazier by the minute. He glanced at his blade and then back at her. She didn’t disappear like the few times she did earlier in the morning. Before he could contemplate, his body had already moved, blade raised to strike the woman. Woman beating cries and protests aside, it was a shinobi world and Yume may or may not be a shinobi herself. His sword flew down, so close in slicing her head off, when Yume moved forward herself and passed through his blade and then his body. She flashed further behind him and leaned back on the tree. She smiled silently at him while his eyes widened and he shouted, “So you are a ghost?!”
He was visibly torn and confused on this. The more he thought about it, the more annoyed he felt. The more annoyed he felt, the angrier he became. It boiled to the point where he thought, fuck it, and charged. He swung at her again, but instead of her phasing through him to dodge; she simply disappeared again just as he blinked. His sword made contact with bark and he had no choice but to pull it back out. His eyes darted around, expecting her reappearance in some other obscure place. He was aided by her echoing laughs; ethereal laughs that didn’t quite seem real or even there, but whenever he turned, he saw her. In fury, he launched at her again, trying his hardest not to blink lest he missed her again, but no. She just dispersed into fine mist and reappeared elsewhere, letting him know with giggles. It was a cycle that went on for a while. Demon goes after her, sword swinging. He deals a blow, misses and hits the tree instead, while the woman he couldn’t decide whether was a ghost or a hallucination disappeared or dodged and reappeared elsewhere. It was a one-sided fight, a fight that wouldn’t fall in his favour. As much as he knew this, he wouldn’t stop. He was angry; she pissed him off with her incessant appearances and meddling. If this was a good way for him vent away his fury, then so be it. Maybe this was a blessing in disguise, she allowed herself to be the proverbial punching bag Demon oh so truly needed. That is, if she was even real. He chased and swung. A multitude of sword techniques and manoeuvres were being used just on this girl. Powerful and advanced as they were, they held a tone of anger and uncontrollable violence; all of which missed the image of the crimson eyed woman and landed on all of the trees around him. Did I say it’d help him vent his anger? That was a mistake. It only made him angrier, determined to strike Yume’s image at least once. Not sure how that would work out, for he still wasn’t sure himself if he was hallucinating or she was actually here and fuckin’ around with him. Either way, it was a near impossible task. Still, it didn’t stop him. Pulling out his secondary sword, he continued his impossible chase to strike the strange woman named Yume.
That took all day, well into the evening. He had failed to even place the tiniest nick on her skin, let alone a good hefty slice. He gave up on that, seeing as that training session had started and ended so crazily, he might as well call it a fucking day and grab dinner. He found himself back in the bar he was in last night. His lips were upturned; their food was kind of shit. Really, the only reason this place was still afloat was because of the copious amounts of alcohol they served and how braindead the adult population of this village was for said alcohol. Not deciding to be overly picky, he entered and ordered the least risky meal on the menu and a glass of hard alcohol. The same bartender glowered at this regular, but annoying, customer, pestering him for last night’s bill that was still unpaid for. Demon merely waved his hand dismissively as he ate, in assurance he wouldn’t skimp out on the bill today. Maybe. The movement of someone sliding into the barstool on his right pricked up in his ears. The bartender’s grouchy demeanour had changed to the over kind and infatuated one. Demon froze. The only time he ever noticed the old man act that way was...
Slowly, mechanically, his head turned to his right and the sight he saw almost made him want to whip out one of his swords and attack like he tried earlier in the depths of the forest. Yume seemed to feel his burning stare and turned herself to look at him. With the same flirtatious smile, she said her greetings, “Oh why if isn’t you, cutie. How was the rest of your training?”
He wanted to rip her head off. Why, oh fucking why, was she addressing him as cutie?! “As if you didn’t know... You were there the whole fuckin’ day.”
She looked offended at the gesture. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I left when you told me to.”
That had to be a crock of bullshit. There was no way he was hallucinating her image for the entirety of the afternoon. It had to be a... a... an illusionary technique! That’s it! Why didn’t he think of it before?! Was it that powerful that it didn’t come to mind? Hallucinations were still not out of the realm of possibility. Much more wary, he cussed under his breath and went back to his food and drinks. Yume stared at him for a little while longer and smiled, leaning closer to him. “Are you still mad?” she asked, only to have Demon’s palm in her face and pushing her back. “Fuckin’ livid,” he replied, taking a swig of his whiskey. He felt her grab onto his hand pry herself free from his grab. She sounded like she was frustrated from that feat, but once he turned to look at her again, aside from the annoyance in her eyes, she was smiling softly. Huh, so she did have other emotions other than bat shit crazy. He groaned to himself. “Why are you following me around, woman?”
She didn’t even bother correcting him with her name. Her hands were still holding onto his as she giggled, whether it was at his obliviousness or not, he couldn’t tell. “I t o l d y o u,” she said again, in a rather sing song voice, “I l i k e you. You’re... i n t e r e s t i n g.” His expression scrunched up into a grimace and he rubbed his face vigorously. Why was she so persistent? There was nothing charming or cute with this behaviour. He needed another drink so desperately. Snapping his fingers, he called for a refill. And another. And another. He drank and drank and then drank some more, while the female beside him was quietly having some time to herself with her own drink and the occasional exchange with the infatuated bartender. Demon looked across, with that drunken flush splayed across his cheeks again. Why wouldn’t she go after the guy that was clearly interested in her? Wait, why was that bar dude even hitting on her? That wasn’t cool, she was into him. It seemed that alcohol turned him to a completely different personality, as he stood, slurred... something, his brain was too fumbled to register what he just yelled, but thought it was a good idea at the time and then socked the bartender in the eye. Even time stopped just for a moment to register what just happened. Then the bar was in an uproar. It was, not surprisingly, him against everyone else. Yume was... was he didn’t know where the little pretty woman went, but if training that morning and afternoon told him anything, she could slip away and out from trouble whenever she wanted. Him on the other hand...
THWACK!
A barstool smashed over his head. The bar patrons yelled, the bartender yelled; good fucking god, were there no security in this establishment to keep shit in order from punks like Demon? It appeared not, as the bartender got in on the scuffle (obviously, since he was the recipient of that black eye from Demon), others joined in against Demon. Bloody noses, black eyes and broken bones galore from nearly everyone involved, it took all he could not to unsheathe his swords and start slicing heads off. He had issues; that was for sure, but they weren’t intense enough so that it would cause him to be murderous criminal. An assaulting criminal was enough. It felt like the fight took for ages, but it was finished as fast as it had started. It left Demon thrown out from the bar, remarkably not banned from the place (probably because he was one of the bigger contributions patrons there or something... not a very high establishment if someone as violent as he didn’t get banned), in a drunken stupor. “Argh...” he grunted, wiping away the blood that was trickling down his nose. His shoulder was sprained, but he popped that back in place easily, but not without a sharp yell of pain. “Fug!” He was stumbling, headed in the direction that he thought was home. One more drunken stumble found him supported by petite arms. Ungraciously, he looked at the newcomer with a grunt. It was her.
“Arrghh... ij joor fault...” he slurred accusingly. Yume rolled her red eyes and smiled, as she pulled out a handkerchief and wiped the rest of the blood away from his head and face before helping him walk. “I didn’t do anything, cutie. You started that fight yourself.” Demon grimaced and pushed her away. He didn’t need help walking. What did she think he was, a baby?
“Nah, it was youuu...” he accused again, stumbling some more. “You’s a witch...” That made his female companion laugh more than anything. Reaching around, she rested her hand on the back of his head, gingerly enough not to even trigger whatever pain he had from the barstool to the head. It wouldn’t be surprising if he did get a concussion from it. “If you say so, cutie,” she giggled. Maybe he was out of it, but there was something in contact with his cheek just for a moment. It was quickly brushed off, as he was still determined that he was playing around with an evil witch.
His dreams were strange tonight. It wasn’t as if nightmares are uncommon with him, but this was strange. He was in his nightclothes, which only really consisted of his boxers and a pillow in hand. Where was he? It was dark, hard to make out what was what, but his bare feet relayed that he was standing on cold, cold concrete. As he stepped forward, he felt someone was behind him, following that step. But as he looked behind him, no one was there. How eerily familiar; it was as if he had gone through this during the daytime while he lived. It was the whooshing sound of fast movement, unnatural movement that made him truly turn around to face it. Something launched at him, akin to how he would charge at things in anger, and pounced. Demon yelled. With no other weapons to fend himself aside from a pillow and his bare hands, he did what a normal person would do. Bat the thing away with the pillow of course. Whatever launched at him was humanoid, mostly silent aside from the high pitched cackling of its laugh. It chased after him and he was forced to run and dodge from its speed. Demon grunted in annoyance and tossed aside the pillow he was holding onto. What the fuck is a pillow going to do anyway, smother this overly active moving monster to death? Laughable.
He had trained for things like these, because even in the vast and endless span of dessert there were things one did not see. This sort of transportation between the dimension of the real and the dimension of the fake was not new to him in the least. He was elsewhere, suddenly. His wrists wriggled, sending waves of pain through his arms and when he looked to either side, the spears were still there, going completely through his flesh. Ah yes, the familiar feeling of dread came back to him now. The crunch of his bones when he moved was not something he could ignore, it was not a pain he could bare, and in helpless retaliation, he let out a loud and graceless roar. Blood from his mouth sprayed out into the open, summer air, and the people seemed to move away from where it fell. Was he so disgusting to them? Or was this just a figment of the dream that he was seeing. The world around him seemed open to the suggestion of change and that made it hard to keep track of where he was and where he wasn't. Instead, as if all of the faces were those he recognized, he looked about as if this was a part of his future, and not his past. In the scorching heat of the season, the people below wore thin veils of purple and maroon to keep the rays off of their face. Their skin, a shade lighter than his, wrinkled to peer up against the sun to see him, the spectacle. Was it a dream? His eyes felt tired and he closed them.
He was given a simple assignment. It was to murder the Duke. These sorts of missions did not require much effort. You go in, you find a way through the guards, you kill the target, and you leave. The aftermath was irrelevant and the reasons were unneeded. The duke, however, was different. He was a man known for his intellect, and had won some sort of Chess competition in his younger days. The fame he had gained through competition translated to political recognition when he won his primary elections. That was many years ago, when Sora lived in a far away land and a very different life. The Duke's name was hard to remember, and he strained to catch a hold of it, a young fat man with thick eye-liner. Was it Genbu? He might have resembled the villain of a book were he not a real man in the real world. And while Genbu did not have a perfect rise to power, his road was not marred with too many pot-holes. He continued attending Chess tournaments, winning most of them even as he aged and the new age of competition rose in the ranks.
But was the name really Genbu? Asura struggled to push his memories beyond where they had currently stopped, and wondered what sort of realm he was in where even his own mind had betrayed him. He felt old and alone. A true prodigy - that duke.
