don't call it a comeback
Words: 5674
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[Previous Update][First Post]
Some time into the future, but not much…
Once upon a time, you, Jiko Tanaka, had chosen the curse of interesting times. You do not regret this decision; the Jiko of the past had grown lazy and unmotivated, content to exert the merest fraction of power outward while investing the rest into continuous battle within. And even that inner battle was a matter of habit, finding the only true opponent in a world bled dry of war.
But here, in this Manifest Realm, you have never felt anything less than utter, overwhelming exhaustion. Deep reserves of willpower and metabolic contingencies, all fired. New and bizarre configurations of neural computation invented, prototyped, refined endlessly with mad abandon. Experimentations of subcellular biology that would have earned the Martial Hero total government censure now pouring forth by the billions into testing crucibles.
After all, the dead do not care for your tragic backstory, your ennui, your despair. To think those things matter above saving lives is the logic of the Villain. To the Hero, all that matters is the salvation of lives, and the inspiration of hope.
Far behind the red line, within clandestine catacombs, a spire of flesh everts from a pot of nutrient mix. Within seconds it swells and digests its container, engorging rapidly into a translucent chrysalis, before you emerge with a splash of waste liquid, slick as a newborn.
The chrysalis retreats into its inert form, the wastewater evaporating into the atmosphere. You stick the respawn seed into a fresh pot, and it sprouts a miniature effigy of your face with maturity indicated by a widening grin.
"I saw him again," you say, combing back your mane. "The Hero. He's gotten stronger! Five percent above the curve, at least."
"Your Curse?" asks Jeanne de Tymarie, the closest thing to a chief strategist you have, though her meagre intellect only rivals your own in select matters. In practice she serves to interpret your own cogitations to the ranks of mortals that have joined the Land of Man, a transitional figurehead to the rural populace of Wacky Mirror Witch France.
"Not so! It's well within his current capabilities to develop without aid." You clench your fist, pitting the totality of your strength against itself; even the least imbalance thunders through the air, ruffling Jeanne's hair. Slowly, though still an eyeblink-smear of blurring motion, you run through a full-body calisthenic stretching routine, feeling that soul-deep grind of stone on bone as your Praxis grows. "I should slay him before it becomes inconvenient."
"The Council is demanding reopened access to the Sea d'Azure," Jeanne says, keeping pace as you stride through the passageways of your central headquarters. She adjusts her glasses, a scrawl of data running across the corner of its smartfilm glaze. "Your biomass harvesting has encroached fishing fields."
"Hmph! And yet they cut down my roads! How shortsighted of them. Is it not obvious that, without a reliable logistical mesh, my operations will shift to local stockpiling?"
"Your transport worms inspire horror," she replies, and takes a small breath, before gritting out, "Have you considered rendering them more palatable?"
Indeed you have, but your attempts at forming large facsimiles of your own beaming mien on their borer orifices did not go smoothly. A sad day for Tanaka Logistics and Trucking Incorporated.
Perhaps the solution lay in the manipulation of findross. Regrettably your own forays yielded only modest rewards. The Maiden was said to be strikingly beautiful, and even Jeanne is capable of transmitting complete information of her beauty to observers through the least channel of sensory data. You had once chewed on a strand of her hair to distract from a gnarly Sorceress who could shoot pain beams! If you could somehow apply a Grace of comparable bandwidth, you could simply transmit the sublime beauty of your own physiological canon.
Wait a moment, you're being foolish. You flex and Jeanne averts her eyes. Success. To gain headway even against her Grace of Clarity that turns aside all distraction mental and physical, is a feat worthy of mythic legend. You mentally construct a medal to commemorate it, award it to yourself, and relegate it to your mental trophy cabinet. Next you begin redesigning each transport worm to have a transparent corneal window where a limited-edition SSR Trucker Jiko effigy will be visible to peasants facing their onrushing maw, and make a note to print out corresponding collectibles.
You'd once thought you had escaped the travails of PR campaigning. But what was a hero, but a man with good PR? Aside from the altruistic will to save the masses, of course.
Jeanne reports briefly on the progress of your militia programme, collating what insights you couldn't observe through Quirk-mediated pericognition alone. Outlook: satisfactory! Numbers: going up! Orcs: going down!