He might have been someone that the Demon respected, had circumstances not been this way. But it was a few years ago during the Ducal elections that he took Oyashira by storm. Oyashira, referred in short as Oya, was a large metropolis for agriculture. A large metropolis that he was now nailed in. In the middle of the desert they had made a city around an oasis, and managed to maintain it with their technology. In lands filled to the brink with sands, having access to water was more powerful than having access to ready death. Commerce flocked around them and they became the center of produce. It was practically the only place in hundreds of miles where livestock could be kept, and so their mode of business never ran dry in the same way that their oasis never did. So subjectively perhaps it was the future of the desert's trade, but right now, it was his funeral. It all felt barbaric and violent, the act conducted here in front of a people that were insistent on moving forward, and not moving back.
This duke of their choosing was their new leader, the one who would take them to the next stage of growth. And growth was such a slippery slope to go down. People called any sort of change a matter of growth and progression. If the rate of killings increased, it was attributed to a new tipping point of society. If the rate of rapes increased, it too was attributed to the same. The only thing that stayed constant was that some times we need brute force to enforce our will. The man had ideas that were not very palatable to the upper class. He wanted to expand the village's energy resource by incorporating the oasis, which was a publicly accessible resource of water. Up until then all of Oya used Wind Factories for their energy, not having thought to tap into hydraulics. So when Genbu suggested that one of the first orders of business he aimed to complete was to get the village off of the privatized Wind Factory trade and onto the nationalized oasis resource, he had made quite a few rich people very angry.
The rich were always the same. They had gotten so far with the tricks and moves they had used in the past that they could not move too much away from them. Bribery and deception was ingrained into them because they knew it had to work before. And if it worked before, it would work now. And that's why the Demon was there, on an assassination mission to take out this man, to solve a problem in the most primal of ways.
He had at first questioned whether he really wanted to partake in such a barbaric shutdown of something that was so obviously good. He had heard of the Duke before and now, given how their paths intersected, he regretted ever knowing of the man's good reputation.
When he entered Oya, it had been at the deep midst of night, and the silence that overtook everything was both a sign of good luck and terrible misfortune. It was too quiet.
Unfortunately for him, they had been prepared. The Chess player had made the King's Gambit, hiring his own spies and sending them off to his opposition. So by the time Sora had arrived, he was expected and captured with ease. And for the first time Genbu showed aggression to the public. Up until then he had been the silent mastermind behind this new era of success that he wanted to usher in. The people were ready to trust him in what he said because of his success in politics and chess but now... now when he had shown to the village what a traitor looks like... he had morphed into something else.
“Alright, come at me, you lil’ piece of shit...” he taunted and that is what he received. It was like both the bar fight from before and a wrestling match. It was humanoid, it had human strength and attributes. He rolled around with the monster, punching it and getting punched by it. Kicking it and getting kicked by it. At one point there would have been a comical scene of those two strangling each other. He broke its arm, to which the thing screeched horridly. Why did the weirdest shit happen to him after going to that bar? No, it wasn’t the bar, it was that woman. 'Why did weird shit start happening with her around. He punched it in what was assumed to be the face and as it cowered, he threw down a relentless assault of more punches. It was like he had to always be on his toes now. It was like he was going crazy from what could or could not be hallucinations. He had nowhere to go to release his frustration and confusion. He had nowhere to go, not even in his sleep, for this son of a bitch was picking a fight with him. Sure, it had only been one occurrence, but the human mind is so quick to judge, so quick to attribute results from just one singular event, it was so easy for him to start blaming everything that just recently happened. Namely, that red eyed woman that keeps on fuckin’ popping up wherever he went. Scrambling around, his roughed up hands blindly sweeping the ground, he miraculously came across something peculiar. It was a hilt that joined onto a sword. A sword, a legitimate weapon that could be used to kill this son of a bitch. With a roar, he grabbed the sword with more defiance and swung it across. It sliced the monster’s head clean off and with a swift and heavy kick, he pushed the thing off him. The decapitated head screamed and the body writhed around in panic. Feeling relieved, proud of himself and cocky all at once, Demon spat on it in disrespect and cursed it out.
He celebrated too early. It seemed as if every single mythology and folktale came together to create an even more monstrosity. Heads regrew and split, extra limbs grew, colours changed and its voice distorted into something more sinister and inhuman. “Oh fuckin’ shit!” He dove to the right just as whatever the fuck it was struck down at where he was standing moments ago. Its head got stuck in the concrete and as it struggled, Demon was reeling his head to find a weak point. If fuckin’ slicing its head off didn’t do shit, what else was there? The heart? Make it unable by breaking its legs? There were endless possibilities, but they all fell under the problem, what if the thing just rejuvenate and recovers from its wounds like some mutant? “Fuck me sideways.” He didn’t have time, the thing was already breaking free. He gasped and its multiple heads roared in his face. He was done for.
He awoke with a start. The horrid screaming faded, but it was still fresh in his memory. Ugh, what a fuckin’ nightmare, he groaned to himself and rolled over to his side for some more shut eye. Something stopped him from rolling over fully though. Skin. Hair. It wasn’t his. Demon’s eyes shot open and behold, that stupid annoying freaky stalking red eyed, dark blue haired girl was lying in bed beside him. She looked like she was sleeping so peacefully, covered from the thin blanket from his bed. Wait, no she wasn’t naked... but she was in just only white lingerie. It took three seconds of silence. And then he screamed. Super loud.
“AHHH!!! WHAT THE FUCK?!”
The woman stirred and fluttered open her eyes, confused at first. “Eh...?” she turned to look at him and smiled. “Good morning cutie~”
Just plainly out of reflex, his foot shot out and kicked her off the bed, rewarding himself with the thud and a surprised yelp. His heart pounded faster, fearing the most reasonable event that could have happened provided the situation that had been presented to him. Was that a bad thing? Probably... probably not, but he’d at least want to remember what the fuck happened! “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOIN’ HERE?!” he shouted. A whirlwind of confusion among other moods shifting in between writhed around his insides.
“You mean you don’t remember?” she asked, not at all seeming hurt or offended. It just sounded like genuine curiosity and care. She sat up from the floor, clinging onto the blanket against her chest and hopped back into bed beside him. He tensed up as her hand reached behind to his head, a familiar feeling that he felt from last night. He flinched. There was no concussion, Yume noticed, in fact, his injuries recovered so much more quickly than a regular human being’s. Still tensing, he glowered at her. All he could remember was the bar fight... him stumbling through the street... then she came along to help him. After that... “Did you drug me? We fuckin’ didn’t...? Did we...?”
“My, you really were wasted from last night,” she sighed, running her fingers through his hair. He was confused, unsure whether to relax into her touch or chop off her limbs. Yume smiled and leaned in slowly and rested her head on his shoulder. “Don’t worry, nothing happened.” Demon was befuddled. Then... then why was she here, practically naked and staying the night?! He was still getting his head around this, as Yume suddenly giggled and pushed him over. He landed back onto his bed, caught off guard and aching with whatever pain that still remained from last night’s bar fight.
“OW! What the fuck, woman?!” he spat, annoyed again in record time. Yume was climbing all over him, slowly, as if any sudden movement would ruin a perfect plan she cooked up. Straddling his waist, she leaned in close to his face and for a moment, Demon thought he saw her crimson red eyes glow just a little bit brighter. She smiled, flirtatious as ever. “Or maybe...” she mused, more to herself than him really. Her eyes were cast to the side. Was she blushing? Demon wondered briefly. It seemed like such an uncharacteristic thing for someone like her to do, even though the only grasp of personality he had on her was merely summed up with the words crazy, stalking, and psycho. “Something did actually happen~”
“Wha-?” He stopped. She kissed him. His eyes were wide open and the next thing he noticed was his wrists were pinned down by her hands and more. Was it chakra? The woman on top of him pulled away and opened her eyes, peering down at him with a smile. Okay, he was sure that they were fucking glowing... but he didn’t point it out. “What in the fuckin’ hell...?”
She giggled in a way that she wanted to sound innocent, but it was obviously not. Not to him. Yume drew her face closer to his once more. “Don’t you remember, cutie? I told you before.” She pecked his unresponsive lips lightly at irregular intervals, whispering in between, “I really really like you a lot...” She had to be casting a spell on him or something; each syllable made him feel like he was slipping away just a little bit at a time. He would protest and accuse her if he could, list ways to get away from her and/or perhaps maim this psycho, but as she moved her lips down his neck and further, suddenly he didn’t really give a damn at all.
“You... you you you you...” the Demon muttered almost to the point of insanity as he stomped off through the village for the forest as quickly as he could. To his dismay, Yume caught up with him easily with a skip in her step and virtually glowing with bliss. “You are a fuckin’ witch. You have to be a witch, I just know it.” She only looked at him in mock hurt. “You didn’t like it?” she asked in such a dejected tone, yet he saw her as such a conniving woman, he couldn’t tell if she was being genuine anymore.
“I didn’t say... That wasn’t what I... ARGH, fuck off!” He broke into a run to get away, not knowing if he left her there looking hurt or smiling in amusement from his antics. If he had to make a wager on that, he was sure that Yume would be standing there, giggling her ass off because of him. She probably was just that crazy. He reached the forest as before, panting slightly. He didn’t pace his run; he just wanted to get away as quickly as possible. Well that was the jogging leg of his training session finished, as unprepared and half assed as it was. He slumped onto the grass to catch his breath. His golden eyes darted around the area. He was almost certain that she would pop out at any moment, if yesterday taught him anything. He waited for a bit, a couple of minutes at best. She didn’t appear. With a sigh, mostly in relief, Demon hunched over to start his push ups and sit ups, crunches and the like. For the most part, he was just half expecting the girl to just suddenly reappear on his back through his push ups or by his feet and directly at his face when he would sit up from crunches. There was nothing so far. He had been working out alone for a remarkable amount of time considering, since Yume interfered with his life. The remnants of her presence still lingered, such that he was so wary of whatever he did, passively preparing himself for her next abrupt arrival. He wasn’t going to get startled like a kitty cat today.
But she didn’t show. Demon huffed. That was a good riddance; surely she got bored and had better shit to do than stalk him all day. Deeper into the forest, he passed by the area of mangled trees and branches from yesterday when he was hallucinating (perhaps) and tried to get at least one stab at the girl. Grimacing, although if it was more for his failure to do so or just the fact he was going crazy himself was anyone’s guess. But he ignored that and continued on, venturing deeper into the forest. There had to be somewhere where he could truly be alone with no psychopathic witches after him. How successful he’d be... he had his doubts.
He stopped when he felt like he walked enough and drew his sword. For the most part, the cuts and bruises from last night’s fight stopped bothering him, but the weakness that came after it still lingered. He probably wouldn’t be able to swing with his maximum power or his technique would be subpar from his strained body... but... who gives a damn? He had his eye on one tree in front of him. Readying his stance, he waited for his arbitrary moment to strike.
A giggle. “Impressive how you can still train... even after what we did this morning.”
“GAH!” He instinctively turned and slashed at the threat, only to hear the contact of plastic and splashes of water. Yume had half ducked from his swing already, though the bottled water she was holding didn’t have a lid and neck anymore. He groaned and lowered his sword. “What the fuck, you crazy bitch... Are you trying to get yourself killed? And what are you still fuckin’ doing here?!”
She giggled again. “Drink?” she offered the cut up bottle, completely brushing off his semi-interrogation. He glowered at her and snatched the bottle from her hand. He was still waiting for her answer as he took a couple of swigs of water. What was she, a psycho version of a wife? Who brings water to someone like him in a deserted part of the forest for the sole reason of hydrating him? No, she had to be up to something. Swear to god, if she tried that magic trick like she did this morning, he was going to make her very very very very very sorr-
“Hello? Cutie? Don’t stare at me for too long, I might get the wrong idea.” Yume smiled as she snapped him out of his reverie and he grunted, tossing back the open bottle to her and turning away to continue some of his weaponry training. Before he could start, he was graced to annoyance by the voice he had heard far too much in the last two days. “You’re just going to slice up trees?” she asked.
A few decades ago he was a student there, pretty average by all regards, and he studied mathematics and economics. He came from a family of school teachers so it was of some import that he did not follow down the family business. But no one cared quite enough to talk about him for longer than two breaths. So when he assaulted one of the girls in his father's school and brought notoriety to his family's name, it was no shock that he fled from the Islands. Unfortunately, his ambition to bent his home lands to his will had not left with him, and in a more hideous shape, lathered in the whites and reds of makeup, he was back.
The blind man knows no difference between the white angel and the black widow. This is because the difference between the angel and the widow is what difference we care for it to be. It will never be anything more than what we want to see it as, and it will never be less. This inherent deception is what is the perception of reality. Without a perception of things, we can not understand the world around us, but this perception, something like a thumbnail to each mind that sees the world, is also what makes the world around us different for each of us. We see different in good and evil and true and false and the things we understand is what shapes our thoughts.
He had hated that saying, having read it as one of the first books that Tsuki gave to Demon. Tsuki was a thinker, much more so than Asura, so Tsuki could tell that Asura would have trouble with some of the jobs they were tasked with. It was difficult at first to separate morals with requirement, but soon even that was numbed over by the ever-battering sands of warfare. But this book had taught Asura how to word these sorts of things. It was proof that the feelings he had regarding the murder and the stealing he was hired to do -- they were not completely foreign. Others had pondered upon them. Others had suffered.
Something Demon had gotten used to was working for people that he despised. This was mostly because he despised most people. The worm he surrounded himself with was the byproduct of his choice in profession. No upstanding man paid under the table for over the top brute force. In the eyes of the devil,t eh angel is not so white, and in the eyes of the dead man, the widow is not so black. Reality is a form of our perception and the distinctions we make are lines drawn by our own judgment. So when we call a man evil for his deeds, are we not just as guilty for passing that judgment unto him? So perhaps he deserved to sit through that meeting with the Circus freak whose name was Maboro. His mannerisms and the way he smiled and caused creases to run along his chin was all the byproduct of his person, and Demon had met many like him, fat, greedy, and sick to the core.
But something was different this time. Perhaps it was the fact that this man was an open pedophile. The rumor was that he was known to hire young women into the circus with no real circus talent, only for his own lecherous desires. But Asura was never one to dwell over that brand of morality - it dulled his senses and filled him with hesitation - so it didn't make sense for him to dwell over Maboro's actions. What did it matter if the man was right or not? He had money and he wanted a service. If not the Demon, he would pick someone else, and the job would be done. So why did it matter whose hands had to wash the blood off from underneath its nails?
It didn't. And Asura knew that.
The difference between good and evil has no meaning beyond that which we chose to see, and if we chose to close our eyes, then the difference too disappears. This is the nature of truth. The truth is something that has no intrinsic shape because it is based on the viewer, like a piece of art. And thus using words like 'truth' argumentatively will inherently run into the requirement that you talk simply about facts and numbers. Anything beyond that, any plea of assessment ,will hit the wall of relativism. This is the nature of the truth. The truth... what a joke. People saw what they wanted to see, and those that had the power to change what was, changed it. With these sorts of literature and this sort of thinking, was there anything one could be certain of? It all seemed absurd then, reading about relativism from a book when before it had been just an adolescent musing. Was it possible that people really believed this shit about there being no good or bad? Could it be true that this was a real philosophy? Others might insist, and others might condemn, but the world will not stop to wait and wonder. It, as all things, will go on, and the subtlety of your actin will be lost in the sands of time. What a dismissive way of putting it, he had thought. The sands of time would engulf everything. Then why didn't we all live in anarchy? Was it because of the money? Was it because even within the churning belly of this chaos we still liked our women and booze?
It had all made sense the way Tsuki explained it. There was no questioning the logic, and the logic in the book was just as sound. The things they did was not their actions. They were the hands and the when we murder, it's not our hand that gets dismembered - it's our heads. Let judgment and punishment fall on those that deemed an action necessary, and not on the vessels through which the sizzling acid of evil was spread.
So we do not look back, we move forward as if the past was only a matter of academics. And when we look ahead, we become blind to the evil that grew from our steps. Not because we are afraid of this evil, but because we recognize it as a figment of our contraptions. We are soldiers, a business model thought up to address the needs of this age, and thus we are a service provided to quench a need. The evil lies within the need, not within the method of fulfilling this need. A murderer is evil because he wants to kill, not because he managed to kill. Actions are consequential and if that can be said, then so are motives. Those who waste their time throwing judgments around such as evil and good will surely think that the soldiers are of the same cloth.
But let them think that, for it does not phase us.
The Demon slammed the empty glass onto the bar counter and hiccupped. Every time he exhaled was like a fireball of whiskey in your face. Not many patrons would go near him and he didn’t see any point in mingling with idiots. Only slightly tipsy, he shouted at the bartender for another drink. He was bored here, nothing in this village to amuse him of any sort. He downed the second dose of alcohol, slamming the glass onto the counter again so violently, that the glass itself shattered and cut into his palm.
“You’re going to have to pay for that.” Demon looked up at the barman and grunted dismissively, “Whatever.”
He heard a soft laugh from behind and turned around on cue. Crimson red eyes flirtatiously peeked over at him with a coy smile. The young woman sauntered over and slid into the seat to Demon’s right, to which he averted his eyes back onto the broken glass cup in front of him. Maybe it was the alcoholic flush on his face, or maybe she was that attractive to him. Her blue black hair fell to her shoulders in soft waves... average height... slim figure with a cute little black dress and heels... but what he noticed three seconds off the bat was a lacking of volume around her chest. It was smaller than the majority of women around here. He looked over again at her face. She was smiling mischievously at the bartender and purchased a drink for herself. The bartender himself looked like he was wrapped around her finger with an unfathomable infatuation. Demon grinned himself and established contact.
He didn’t quite remember what he said, but he didn’t think it was anything bad. The woman started off laughing with him, engaging in genuine looking interest and in the next minute, instead of the typical slap across the face or a drink poured all over him, his head was smashed against the counter and broken glass. He groaned and lifted his head, grasping onto his bloody forehead. “What the fuck, you crazy bitch?!”
The bartender chuckled himself and asked, a little bit to sickly sweet and kind as a foolish man smitten, “Aren’t you being a little harsh, Yume-chan?”
The woman now known as Yume pouted and crossed her arms. “I’m not a cross-dressing boy, boy.”
“What the fuck... You look younger than me, girlie-” He was cut short with something stuffed into his mouth. He spluttered it out, seeing a white cloth bandage and stared at her incredulously. “It’s for your head,” Yume stated as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. She giggled and leaned in close to his face. “You’re kind of dumb,” she shushed him with a finger to his lips before he could actually protest back in fury, "but you know, that's okay, I like you a lot~"
Was she being serious or just plain psychopathic? He couldn’t tell. Yume smiled and slid out of her seat. She waved goodbye to the bartender and with one last smile at the fuming Demon, she left before any destruction could occur. It was surprisingly tame, Demon left just as immediately, but not soon after a rough upturn of his stool and another. He ignored the shouts of the barman for the payment of the bill and even left the cloth bandage behind. Fuck it all; he didn’t have the interest to dwell on this. He’s going home and going to bed.
It was sometime in the very early morning, but the sun was already rising from the horizon. Sunlight was fucking annoying. He groaned and kicked the thin blanket off his body before getting up. It was a good as time as any to train and get stronger. After a small quick breakfast consisting of granola and apples, he left his residence to start off his day with a jog around the village. 'The difference between good and evil has no meaning beyond that which we chose to see, and if we chose to close our eyes, then the difference too disappears. This is the nature of truth. The truth is something that has no intrinsic shape because it is based on the viewer, like a piece of art. And thus using words like 'truth' argumentatively will inherently run into the requirement that you talk simply about facts and numbers. Anything beyond that, any plea of assessment ,will hit the wall of relativism. This is the nature of the truth.' There wasn’t much going on in his mind as he was running laps; he found a good rhythm in his silence and running pace. It was nice; it was not the peak hour of the village’s schedule, so not many citizens were outside on the streets and even none at all when he entered the forest training grounds. It was in complete silence, aside from the crunch of the grass under his feet and his rhythmic breathing on the run. He closed his eyes in peace for a second to relish in the quiet. Familiar red eyes peered at him in clear amusement just as he reopened his eyes.
“Hi!”
“AH!” He stumbled and almost tripped over. How did she get here?! Ugh, and it was so peaceful too. He only closed his eyes for a moment... but he didn’t feel any change in presence at all. Demon glared at her, still jogging. She kept up with his speed easily, though he could clearly see that she was cheating. “What the fuck are you doing’ here”
“Jogging of course. Aren’t you silly,” she giggled.
“No one calls fuckin’ floatin’ backwards as joggin’.” More specifically, she was hopping rather long distances backwards but details, details. He groaned and rubbed his eyes. ''The difference between good and evil has no meaning beyond that which we chose to see, and if we chose to close our eyes, then the difference too disappears. This is the nature of truth. The truth is something that has no intrinsic shape because it is based on the viewer, like a piece of art. And thus using words like 'truth' argumentatively will inherently run into the requirement that you talk simply about facts and numbers. Anything beyond that, any plea of assessment ,will hit the wall of relativism. This is the nature of the truth.' What was she doing here of all places? How did she find him here? Did she even go home to sleep and shower and change? She was wearing the same clothes as yesterday. He was about to yell at her again, but stopped short. His run slowed to a confused halt as he looked around. Yume had disappeared without a trace.
“Hey! Girlie?”