Sorcery limited to females alone, you had initiated widespread Quirk Factor dissemination into the genetic pool available within the red line. Even disregarding the perceptual and cognitive enhancement natural to any circulation of Quirk Factor, the average fresh Joanian Self Defense Force recruit was now capable of activating Quirk: Findross Rush, rapidly converting their natural findross production into significant physical augmentation rivaling even the hardiness of military cyborgs. With the neural programming capability of your enhanced Anivoice, strategic, tactical, even martial maneuvers could be transmitted through Jikochondrion nodes and translated directly into physical action. Any recruit that distinguished themselves in the Orcwaste frontier would be granted specialized engineering of their genome to manifest a Quirk tailored to their personality and phenotype; as dictated by Sorcerous paradigms you had theorized, fully leaning into certain metaphorical frameworks for psychological assessment was more effective than simply granting every sergeant Half-Hot-Half-Cold, which doesn't stop you from giving it to every second sergeant.
Speaking of Sorcerous paradigms, your experimentation into hybridising Sorceress and orc material is proceeding slowly. The problem lies in preventing the orc tissue from fully cannibalizing the findross-singularity generators; until that point of inflection, the superb neural proliferation and resilience of orc tissue makes it suitable for the operation of your JSDF Combat Automaton Series, and significantly cheaper than manufacturing myomers and quantum chips! Until you manage to design biological safeguards that enforce homeostasis, you'll have to mediate every unit directly.
Oh, you've detected some orc presences amassing. You send out some interceptors. Far into the outskirts of the march, a tree that stands like a swirl of noodles in a vortex opens a single port on the end of one of its branches. With the crack of hypersonic acceleration, you pilot the unfolding masses of nanoengineered superbone and Quirk-generated pressure jets as they briefly rise above the stratosphere, assume new flight profiles, and fly into a greenskin horde.
You nod at Jeanne while your interceptors splinter on their descent into a rain of aerial mines, their monowire payloads spearing miles of viridian leather and steel, drawing them together into masses of suborned flesh as your Quirk runs rampant. Soon, from the mesh of orcflesh rises a new batch of Kyojin-class Units, fresh waterfalls of blood gushing from your beaming grins.
"FEAR, VILLAINOUS SCUM, FOR I AM HERE," you boom, arms stretched like blades and brought to cross in front of your chests. "JIKULTRA BEAM." Like swords of daylight high-energy beams smash into the onslaught of Orkhans, the sweep of its severity like the child who holds a lens above ants, writing his name in flame and corpses.
"Are you listening to me?" asks Jeanne, adjusting her glasses to shine menacingly.
"Of course!" you say, then amend, "No, I was thinking about fighting. But I was still listening to you, Jeannie!"
"Don't call me that."
~~~
You extrude yourself from a cavity, stepping into a realm of steel.
Stainless metal embraces stained glass in intricate facades, countless fragments hammered from shimmering aurora depicting your triumphs (factual and imagined) in stark relief. Their presence is among the vanishing few acknowledgments of local cultural standards in this, the beating heart of your technological renaissance.
Echoing your last moments in a dimension you once called home are a bevy of familiar sounds, the steady drone of progress music to your ears. Familiar to your eyes are the silk embroidery and brocade of the Orient, amidst rice-paper screens slashed dark and grey with calligraphic mountains. Nearby, a miniature Zen garden hosts a suikinkutsu, clear peals ringing from water into stone.
"Darling!"
The voice of Gisena Allria, Traitor Sorceress, rings out, soon followed by the genuine article in a white labcoat over her low-cut kimono. Publically reported fighting for the side of the greenskins, her capture proved somewhat difficult; armed with a form of Sorcery mimicking Eraserhead, you almost faced the critical failure of Quirk neutralisation that so often issued from your favourite sensei shortly before your many classroom concussions. Fortunately, you improvised a capture-ball, a flagellated flesh-sphere of organic nanotubing pseudotentacles functioning without a scrap of Quirk genetics, and after roundly subduing her bodyguard of orcs she surrendered herself into your custody. Of all the captured Sorceresses you have subjected to your Heroic Therapy: Restorative Japanese Meditation technique, Gisena proved most mutable; you'd almost think she didn't want to work for the orcs at all!
"Why, I didn't expect you today, Mister Godfist!" She leans against a nearby washi fresco depicting your dismemberment of orcs. "Would you like supper? A bath? Or perhaps… moi?" Her eyes glimmer like polished emeralds held before candlelight.
"A supper sounds intriguing and mysterious! Lead on!" You stride into the transept, where a rudimentary chemical synthesiser chugs along, one of many crude machines you have given Gisena access to as reward for good behaviour.