He must be hallucinating. He didn’t know if she was a shinobi herself or not but no ninja could just appear and disappear without some sort of trace chakra. Now that he thought about it he didn’t feel any bursts of chakra while she was hopping backwards alongside him. A feat like that surely needed chakra use of some sort. The Demon groaned to himself. He really must be hallucinating... the bartender probably put something in the alcohol from last night or something. Deciding to simply brush it off, he resumed on his run. There wasn’t anything interrupting him from his run from then on.
After a couple more laps around the village, Demon finished his run right in the middle of the forest. Slumping back against a tree trunk for short break, he looked up through the canopy trees. His mind didn’t stray from its core much. The low rustling through the leaves hummed in sync with his brainwaves, as he spaced deeper into his unconscious. It was a rabbit hole, his mind. What he thinks about is something most people fear to tread into should they even see the slightest hint of what.
The wind blew colder. He was still staring up past the canopy of the trees.
“Oh! I didn’t know you could actually think,” came the same familiar and infuriating giggle. His eyes widened. Yume’s face was upside down, directly in front of his. He yelled, off guard, again and within an accidental blink, she was nowhere in sight. He whirled around. There was only the tree trunk behind him. She couldn’t have positioned herself above him, even with chakra work and crouching. What was she, a fucking ghost?
“I’m goin’ fuckin’ crazy...” he muttered and picked himself up from the ground to resume his spontaneous training regime. Demon started on some push ups. He found push ups as one of the easier workouts, as swordsmanship did already help out on his upper body strength.
One... two... three...
“F o u r.” A weight on his back forced him flat on the ground purely by its sudden presence. He gasped as he fell and turned his head back to see the girl that had been somehow popping up and annoying him all morning. The crimson eyes peered down with that flirty, yet at the same time, infuriating, smile. “Only four push ups? You don’t last very long, do you?”
“Gah! Get off me, you psycho!”
She only giggled and ruffled his short red hair. “Oh come on, cutie, I’m sure you can pick yourself up. Or... are these biceps just for show?” Cutie?! The Demon glared back at her and managed to push himself back up after some readjusting. He was still housing Yume on his back and thankfully she wasn’t that heavy. The crimson eyed woman returned his glare with a soft giggle and leaned down closer his ear, hand still atop his head. Her fingernails were raking across his scalp as she purred into his ear. “F i v e ~”
Alright this was enough. Demon launched himself up and tried to flip Yume into a more subdued position. She disappeared in a blink; he missed quite obviously and fell face down with the woman once again sitting comfortably on his back. He was furious alongside baffled. How did she move around like that? That wasn’t shinobi, let alone human. Groaning and defeated just from the annoyance, he pushed himself back up and resumed his push ups. Too much time was being wasted dealing with this woman. “So you’re not a ghost,” he stated gruffly, more than questioned.
Five... Six...
Yume chuckled to herself but said nothing about it. She simply leaned back and let herself become a handicap to his push up training. What’s training without a little weight challenge anyway? “Seven . . . eight . . . nine”
“QUIT COUNTIN’!”
Pouting, the woman crossed her arms and sat in silence as Demon continued with his push ups. The rhythm of his push ups was consistent; they could lull someone on top of him to sleep if his pushes weren’t so violent and rough.
It had been a while and not one of them spoke yet. Yume mentally counted that he had done a hundred and eight. Demon didn’t bother with numbers himself. He just kept going until he thought he did enough and it was time for another break. Discreetly peeking up at the woman on his back, he decided that now (one hundred and twenty push ups) were enough. 'The blind man knows no difference between the white angel and the black widow. This is because the difference between the angel and the widow is what difference we care for it to be. It will never be anything more than what we want to see it as, and it will never be less. This inherent deception is what is the perception of reality.' As sudden as the weight on his back, he rolled over and got up quickly, expecting her to fall with a yelp. To his disappointment, she simply jumped off him just milliseconds after he even thought of getting up. He looked at her incredulously, while she blinked back pseudo-innocently. “What the hell are you doin’ here?” he asked again. The level of annoyance in him was pretty consistent with falters of spiking up into fury here and there. Yume tilted her head and smiled. “Just strolling around. Thought I’d keep you company.”
Freaky, psycho, phantom, stalker girl... Demon’s eyes twitched irately, looking like he was just this close to exploding in anger. “Well run off and stroll away from me.” It seemed that the threat blew over her head as Yume slowly rested her hand on her hip. “Did you just try to make a play on words?”
“What of it?! Scram, woman!”
She waved her free hand dismissively. “I won’t get in the way.” Somehow, that sounded like a lie to him. He twitched again. “You shouldn’t waste your training time trying to chase me off, cutie.”
“Fuckin’ stop callin’ me that. You don’t even know what my name is!”
Yume giggled to herself and simply hopped up into a tree branch, surprisingly out of his way. “Does it matter? Cutie is good enough for me.” Demon looked up at her suspiciously and jogged off deeper into the forest, away from the crazy lady. Huh. For a moment he thought she wasn’t human. Maybe he was right.
He eventually stopped jogging, finding himself at another section of the forest, alone. Well, he hoped he was fucking alone. That woman was so hard to deal with in such a prolonged period. He checked around the area until he was satisfied that she had left him to his own devices. Dropping down onto the grass, he rested for a couple of seconds before starting off on some rounds of sit ups and crunches. God forbid if Yume randomly popped up on one of his ups. He wouldn’t know what he would do if he were to be surprised again. He gritted his teeth as his abdominals burned. Why was he thinking about that? It’s annoying and fucking stupid. The rest of the morning was of his giant extended warm up of jogs, push ups and sit ups. There wasn’t any sign of Yume around.
Lunch was at a small noodle bar in the village. He returned into the forest as quickly as he could after his meal. Running into people that would dare interact with him would be pain and it’d be remarkably worse if a certain crimson red eyed, dark blue haired woman found him again. Surrounded and circled by trees and small animals, Demon reached for one of his swords and unsheathed. He exhaled slowly. A familiar giggle sounded from behind him. Once again, it was just so sudden, without so much the slightest hint of her oncoming presence. He yelped and spun around with his sword swinging. Was the woman even standing behind him? Perhaps. He thought he saw her image, but just as his blade tried to make contact, she was gone as if she never was there to begin with. His sword hit the tree trunk behind him instead. He blinked, dumbfounded and yanked his sword back, scratching the back of his head with his free hand. Was she even here at all? Yes, right? How else could he have heard her laugh? But he wasn’t sure if he even saw her just then when he turned around. Chalking it back up to hallucinations again, this time perhaps from a lack of sleep, Demon readied his sword and charged towards one of the trees. He probably would be able to cleanly slice through the trunk like sushi, due to his physical condition from last time, but it didn’t matter. He just wanted to see where he was at.
The blade sliced through a little more of halfway of the trunk. Not bad, he thought, pulling out his sword from the tree. Demon returned back into his stance in order to try again. Another laugh tinkled from his right and he snapped around to actually see the woman standing there, enjoying herself from the show he was putting on. Demon grimaced and then snarled, “I thought I told you to scram, girlie.” She didn’t reply; it was like she really wasn’t there and he was turning crazier by the minute. He glanced at his blade and then back at her. She didn’t disappear like the few times she did earlier in the morning. Before he could contemplate, his body had already moved, blade raised to strike the woman. Woman beating cries and protests aside, it was a shinobi world and Yume may or may not be a shinobi herself. His sword flew down, so close in slicing her head off, when Yume moved forward herself and passed through his blade and then his body. She flashed further behind him and leaned back on the tree. She smiled silently at him while his eyes widened and he shouted, “So you are a ghost?!”
He was visibly torn and confused on this. The more he thought about it, the more annoyed he felt. The more annoyed he felt, the angrier he became. It boiled to the point where he thought, fuck it, and charged. He swung at her again, but instead of her phasing through him to dodge; she simply disappeared again just as he blinked. His sword made contact with bark and he had no choice but to pull it back out. His eyes darted around, expecting her reappearance in some other obscure place. He was aided by her echoing laughs; ethereal laughs that didn’t quite seem real or even there, but whenever he turned, he saw her. In fury, he launched at her again, trying his hardest not to blink lest he missed her again, but no. She just dispersed into fine mist and reappeared elsewhere, letting him know with giggles. It was a cycle that went on for a while. Demon goes after her, sword swinging. He deals a blow, misses and hits the tree instead, while the woman he couldn’t decide whether was a ghost or a hallucination disappeared or dodged and reappeared elsewhere. It was a one-sided fight, a fight that wouldn’t fall in his favour. As much as he knew this, he wouldn’t stop. He was angry; she pissed him off with her incessant appearances and meddling. If this was a good way for him vent away his fury, then so be it. Maybe this was a blessing in disguise, she allowed herself to be the proverbial punching bag Demon oh so truly needed. That is, if she was even real. He chased and swung. A multitude of sword techniques and manoeuvres were being used just on this girl. Powerful and advanced as they were, they held a tone of anger and uncontrollable violence; all of which missed the image of the crimson eyed woman and landed on all of the trees around him. Did I say it’d help him vent his anger? That was a mistake. It only made him angrier, determined to strike Yume’s image at least once. Not sure how that would work out, for he still wasn’t sure himself if he was hallucinating or she was actually here and fuckin’ around with him. Either way, it was a near impossible task. Still, it didn’t stop him. Pulling out his secondary sword, he continued his impossible chase to strike the strange woman named Yume.
That took all day, well into the evening. He had failed to even place the tiniest nick on her skin, let alone a good hefty slice. He gave up on that, seeing as that training session had started and ended so crazily, he might as well call it a fucking day and grab dinner. He found himself back in the bar he was in last night. His lips were upturned; their food was kind of shit. Really, the only reason this place was still afloat was because of the copious amounts of alcohol they served and how braindead the adult population of this village was for said alcohol. Not deciding to be overly picky, he entered and ordered the least risky meal on the menu and a glass of hard alcohol. The same bartender glowered at this regular, but annoying, customer, pestering him for last night’s bill that was still unpaid for. Demon merely waved his hand dismissively as he ate, in assurance he wouldn’t skimp out on the bill today. Maybe. The movement of someone sliding into the barstool on his right pricked up in his ears. The bartender’s grouchy demeanour had changed to the over kind and infatuated one. Demon froze. The only time he ever noticed the old man act that way was...
Slowly, mechanically, his head turned to his right and the sight he saw almost made him want to whip out one of his swords and attack like he tried earlier in the depths of the forest. Yume seemed to feel his burning stare and turned herself to look at him. With the same flirtatious smile, she said her greetings, “Oh why if isn’t you, cutie. How was the rest of your training?”
He wanted to rip her head off. Why, oh fucking why, was she addressing him as cutie?! “As if you didn’t know... You were there the whole fuckin’ day.”
She looked offended at the gesture. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I left when you told me to.”
That had to be a crock of bullshit. There was no way he was hallucinating her image for the entirety of the afternoon. It had to be a... a... an illusionary technique! That’s it! Why didn’t he think of it before?! Was it that powerful that it didn’t come to mind? Hallucinations were still not out of the realm of possibility. Much more wary, he cussed under his breath and went back to his food and drinks. Yume stared at him for a little while longer and smiled, leaning closer to him. “Are you still mad?” she asked, only to have Demon’s palm in her face and pushing her back. “Fuckin’ livid,” he replied, taking a swig of his whiskey. He felt her grab onto his hand pry herself free from his grab. She sounded like she was frustrated from that feat, but once he turned to look at her again, aside from the annoyance in her eyes, she was smiling softly. Huh, so she did have other emotions other than bat shit crazy. He groaned to himself. “Why are you following me around, woman?”
She didn’t even bother correcting him with her name. Her hands were still holding onto his as she giggled, whether it was at his obliviousness or not, he couldn’t tell. “I t o l d y o u,” she said again, in a rather sing song voice, “I l i k e you. You’re... i n t e r e s t i n g.” His expression scrunched up into a grimace and he rubbed his face vigorously. Why was she so persistent? There was nothing charming or cute with this behaviour. He needed another drink so desperately. Snapping his fingers, he called for a refill. And another. And another. He drank and drank and then drank some more, while the female beside him was quietly having some time to herself with her own drink and the occasional exchange with the infatuated bartender. Demon looked across, with that drunken flush splayed across his cheeks again. Why wouldn’t she go after the guy that was clearly interested in her? Wait, why was that bar dude even hitting on her? That wasn’t cool, she was into him. It seemed that alcohol turned him to a completely different personality, as he stood, slurred... something, his brain was too fumbled to register what he just yelled, but thought it was a good idea at the time and then socked the bartender in the eye. Even time stopped just for a moment to register what just happened. Then the bar was in an uproar. It was, not surprisingly, him against everyone else. Yume was... was he didn’t know where the little pretty woman went, but if training that morning and afternoon told him anything, she could slip away and out from trouble whenever she wanted. Him on the other hand...
THWACK!
A barstool smashed over his head. The bar patrons yelled, the bartender yelled; good fucking god, were there no security in this establishment to keep shit in order from punks like Demon? It appeared not, as the bartender got in on the scuffle (obviously, since he was the recipient of that black eye from Demon), others joined in against Demon. Bloody noses, black eyes and broken bones galore from nearly everyone involved, it took all he could not to unsheathe his swords and start slicing heads off. He had issues; that was for sure, but they weren’t intense enough so that it would cause him to be murderous criminal. An assaulting criminal was enough. It felt like the fight took for ages, but it was finished as fast as it had started. It left Demon thrown out from the bar, remarkably not banned from the place (probably because he was one of the bigger contributions patrons there or something... not a very high establishment if someone as violent as he didn’t get banned), in a drunken stupor. “Argh...” he grunted, wiping away the blood that was trickling down his nose. His shoulder was sprained, but he popped that back in place easily, but not without a sharp yell of pain. “Fug!” He was stumbling, headed in the direction that he thought was home. One more drunken stumble found him supported by petite arms. Ungraciously, he looked at the newcomer with a grunt. It was her.
“Arrghh... ij joor fault...” he slurred accusingly. Yume rolled her red eyes and smiled, as she pulled out a handkerchief and wiped the rest of the blood away from his head and face before helping him walk. “I didn’t do anything, cutie. You started that fight yourself.” Demon grimaced and pushed her away. He didn’t need help walking. What did she think he was, a baby?
“Nah, it was youuu...” he accused again, stumbling some more. “You’s a witch...” That made his female companion laugh more than anything. Reaching around, she rested her hand on the back of his head, gingerly enough not to even trigger whatever pain he had from the barstool to the head. It wouldn’t be surprising if he did get a concussion from it. “If you say so, cutie,” she giggled. Maybe he was out of it, but there was something in contact with his cheek just for a moment. It was quickly brushed off, as he was still determined that he was playing around with an evil witch.
His dreams were strange tonight. It wasn’t as if nightmares are uncommon with him, but this was strange. He was in his nightclothes, which only really consisted of his boxers and a pillow in hand. Where was he? It was dark, hard to make out what was what, but his bare feet relayed that he was standing on cold, cold concrete. As he stepped forward, he felt someone was behind him, following that step. But as he looked behind him, no one was there. How eerily familiar; it was as if he had gone through this during the daytime while he lived. It was the whooshing sound of fast movement, unnatural movement that made him truly turn around to face it. Something launched at him, akin to how he would charge at things in anger, and pounced. Demon yelled. With no other weapons to fend himself aside from a pillow and his bare hands, he did what a normal person would do. Bat the thing away with the pillow of course. Whatever launched at him was humanoid, mostly silent aside from the high pitched cackling of its laugh. It chased after him and he was forced to run and dodge from its speed. Demon grunted in annoyance and tossed aside the pillow he was holding onto. What the fuck is a pillow going to do anyway, smother this overly active moving monster to death? Laughable.
He had trained for things like these, because even in the vast and endless span of dessert there were things one did not see. This sort of transportation between the dimension of the real and the dimension of the fake was not new to him in the least. He was elsewhere, suddenly. His wrists wriggled, sending waves of pain through his arms and when he looked to either side, the spears were still there, going completely through his flesh. Ah yes, the familiar feeling of dread came back to him now. The crunch of his bones when he moved was not something he could ignore, it was not a pain he could bare, and in helpless retaliation, he let out a loud and graceless roar. Blood from his mouth sprayed out into the open, summer air, and the people seemed to move away from where it fell. Was he so disgusting to them? Or was this just a figment of the dream that he was seeing. The world around him seemed open to the suggestion of change and that made it hard to keep track of where he was and where he wasn't. Instead, as if all of the faces were those he recognized, he looked about as if this was a part of his future, and not his past. In the scorching heat of the season, the people below wore thin veils of purple and maroon to keep the rays off of their face. Their skin, a shade lighter than his, wrinkled to peer up against the sun to see him, the spectacle. Was it a dream? His eyes felt tired and he closed them.
He was given a simple assignment. It was to murder the Duke. These sorts of missions did not require much effort. You go in, you find a way through the guards, you kill the target, and you leave. The aftermath was irrelevant and the reasons were unneeded. The duke, however, was different. He was a man known for his intellect, and had won some sort of Chess competition in his younger days. The fame he had gained through competition translated to political recognition when he won his primary elections. That was many years ago, when Sora lived in a far away land and a very different life. The Duke's name was hard to remember, and he strained to catch a hold of it, a young fat man with thick eye-liner. Was it Genbu? He might have resembled the villain of a book were he not a real man in the real world. And while Genbu did not have a perfect rise to power, his road was not marred with too many pot-holes. He continued attending Chess tournaments, winning most of them even as he aged and the new age of competition rose in the ranks.
But was the name really Genbu? Asura struggled to push his memories beyond where they had currently stopped, and wondered what sort of realm he was in where even his own mind had betrayed him. He felt old and alone. A true prodigy - that duke.
He might have been someone that the Demon respected, had circumstances not been this way. But it was a few years ago during the Ducal elections that he took Oyashira by storm. Oyashira, referred in short as Oya, was a large metropolis for agriculture. A large metropolis that he was now nailed in. In the middle of the desert they had made a city around an oasis, and managed to maintain it with their technology. In lands filled to the brink with sands, having access to water was more powerful than having access to ready death. Commerce flocked around them and they became the center of produce. It was practically the only place in hundreds of miles where livestock could be kept, and so their mode of business never ran dry in the same way that their oasis never did. So subjectively perhaps it was the future of the desert's trade, but right now, it was his funeral. It all felt barbaric and violent, the act conducted here in front of a people that were insistent on moving forward, and not moving back.
This duke of their choosing was their new leader, the one who would take them to the next stage of growth. And growth was such a slippery slope to go down. People called any sort of change a matter of growth and progression. If the rate of killings increased, it was attributed to a new tipping point of society. If the rate of rapes increased, it too was attributed to the same. The only thing that stayed constant was that some times we need brute force to enforce our will. The man had ideas that were not very palatable to the upper class. He wanted to expand the village's energy resource by incorporating the oasis, which was a publicly accessible resource of water. Up until then all of Oya used Wind Factories for their energy, not having thought to tap into hydraulics. So when Genbu suggested that one of the first orders of business he aimed to complete was to get the village off of the privatized Wind Factory trade and onto the nationalized oasis resource, he had made quite a few rich people very angry.
The rich were always the same. They had gotten so far with the tricks and moves they had used in the past that they could not move too much away from them. Bribery and deception was ingrained into them because they knew it had to work before. And if it worked before, it would work now. And that's why the Demon was there, on an assassination mission to take out this man, to solve a problem in the most primal of ways.
He had at first questioned whether he really wanted to partake in such a barbaric shutdown of something that was so obviously good. He had heard of the Duke before and now, given how their paths intersected, he regretted ever knowing of the man's good reputation.
When he entered Oya, it had been at the deep midst of night, and the silence that overtook everything was both a sign of good luck and terrible misfortune. It was too quiet.
Unfortunately for him, they had been prepared. The Chess player had made the King's Gambit, hiring his own spies and sending them off to his opposition. So by the time Sora had arrived, he was expected and captured with ease. And for the first time Genbu showed aggression to the public. Up until then he had been the silent mastermind behind this new era of success that he wanted to usher in. The people were ready to trust him in what he said because of his success in politics and chess but now... now when he had shown to the village what a traitor looks like... he had morphed into something else.
“Alright, come at me, you lil’ piece of shit...” he taunted and that is what he received. It was like both the bar fight from before and a wrestling match. It was humanoid, it had human strength and attributes. He rolled around with the monster, punching it and getting punched by it. Kicking it and getting kicked by it. At one point there would have been a comical scene of those two strangling each other. He broke its arm, to which the thing screeched horridly. Why did the weirdest shit happen to him after going to that bar? No, it wasn’t the bar, it was that woman. 'Why did weird shit start happening with her around. He punched it in what was assumed to be the face and as it cowered, he threw down a relentless assault of more punches. It was like he had to always be on his toes now. It was like he was going crazy from what could or could not be hallucinations. He had nowhere to go to release his frustration and confusion. He had nowhere to go, not even in his sleep, for this son of a bitch was picking a fight with him. Sure, it had only been one occurrence, but the human mind is so quick to judge, so quick to attribute results from just one singular event, it was so easy for him to start blaming everything that just recently happened. Namely, that red eyed woman that keeps on fuckin’ popping up wherever he went. Scrambling around, his roughed up hands blindly sweeping the ground, he miraculously came across something peculiar. It was a hilt that joined onto a sword. A sword, a legitimate weapon that could be used to kill this son of a bitch. With a roar, he grabbed the sword with more defiance and swung it across. It sliced the monster’s head clean off and with a swift and heavy kick, he pushed the thing off him. The decapitated head screamed and the body writhed around in panic. Feeling relieved, proud of himself and cocky all at once, Demon spat on it in disrespect and cursed it out.