She hurries around to present a finely gilded platter loaded with brown bars. "Behold, the ration! All the necessary macronutrients for human function compressed into an efficient meal! One bite is enough to fill a man's stomach for a day!"
"A bold claim, Sorceress!" You grab one bar and swiftly chew it to submission before swallowing. Bizarrely, it is piping hot, as though fresh from the oven; you huff and puff steam from your open mouth. Your tummy rumbles and grumbles like a cage of a capella lions.
Urgh! Ughk! Gaah! You tumble to one knee, clutching the mad dervish of your insides as they threaten to become outsides. "Treachery… poison…" But upthrust flies your fist, and you ascend with it, looking down upon the Sorceress. "Or so you would think! But it'll take more than that to destroy me!" You belch, emitting a thin lance of superheated air.
"Darn," says Gisena from the vicinity of your pectorals, snapping her fingers. "Foiled again."
"Indeed, your stratagem was weak! Though its taste may be heinous– nay, I would even say atrocious– your poison could not kill even a mortal, though it may give them indigestion!"
"Alas, defeated once more."
"And though your scheme may have failed, I must punish this lapse of good moral behaviour!"
"Oh?" Gisena flutters her eyelashes. "And how will you punish me?"
Immediately you begin squatting vigorously. "Look closely, Miss Allria! We'll see how dastardly you feel after a good round of sweat!"
Gisena observes your flexing form fastidiously. Afterward, she wobbles on unsteady legs, supported by your chivalrous bicep.
"I don't think I can walk," she says. "Could you carry me, darling?"
Having doled out her punishment, further negative reinforcement would be unnecessary and unethical. You heft Gisena onto your forearm, securely ensconcing her pliant form into the crevices of your biceps and firm, unyielding grasp. You feel her squirm into position for many long seconds, but in vain; your calculations are impeccable; comfort, maximised.
"How goes your studies into big orc balls, Gisena?"
The Sorceress makes the same face she does when testing her soups. "Darling, please don't call it that." Nevertheless she leads you to the vivisection cell, where a limbless, faceless, bisected, mostly eviscerated Orkaiser hangs from a hook, straining against its high-gauge carbon-reinforced mechasteel as the surgery arms strip away the daily pound of flesh. You examine the series of scalpels that have been exchanged each day, each blade corroded down to a bone of polymer. The air around the specimen pulses like unfolding sheets of mirage heat, the heat of burning probabilities.
Not only extremely resilient in their biological structure, the orc species appears to have their own subtle arts. Like a bowling ball hefted onto a trampoline deforming the curvature of the polymesh mat, mature orcs distorted the paths of lesser worldlines with their own heft of spirit. Their reach extended beyond their own physical body to bend the world to their will, like stones hurled from ever higher heights to ever farther lands.
You contemplate the trampoline you created to enrich Gisena's containment. Strangely, she only uses it when you're here to observe. She should have more trust in her own ability to recover from falls!
Under the heat of that blazon-soul, even the most statistically astronomical events would occur with regularity, so long as it benefited the orc in question. Naturally this would lead to the dreaded "double bounce" scenario: hurling a bowling ball at the other side of the trampoline to launch yourself ever higher, granting more altitude to impart greater energy at the next throw, and so on, assuming infinitely durable bowling balls and trampoline elasticity. It is only the fact that most orcs are subsapient that has permitted the Joanian Empire to persist as long as it has.
Most, but not all.
You place Gisena down on a nearby chaise lounge, and enter the cell. Even bereft of all its sensory organs, the Orkaiser turns its hollowed head to you, the pulsating golden glow of its cerebral node exposed to the air. A harsh exhale from its half-lung you translate as an orcish roar.
You feel your skin spontaneously erupting into flames as cellular stockpiles rupture without cause. You sweep your hand down, your knifehand chop dulled by a bizarre atmospheric hyperbaric coalescence focused precisely to interrupt your motion, just as several of the same anomalies disrupt your stance. The power of the spiritual distortion to draw together unlikely factors essential to success, Gisena had dubbed the power of Attraction. Against it, even the least possibility of your failure to execute your techniques becomes almost certain; any creature of sufficient Attractive power could turn a 0.00001% chance of victory into 0.0001%, or 0.1%, or 10%. Like the Marble Trick from famed anime-manga franchise Gate/stay Night involving a portal in Tokyo leading to a land of living myth and heroic legendry, a vat containing ten thousand black marbles and one white marble would produce only white, every draw.