He celebrated too early. It seemed as if every single mythology and folktale came together to create an even more monstrosity. Heads regrew and split, extra limbs grew, colours changed and its voice distorted into something more sinister and inhuman. “Oh fuckin’ shit!” He dove to the right just as whatever the fuck it was struck down at where he was standing moments ago. Its head got stuck in the concrete and as it struggled, Demon was reeling his head to find a weak point. If fuckin’ slicing its head off didn’t do shit, what else was there? The heart? Make it unable by breaking its legs? There were endless possibilities, but they all fell under the problem, what if the thing just rejuvenate and recovers from its wounds like some mutant? “Fuck me sideways.” He didn’t have time, the thing was already breaking free. He gasped and its multiple heads roared in his face. He was done for.
He awoke with a start. The horrid screaming faded, but it was still fresh in his memory. Ugh, what a fuckin’ nightmare, he groaned to himself and rolled over to his side for some more shut eye. Something stopped him from rolling over fully though. Skin. Hair. It wasn’t his. Demon’s eyes shot open and behold, that stupid annoying freaky stalking red eyed, dark blue haired girl was lying in bed beside him. She looked like she was sleeping so peacefully, covered from the thin blanket from his bed. Wait, no she wasn’t naked... but she was in just only white lingerie. It took three seconds of silence. And then he screamed. Super loud.
“AHHH!!! WHAT THE FUCK?!”
The woman stirred and fluttered open her eyes, confused at first. “Eh...?” she turned to look at him and smiled. “Good morning cutie~”
Just plainly out of reflex, his foot shot out and kicked her off the bed, rewarding himself with the thud and a surprised yelp. His heart pounded faster, fearing the most reasonable event that could have happened provided the situation that had been presented to him. Was that a bad thing? Probably... probably not, but he’d at least want to remember what the fuck happened! “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOIN’ HERE?!” he shouted. A whirlwind of confusion among other moods shifting in between writhed around his insides.
“You mean you don’t remember?” she asked, not at all seeming hurt or offended. It just sounded like genuine curiosity and care. She sat up from the floor, clinging onto the blanket against her chest and hopped back into bed beside him. He tensed up as her hand reached behind to his head, a familiar feeling that he felt from last night. He flinched. There was no concussion, Yume noticed, in fact, his injuries recovered so much more quickly than a regular human being’s. Still tensing, he glowered at her. All he could remember was the bar fight... him stumbling through the street... then she came along to help him. After that... “Did you drug me? We fuckin’ didn’t...? Did we...?”
“My, you really were wasted from last night,” she sighed, running her fingers through his hair. He was confused, unsure whether to relax into her touch or chop off her limbs. Yume smiled and leaned in slowly and rested her head on his shoulder. “Don’t worry, nothing happened.” Demon was befuddled. Then... then why was she here, practically naked and staying the night?! He was still getting his head around this, as Yume suddenly giggled and pushed him over. He landed back onto his bed, caught off guard and aching with whatever pain that still remained from last night’s bar fight.
“OW! What the fuck, woman?!” he spat, annoyed again in record time. Yume was climbing all over him, slowly, as if any sudden movement would ruin a perfect plan she cooked up. Straddling his waist, she leaned in close to his face and for a moment, Demon thought he saw her crimson red eyes glow just a little bit brighter. She smiled, flirtatious as ever. “Or maybe...” she mused, more to herself than him really. Her eyes were cast to the side. Was she blushing? Demon wondered briefly. It seemed like such an uncharacteristic thing for someone like her to do, even though the only grasp of personality he had on her was merely summed up with the words crazy, stalking, and psycho. “Something did actually happen~”
“Wha-?” He stopped. She kissed him. His eyes were wide open and the next thing he noticed was his wrists were pinned down by her hands and more. Was it chakra? The woman on top of him pulled away and opened her eyes, peering down at him with a smile. Okay, he was sure that they were fucking glowing... but he didn’t point it out. “What in the fuckin’ hell...?”
She giggled in a way that she wanted to sound innocent, but it was obviously not. Not to him. Yume drew her face closer to his once more. “Don’t you remember, cutie? I told you before.” She pecked his unresponsive lips lightly at irregular intervals, whispering in between, “I really really like you a lot...” She had to be casting a spell on him or something; each syllable made him feel like he was slipping away just a little bit at a time. He would protest and accuse her if he could, list ways to get away from her and/or perhaps maim this psycho, but as she moved her lips down his neck and further, suddenly he didn’t really give a damn at all.
“You... you you you you...” the Demon muttered almost to the point of insanity as he stomped off through the village for the forest as quickly as he could. To his dismay, Yume caught up with him easily with a skip in her step and virtually glowing with bliss. “You are a fuckin’ witch. You have to be a witch, I just know it.” She only looked at him in mock hurt. “You didn’t like it?” she asked in such a dejected tone, yet he saw her as such a conniving woman, he couldn’t tell if she was being genuine anymore.
“I didn’t say... That wasn’t what I... ARGH, fuck off!” He broke into a run to get away, not knowing if he left her there looking hurt or smiling in amusement from his antics. If he had to make a wager on that, he was sure that Yume would be standing there, giggling her ass off because of him. She probably was just that crazy. He reached the forest as before, panting slightly. He didn’t pace his run; he just wanted to get away as quickly as possible. Well that was the jogging leg of his training session finished, as unprepared and half assed as it was. He slumped onto the grass to catch his breath. His golden eyes darted around the area. He was almost certain that she would pop out at any moment, if yesterday taught him anything. He waited for a bit, a couple of minutes at best. She didn’t appear. With a sigh, mostly in relief, Demon hunched over to start his push ups and sit ups, crunches and the like. For the most part, he was just half expecting the girl to just suddenly reappear on his back through his push ups or by his feet and directly at his face when he would sit up from crunches. There was nothing so far. He had been working out alone for a remarkable amount of time considering, since Yume interfered with his life. The remnants of her presence still lingered, such that he was so wary of whatever he did, passively preparing himself for her next abrupt arrival. He wasn’t going to get startled like a kitty cat today.
But she didn’t show. Demon huffed. That was a good riddance; surely she got bored and had better shit to do than stalk him all day. Deeper into the forest, he passed by the area of mangled trees and branches from yesterday when he was hallucinating (perhaps) and tried to get at least one stab at the girl. Grimacing, although if it was more for his failure to do so or just the fact he was going crazy himself was anyone’s guess. But he ignored that and continued on, venturing deeper into the forest. There had to be somewhere where he could truly be alone with no psychopathic witches after him. How successful he’d be... he had his doubts.
He stopped when he felt like he walked enough and drew his sword. For the most part, the cuts and bruises from last night’s fight stopped bothering him, but the weakness that came after it still lingered. He probably wouldn’t be able to swing with his maximum power or his technique would be subpar from his strained body... but... who gives a damn? He had his eye on one tree in front of him. Readying his stance, he waited for his arbitrary moment to strike.
A giggle. “Impressive how you can still train... even after what we did this morning.”
“GAH!” He instinctively turned and slashed at the threat, only to hear the contact of plastic and splashes of water. Yume had half ducked from his swing already, though the bottled water she was holding didn’t have a lid and neck anymore. He groaned and lowered his sword. “What the fuck, you crazy bitch... Are you trying to get yourself killed? And what are you still fuckin’ doing here?!”
She giggled again. “Drink?” she offered the cut up bottle, completely brushing off his semi-interrogation. He glowered at her and snatched the bottle from her hand. He was still waiting for her answer as he took a couple of swigs of water. What was she, a psycho version of a wife? Who brings water to someone like him in a deserted part of the forest for the sole reason of hydrating him? No, she had to be up to something. Swear to god, if she tried that magic trick like she did this morning, he was going to make her very very very very very sorr-
“Hello? Cutie? Don’t stare at me for too long, I might get the wrong idea.” Yume smiled as she snapped him out of his reverie and he grunted, tossing back the open bottle to her and turning away to continue some of his weaponry training. Before he could start, he was graced to annoyance by the voice he had heard far too much in the last two days. “You’re just going to slice up trees?” she asked.
- DemonCitizen
- Ryo : 7800
Re: Edict of the Demon, Chapter 3
Tue Mar 04, 2014 6:36 pm
“What of it?” he asked gruffly. He raised his sword, but lowered it again with an exasperated roll of his eyes when Yume stood directly in front of him. She smiled. “Wouldn’t it be more fun if you were training against something more animated” He stared at her. She stared back, her red eyes slowly dulling as if she realised that this man wasn’t as smart as she had thought he was. “Someone like me perhaps?”
To be honest, he wasn’t dumb. He knew what she was alluding to, but the notion of that never occurred to his head. Okay, yeah there was that time he was going after his hallucination, but she was here now. She was real. “I don’t fight girls,” he stated. But just as the last word left his mouth, a sudden and sharp pain riveted through his body from his thigh. “ARGH!” His sword dropped onto the grass as he clutched onto his leg and looked down to see a thin blade embedded into his flesh. It wiggled up and down, loosening the wound such that the sword would no longer become a plug. As the blood pooled and dripped down his leg slowly, he looked up to the owner of the sword. Yume’s expression was no longer the flirty young vixen she annoyingly made herself out to be. Instead her face was cold; almost lifeless if it weren’t for the two faintly glowing red orbs she’d call her eyes. The next thing he noticed was the strange intricacy of her blade. It wasn’t a katana; it was thinner than the average katana. It had a light bluish tint in the metal, with the hilt a darker blue, almost black, with small colourless crystals encrusted around it her grip. In one quick movement, she yanked her sword back out, causing him to yell and grip onto his wound more to stop it from bleeding anymore. “Why in the fuck would you...?”
Her sword was upright before her, with her free hand tracing along the edge of the blade until her finger met with his blood. “You didn't like it?” This time, instead of appearing dejected, she sounded like a tease. What a sinister tease. She looked back at him with a coy smile, and stroked along the blade of her sword. “It's amazing just how much you can learn about someone, after doing so little as spending one night with them.. ne~?” His heart began to race, the blood pounded in his ears and his body rushed with the adrenaline he relished in. Yume readjusted her stance and pointed her thin sword to Demon. “Your sword,” she purred. “Pick it up.”
She reminded him of the Reverend Mother from the Apostles of the Sea. They were a crew of religious fanatics that used an intimate knowledge of man as well as an impossibly strong grasp of Genjutsu to spread their religion. It was there that he had first seen the sight of a woman that understood the power she held over the race she inhabited. Women could wage wars so much easier than men could, and perhaps it was only right that they had been held down all of these years, in an effort to keep them from taking over. It was a terrifying sight when the Reverend Mother came out to the stage in Sansa village. Her display of extraordinary powers was a simple one. She called up a man from the crowd, a known hero of the village, and she touched his forehead. There was a silence that followed, but it was petaled with confidence. The man was a loved figure in the village of Sansa.
Then she said something along the lines of 'you have raped three women this year,' and the crowd of people watching erupted in curses at her. They were appalled that she might walk into their midst and shame one of their own in this way. Some threw bottles while others threw their words but none of them seemed to phase the Reverend Mother as she stood, with her fingers still on the man's forehead. Then, suddenly, the man fell to his knees an covered his face with his hands. The crowd went silent as a shrill wave of realization washed over them.
The man began crying out loud and the people did not find the will to move. They only watched as the hero of their village perhaps made the largest admission of guilt that they had ever seen. The Reverend Mother turned to the people and smiled at them. The stage she stood on had been filled with paper towels and garbage from the crowd's previous rage but now no one threw a single thing. They watched her in awe and in fear, feeling more exposed than they ever were. She smiled but it was obvious that she was observing them. Her eyes moved over them like a hand moves over the keys of a piano, inspecting how each one dents to the slightest of pressure. And they all dented in. Their spines seemed to melt a little when her watch moved onto each one of them.
They felt exposed.
This girl, Yume, she saw into him somehow. He knew it yet he could not figure out an explanation as to how. This was not to say that he was unable to find her secret. Some thing he had missed was what tricked his mind now. In the same way that the Reverend Mother had done it, so many years ago. The truth was that she could not read the man's mind at all. In fact, she could not read anyone's mind. She simply cast a strong sensory Genjutsu on him, making his knees numb and rushing his mind with the need to weep. It was a simple technique that worked only on the unprepared. And you didn't even need to be a Shinobi with control of Chakra to resist it. Once you knew you were up against a Genjutsu user you could rationalize your way out of most of these emotional attacks.
But the man was not aware of this, and neither was Sansa village. They were taken into the charade with ease. And Asura would not forget the dread he felt at the gullibility of man. How easy it was to see a woman and believe that she had some intrinsic knowledge of the man that a man could not have of a woman. It was accepted culture, like a ghost story we all chose to believe.
Demon furrowed his brows. This girl was nuts, but at the same time, she gave him opportunity. “Fine,” he grunted and bent down to pick up his sword. Yume smiled, delighted. That was when he drew his sword’s twin from his back, to which Yume swayed her free hand around until a replica of her sword materialised in her grasp from swirls of mist. Demon’s jaw dropped in disbelief. “Oh what the fuck, you’re a witch that fuckin’ COPIES other people?!” She tilted her head to the side innocently, saying nothing, as her red eyes were taunting him on its own. Demon had enough of this. It was too much to handle. With a roar, such a predictable way to indicate action, he recklessly charged towards Yume, as she charged towards him herself. All moral obligations were out the fucking window. Hey, she fucking asked for it, alright?!
The spar was so strange and so interesting in itself. Yume was mirroring his movements perfectly, every swing was met straight in the middle. But there was still a noticeable difference on how the two actually moved together. Demon was reckless as shit; it was almost as if he wasn’t thinking at all. His female opponent, while mirroring his movements, they had an edge and precision that Demon did not have with his raw swings and manoeuvres. He gritted his teeth. “Don’t you have your own fuckin’ fightin’ style?” he hissed through the gaps of his blade and hers.
Yume blinked and smiled quite giddily. “You want to me to use my own sword style, cutie?” Again with the cutie pet name... why was she taunting him so much? He growled and retreated a ways back into a defensive stance. The sword Yume had just created shattered into what seemed like water vapours, but one could never be too sure of what happens in the ninja world. Now with both hands on her one and only blade, the battle resumed. Demon was fast, and as he expected, she kept up with him just as easily. The jog from yesterday and the walk today could have told him that. She had to worry about two swords flying at her, while she only had the one to both defend herself and be on the offensive. That should give him the advantage. Not to mention the sheer difference in sizes between the two. He was much bigger than her in comparison, well built, while she was thin and though average height of the rest of the female population, was perceivably smaller than he. What she could have had over him was taken away by the Demon himself. She was fast, but so was he. They matched in speed but differed in size and attitude. It was still hard to tell which one was the superior of the two. Every time he struck at her, she could dodge and every time she struck at him, he could block and perhaps even use his second sword to counterattack. They were at an impasse and with such contrasting attributes, they were at the same unmoving level as they were when Yume was only just mirroring Demon’s attacks.
He was quickly getting bored of this and switched it up, going in for a punch instead of a slice. Just as he changed, just that one different move, something seemed to click. Yume dodged the punch as expected and dove in through his defences, giving a nasty gash across his abdomen. He cursed loudly and glared at Yume. What a fucking cheater! He thought, fuming. I-I don’t know, was that cheating? Was there any rules against that in a shinobi spar to begin with? Yume only peered at him as if to say, ‘Well something had to happen.’ And that something did happen. The woman became more reckless too, in such an unpredictable method of recklessness that Demon couldn’t fathom. Was it just merely because she was a fucking psychopath? Maybe. He was sporting cuts left and right, and while he noticed it was nothing but a light flesh wound, it only made him angrier... or more pumped... or both. There was no true way he could tell what he was feeling, aside from the rapid pounding of blood flow through his body. Every time he tried, he couldn’t get to her. He knew he was fast. He knew she was fast. She matched him, but her style now... her style was odd. He could see his moves weaved within her techniques. How did she even get that? He stopped himself. She couldn’t have... noooo, impossible. She couldn’t have slept with him just to imitate his abilities... could she? The idea sounded absurd but at the same time he was already convinced that she was a fucking witch (no pun intended), so maybe this was a weird witchcraft to steal his secrets. This was making his head hurt.
She impaled his other leg and Demon let out a roar of pain as he fell to his knees. “FUCKIN’ SHIT!” he cursed out loudly. He hissed in pain. This wasn’t broken bone, he couldn’t just crack it back in and he’d be fine and dandy. This fucking sucked. “I swear once I’m done with you, I’m gonna FUCK you in the ASS!” he yelled, without so much thinking. Yume stopped short for just a brief moment to process his words and then giggled upon realisation. "Shouldn't you take me out to dinner first, cutie?"
“ARGH FUCKIN’ HELL, WOMAN!” He fumbled around for his twin swords and was ready to get up again. He was both livid and within a rush, while Yume calmly stood with a smile, waiting for his next move. He decided that being raw and reckless wasn’t right against her. Her constant calculating red eyed stares would come out on top and trump him... It was almost as if she was reading his mind milliseconds before he actually decided to do the action. If she wasn’t a witch, he wouldn’t be surprised to call her a fucking robot. Well in that case, two can play that strategising game. There were so many ways he could approach this. Fuck the tactical manoeuvres, he could go all out with sheer power and crush her, simply with his body weight alone. She was tiny compared to him. It’d be easy. But what of her agility? He couldn’t just play King Kong and expect shit to go his way even though it’d be really funny in itself. He noticed time and time again how she kept up with him, but was that all she had? Really? She was as small like a twig and he was much bigger. Physics should say that she’d be faster, even if it was just a short spurt of energy. Was she holding back on him? That thought made him irrationally annoyed. Why was she the one holding back her power, while he was the one going all out? Okay, he wasn’t exactly going all out in his power and in this fight; he was still injured after all. But he could feel that it didn’t hurt as bad as when he woke up this morning. Holy shit, did sex help him get better and heal quicker? The science seemed... impossible. Anywho, perhaps he should just adding in kicks to the fight this time. That way he had so many more ways in offense then than just his twin swords. She only had one sword, he had two. So by default, he really should have been the superior fighter either way...
His reeling and thinking of different strategies and tactics (or was it just the rambles of a man’s mind slowly going insane?) were cut short when Yume simply just kicked on his wrists and hands such that she could disarm him and fling his swords away from his person. Her own sword dissipated into mist as she kicked behind his knee, having him fall onto the ground with both a startled and pained yell. She dropped down onto her knees too and fell forward, pinning him down by his shoulders with her hands. With her usual flirty smile, she leaned in closer. “H m m... ~” she hummed, partially giggling as well. “We could call this a tie if you want... I know how men can get with losses on their mental records, it's all a very droll affair when ego gets into it... yaknow?...” Demon only groaned and turned his head to the side. “Do you get a fuckin’ kick out of this or what?”
Yume only giggled and pecked his cheek to his displeasure. “You know I like you a lot, cutie,” she smiled, while Demon scoffed with a dismissive, “Yeah yeah yeah, whatever.” It was the same shit, different day, even though it had been only two days. He didn’t expect her next words to take a turn of the twisted.
“But if you cheat on me, I'll kill you~”
He turned his head back and stared at Yume in disbelief. Her arm suddenly grasped into an iron grip and he flipped her over, now that he was on top. “Crazy bitch.” his eyes were narrowed in some sort of anger, his grip on her forearms only tightened more as he pulled her dangerously closer, even though he knew she could phase out of it so easily. Or was that truly a hallucination? “We’re not together to begin with... But if we’re fuckin’ around with that kind of game, the same goes to you then.” There wasn’t much else to do but play along for now. There was a crack. His grip had made her one of her bones give way, yet neither winced nor yet moved from each other. It was all rather surreal. After all this time, he still didn’t know what she wanted from him, or even if she was fucking human in this world. After a few seconds of silence had passed, Demon let go and sat back while Yume rubbed her arm. 'Like sleight of hand, her forearm had snapped back to its original position without so much a bruise. Demon watched her as she performed her witchcraft, but his interest quickly waned. He got up and turned to leave the forest, but not without Yume’s need to have the last word in.
“See you tonight, cutie~”
___
WC: 12000
To be honest, he wasn’t dumb. He knew what she was alluding to, but the notion of that never occurred to his head. Okay, yeah there was that time he was going after his hallucination, but she was here now. She was real. “I don’t fight girls,” he stated. But just as the last word left his mouth, a sudden and sharp pain riveted through his body from his thigh. “ARGH!” His sword dropped onto the grass as he clutched onto his leg and looked down to see a thin blade embedded into his flesh. It wiggled up and down, loosening the wound such that the sword would no longer become a plug. As the blood pooled and dripped down his leg slowly, he looked up to the owner of the sword. Yume’s expression was no longer the flirty young vixen she annoyingly made herself out to be. Instead her face was cold; almost lifeless if it weren’t for the two faintly glowing red orbs she’d call her eyes. The next thing he noticed was the strange intricacy of her blade. It wasn’t a katana; it was thinner than the average katana. It had a light bluish tint in the metal, with the hilt a darker blue, almost black, with small colourless crystals encrusted around it her grip. In one quick movement, she yanked her sword back out, causing him to yell and grip onto his wound more to stop it from bleeding anymore. “Why in the fuck would you...?”