But what if that white marble was removed?
Again your hand descends, again you face interference. Like the smith hammering flaws from his blade, you sharpen your martial technique. Existing in the epicentre of a ravaging whirlwind of fate directed solely to your destruction, you resist. One by one, you pick out the white marbles and toss them away: stance transitions, cellular matrix substructures, force concatenations, imbalances of hormone receptor triggers, and more. Your hand reaches the Orkaiser, first with feather-force, then cudgel, then bone-rocking sledgehammer impetus, sending the orc swinging on its hook.
There is always one more white marble in the road to touch the Accursed's back, but it is no longer within the remit of this orc's Marble Trick to extricate it from its prison of black balls. Your pure mortal technique, long since eclipsing the efforts of the men of your home, has been honed to present an impenetrable wall of failure for any force of Attraction lesser to this Orkaiser. A future of nothing but black balls.
Having extracted the last useful data from this specimen, you exert the merest iota of your Attractive power. The Orkaiser evaporates into a green-and-grey mist of disintegrated matter.
You exit the cell, taking a seat next to Gisena, who immediately uses your powerful thigh as a pillow, tracing a fingernail up and down your abdominal muscles. Despite the obvious benefits of enacting prisoner-labour schemes to simultaneously rehabilitate Sorceresses and fortify mankind's geopolitical and existential security, you cannot help but shed a tear at this transgression against minimum-wage laws. Only by her work did you chip against your rostered fragment of Curses, with the aid of a mysterious crystal housing a child predator ghost elf (long story).
What use is the Hero, if he saves through Villainous means? If the Hero wins the preservation of society with means the society deplores, has it truly earned its victory against all that could have been? Alas, your shoulders are not yet wide enough to carry the Manifest Realm entire, and so you must resort to these truly exploitative measures, even if you have done your best to make this incarceration as efficiently painless as possible.
You gaze at Gisena, sorrow filling your Heroic heart at this heinous labyrinthine strait of circumstances you have constructed to force her aid. No doubt she will forever harbour a seed of resentment against you for this humiliating indignity of coercing her to your purposes, but needs must. Were it only you… but alas, you are still gainfully employed by the man called the Accursed.
Gisena squints at you, before winking with a poked out tongue. You weep internally, and then externally, collapsing to your knees and shaking both fists to the uncaring heavens. Would that this flower of maidenhood were not created in this bitter world, but in a time of peace.
Gisena sighs.
~~~
See the Manifest Realm. League on league of hills and valleys gently coated with green. Forests like elders bearing witness to the procession of ages. The little squares of wheat shining like mirrors kindled with sunlight gold, the castles of the Sorceresses reaching high with their fingers of stone.
Look a little east. See the red line, the jaws that bite, the eyes that blind, the wall of light and flame. The thundering blows and hurricanes of the JSDF swollen with almighty brute power. The Orcwaste, a cigarette burn on the face of the land.
Correct your course. It is time to slay the Hero out of Legend.
You nyoom your way through the air. Far behind you, Spaceship Jikoprise closes its elbow railgun and returns to its pose. Miles away on the sunburned earth you sense the Hero just as he senses you, and though you are a great distance away it is as though he speaks to you face to face. As two men who view each other from the treetops, achievement has made you comrades, even if the gulf between you is unsurpassable. You fondly recall your childhood training shot putting squirrels among treetops to perfect your Nutpounder technique. Truly, many nuts were pounded that weekend.
"Returning so soon," he says. The Hero stands no taller than his Warlords, his eyes like candles at dusk, but he alone wears the full plate of grimsteel forged beneath the Attraction of their greatest smiths, the snarling cuirass fearsome as an oni. Atop his pate are indelible scars stretching from brow to temple, the marks of ithilyor unfaded that shine like seething furnace-mouths, the battle-crowned Orkönig. "So the time has come. Then come, human! As close as you like!"
Indeed you do come, hard and fast. Like two bowling balls circling each other on the trampoline, collision is inevitable. Though country or world may separate you, your Attraction contains and confines you both to the inevitable smashing of your balls.
When you first met the Hero, his attempt at defense was pathetic. Fostered into a machine of extermination by the elves, Gisena said. How laughable! Perhaps his training would have been enough to destroy mankind, but to your eyes perfection was sadly lacking. Perhaps the elves had trained him wrong, as a joke. You soon corrected that error.