Her sword was upright before her, with her free hand tracing along the edge of the blade until her finger met with his blood. “You didn't like it?” This time, instead of appearing dejected, she sounded like a tease. What a sinister tease. She looked back at him with a coy smile, and stroked along the blade of her sword. “It's amazing just how much you can learn about someone, after doing so little as spending one night with them.. ne~?” His heart began to race, the blood pounded in his ears and his body rushed with the adrenaline he relished in. Yume readjusted her stance and pointed her thin sword to Demon. “Your sword,” she purred. “Pick it up.”
She reminded him of the Reverend Mother from the Apostles of the Sea. They were a crew of religious fanatics that used an intimate knowledge of man as well as an impossibly strong grasp of Genjutsu to spread their religion. It was there that he had first seen the sight of a woman that understood the power she held over the race she inhabited. Women could wage wars so much easier than men could, and perhaps it was only right that they had been held down all of these years, in an effort to keep them from taking over. It was a terrifying sight when the Reverend Mother came out to the stage in Sansa village. Her display of extraordinary powers was a simple one. She called up a man from the crowd, a known hero of the village, and she touched his forehead. There was a silence that followed, but it was petaled with confidence. The man was a loved figure in the village of Sansa.
Then she said something along the lines of 'you have raped three women this year,' and the crowd of people watching erupted in curses at her. They were appalled that she might walk into their midst and shame one of their own in this way. Some threw bottles while others threw their words but none of them seemed to phase the Reverend Mother as she stood, with her fingers still on the man's forehead. Then, suddenly, the man fell to his knees an covered his face with his hands. The crowd went silent as a shrill wave of realization washed over them.
The man began crying out loud and the people did not find the will to move. They only watched as the hero of their village perhaps made the largest admission of guilt that they had ever seen. The Reverend Mother turned to the people and smiled at them. The stage she stood on had been filled with paper towels and garbage from the crowd's previous rage but now no one threw a single thing. They watched her in awe and in fear, feeling more exposed than they ever were. She smiled but it was obvious that she was observing them. Her eyes moved over them like a hand moves over the keys of a piano, inspecting how each one dents to the slightest of pressure. And they all dented in. Their spines seemed to melt a little when her watch moved onto each one of them.
They felt exposed.
This girl, Yume, she saw into him somehow. He knew it yet he could not figure out an explanation as to how. This was not to say that he was unable to find her secret. Some thing he had missed was what tricked his mind now. In the same way that the Reverend Mother had done it, so many years ago. The truth was that she could not read the man's mind at all. In fact, she could not read anyone's mind. She simply cast a strong sensory Genjutsu on him, making his knees numb and rushing his mind with the need to weep. It was a simple technique that worked only on the unprepared. And you didn't even need to be a Shinobi with control of Chakra to resist it. Once you knew you were up against a Genjutsu user you could rationalize your way out of most of these emotional attacks.
But the man was not aware of this, and neither was Sansa village. They were taken into the charade with ease. And Asura would not forget the dread he felt at the gullibility of man. How easy it was to see a woman and believe that she had some intrinsic knowledge of the man that a man could not have of a woman. It was accepted culture, like a ghost story we all chose to believe.
Demon furrowed his brows. This girl was nuts, but at the same time, she gave him opportunity. “Fine,” he grunted and bent down to pick up his sword. Yume smiled, delighted. That was when he drew his sword’s twin from his back, to which Yume swayed her free hand around until a replica of her sword materialised in her grasp from swirls of mist. Demon’s jaw dropped in disbelief. “Oh what the fuck, you’re a witch that fuckin’ COPIES other people?!” She tilted her head to the side innocently, saying nothing, as her red eyes were taunting him on its own. Demon had enough of this. It was too much to handle. With a roar, such a predictable way to indicate action, he recklessly charged towards Yume, as she charged towards him herself. All moral obligations were out the fucking window. Hey, she fucking asked for it, alright?!
The spar was so strange and so interesting in itself. Yume was mirroring his movements perfectly, every swing was met straight in the middle. But there was still a noticeable difference on how the two actually moved together. Demon was reckless as shit; it was almost as if he wasn’t thinking at all. His female opponent, while mirroring his movements, they had an edge and precision that Demon did not have with his raw swings and manoeuvres. He gritted his teeth. “Don’t you have your own fuckin’ fightin’ style?” he hissed through the gaps of his blade and hers.
Yume blinked and smiled quite giddily. “You want to me to use my own sword style, cutie?” Again with the cutie pet name... why was she taunting him so much? He growled and retreated a ways back into a defensive stance. The sword Yume had just created shattered into what seemed like water vapours, but one could never be too sure of what happens in the ninja world. Now with both hands on her one and only blade, the battle resumed. Demon was fast, and as he expected, she kept up with him just as easily. The jog from yesterday and the walk today could have told him that. She had to worry about two swords flying at her, while she only had the one to both defend herself and be on the offensive. That should give him the advantage. Not to mention the sheer difference in sizes between the two. He was much bigger than her in comparison, well built, while she was thin and though average height of the rest of the female population, was perceivably smaller than he. What she could have had over him was taken away by the Demon himself. She was fast, but so was he. They matched in speed but differed in size and attitude. It was still hard to tell which one was the superior of the two. Every time he struck at her, she could dodge and every time she struck at him, he could block and perhaps even use his second sword to counterattack. They were at an impasse and with such contrasting attributes, they were at the same unmoving level as they were when Yume was only just mirroring Demon’s attacks.
He was quickly getting bored of this and switched it up, going in for a punch instead of a slice. Just as he changed, just that one different move, something seemed to click. Yume dodged the punch as expected and dove in through his defences, giving a nasty gash across his abdomen. He cursed loudly and glared at Yume. What a fucking cheater! He thought, fuming. I-I don’t know, was that cheating? Was there any rules against that in a shinobi spar to begin with? Yume only peered at him as if to say, ‘Well something had to happen.’ And that something did happen. The woman became more reckless too, in such an unpredictable method of recklessness that Demon couldn’t fathom. Was it just merely because she was a fucking psychopath? Maybe. He was sporting cuts left and right, and while he noticed it was nothing but a light flesh wound, it only made him angrier... or more pumped... or both. There was no true way he could tell what he was feeling, aside from the rapid pounding of blood flow through his body. Every time he tried, he couldn’t get to her. He knew he was fast. He knew she was fast. She matched him, but her style now... her style was odd. He could see his moves weaved within her techniques. How did she even get that? He stopped himself. She couldn’t have... noooo, impossible. She couldn’t have slept with him just to imitate his abilities... could she? The idea sounded absurd but at the same time he was already convinced that she was a fucking witch (no pun intended), so maybe this was a weird witchcraft to steal his secrets. This was making his head hurt.
She impaled his other leg and Demon let out a roar of pain as he fell to his knees. “FUCKIN’ SHIT!” he cursed out loudly. He hissed in pain. This wasn’t broken bone, he couldn’t just crack it back in and he’d be fine and dandy. This fucking sucked. “I swear once I’m done with you, I’m gonna FUCK you in the ASS!” he yelled, without so much thinking. Yume stopped short for just a brief moment to process his words and then giggled upon realisation. "Shouldn't you take me out to dinner first, cutie?"
“ARGH FUCKIN’ HELL, WOMAN!” He fumbled around for his twin swords and was ready to get up again. He was both livid and within a rush, while Yume calmly stood with a smile, waiting for his next move. He decided that being raw and reckless wasn’t right against her. Her constant calculating red eyed stares would come out on top and trump him... It was almost as if she was reading his mind milliseconds before he actually decided to do the action. If she wasn’t a witch, he wouldn’t be surprised to call her a fucking robot. Well in that case, two can play that strategising game. There were so many ways he could approach this. Fuck the tactical manoeuvres, he could go all out with sheer power and crush her, simply with his body weight alone. She was tiny compared to him. It’d be easy. But what of her agility? He couldn’t just play King Kong and expect shit to go his way even though it’d be really funny in itself. He noticed time and time again how she kept up with him, but was that all she had? Really? She was as small like a twig and he was much bigger. Physics should say that she’d be faster, even if it was just a short spurt of energy. Was she holding back on him? That thought made him irrationally annoyed. Why was she the one holding back her power, while he was the one going all out? Okay, he wasn’t exactly going all out in his power and in this fight; he was still injured after all. But he could feel that it didn’t hurt as bad as when he woke up this morning. Holy shit, did sex help him get better and heal quicker? The science seemed... impossible. Anywho, perhaps he should just adding in kicks to the fight this time. That way he had so many more ways in offense then than just his twin swords. She only had one sword, he had two. So by default, he really should have been the superior fighter either way...
His reeling and thinking of different strategies and tactics (or was it just the rambles of a man’s mind slowly going insane?) were cut short when Yume simply just kicked on his wrists and hands such that she could disarm him and fling his swords away from his person. Her own sword dissipated into mist as she kicked behind his knee, having him fall onto the ground with both a startled and pained yell. She dropped down onto her knees too and fell forward, pinning him down by his shoulders with her hands. With her usual flirty smile, she leaned in closer. “H m m... ~” she hummed, partially giggling as well. “We could call this a tie if you want... I know how men can get with losses on their mental records, it's all a very droll affair when ego gets into it... yaknow?...” Demon only groaned and turned his head to the side. “Do you get a fuckin’ kick out of this or what?”
Yume only giggled and pecked his cheek to his displeasure. “You know I like you a lot, cutie,” she smiled, while Demon scoffed with a dismissive, “Yeah yeah yeah, whatever.” It was the same shit, different day, even though it had been only two days. He didn’t expect her next words to take a turn of the twisted.
“But if you cheat on me, I'll kill you~”
He turned his head back and stared at Yume in disbelief. Her arm suddenly grasped into an iron grip and he flipped her over, now that he was on top. “Crazy bitch.” his eyes were narrowed in some sort of anger, his grip on her forearms only tightened more as he pulled her dangerously closer, even though he knew she could phase out of it so easily. Or was that truly a hallucination? “We’re not together to begin with... But if we’re fuckin’ around with that kind of game, the same goes to you then.” There wasn’t much else to do but play along for now. There was a crack. His grip had made her one of her bones give way, yet neither winced nor yet moved from each other. It was all rather surreal. After all this time, he still didn’t know what she wanted from him, or even if she was fucking human in this world. After a few seconds of silence had passed, Demon let go and sat back while Yume rubbed her arm. 'Like sleight of hand, her forearm had snapped back to its original position without so much a bruise. Demon watched her as she performed her witchcraft, but his interest quickly waned. He got up and turned to leave the forest, but not without Yume’s need to have the last word in.
“See you tonight, cutie~”
___
WC: 12000
Demetri Kaguya <3Citizen- Ryo : 0
Re: Edict of the Demon, Chapter 3
Wed Mar 05, 2014 1:24 am
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120 JP
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120 JP
60 stats
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