Your first blow lands as a meteor of brute force, a swaggering axekick that ignites the air, capsizes the earth into a bowl of scorching lava. As expected, the Hero dodged your traditional opening, flecks of liquid stone flying into transient chimerae of hurricane and quake. He leaps backward, vanishing in a typhoon backstep that upkicks a tsunami of bone-white boiling rock like a dragon's claw.
"My student!" you cry, and with a sweep of your hand the avalanche scatters like sakura. "Why do you flee my embrace?" Through the searing air you hurry after him. With raptor agility you leap high and land hard, your fierce toes stitching divots into the lava like a tracking machine-gun.
You feel his will set against you, his Attractive girth flaring out to swamp you. In higher realms he works, as do you, that realm of spirit weighing on the world like the gathering of a storm charges the air with electric potential. "Student?" says the Hero. "No. Now I am the master."
So uttered, the orc raises a palm to the sky as if catching rain. Streaks of pure black lance out from that palm, slashes of calligraphy across the skin of reality, runes of hollow darkness in the tongue of the elves. The Hero sags in enervation as though drained of blood and bone, as his working takes form, one of the fate-blessings of the ithilyor incinerated on the altar of victory. Suddenly the world shimmers as though beyond the two of you it is only a painted facade; your Quirk stutters, suddenly losing control of everything outside this arena. The Hero burns bright, a dominating fist clenching at reality.
What a clever orc. Ever has the orc race embodied elegance of motion and skill, true grace now rendered.. Into this Sorcerorc! He has cut off your escape route, binding spirit to body irrevocably. Destruction of your current corporeal form will be true destruction, wound of body now wound of soul. The additional auxiliary bodies sent after this one will likely splatter across the countryside without your direction. How inconvenient! And with his Attractive presence so deeply enmeshed into the Material World, its thousandfold hands even now clutch against you directly, sacrificing mere probability-burning for immediate, overwhelming power.
Death looms behind you, its specter both terrible impetus and sweetest comfort. Such a nostalgic feeling. Like meeting an old friend! Your soul now joined to flesh exerts its own Attraction, the sensation swaddling you like cloth. Between you, closer to you than him, the wall of your mutual Attractions grinding against each other screeches with earth-fracturing friction, a sheeting pane of tumultuous static like lightning illuminating a sunset sea.
The prelude to your clash engenders an electrifying frisson within your breast, a thrill that spurs your vocal chords to action.
"HAAAAAAAH!" you roar. Your abs slide apart with a hydraulic hiss, and you let loose a Navel Laser pulse, the energy of a solar event concentrated into a palm-wide radiation point. The Hero vanishes in a sidestep and the Laser makes a hard right turn, tracing a deafening, dazzling path through the turbulence of his wake.
You follow the road of light, swallowed up in the twinkling coat as Hagakure's Quirk bends planet-burning power into a whirling suit, your Naturalist's Brand forcing the Hero to turn back with a snarl. The least fraction of that sun-rivaling shine bursts behind you in twin scarves of light, propelling you fist first as the Hero meets you, his grimsteel plate blue with heat as the laser refracts from its stygian gaze, its umbilical tether drawing you together.
"Show me your progress, Hero!" you cry, and meet him.
Your fists fall as uncountable as the rain, a diluvial annihilation of realm-purging strikes that engulf the Hero in a deafening symphony of wind and light, the material static of heavenly force congealed into lesser dimensions. Your first blow pushes him back as though embedded in molasses, your second hurtling with supernal speed to strike before the Hero floats beyond your reach, imparting exponentially greater force. So comes your subsequent blows, each ever faster than its predecessor, pushing even further, the ring of your fist against steel growing sharper, forcing you to compete against yourself of yestermoment, faster and faster and faster–
The Hero unsheathes the barest inch of his grimsteel scimitar, the Starbane whose mettle is black as hate, and whose reflection cuts as fiercely as its edge; of its thousandfold slicing image, Hagakure turns away ninety-five parts in a hundred, riddling your skin with a dozen bone-deep scores that resist your regeneration, throbbing with agony and blowing you back. This is only a prelude to the full baring of that unseeable sword flying to his claws with magnetic Attraction, and with it the Hero holds it upright, a vortex monolith that seems to sink spacetime like silk cast onto water. He slashes once more his dark runes into the world, its cutting shine swallowed up and concentrated into its steel bite, an incising hemisphere of ideograms that burn with sepulchral glory, each stretch of darkness invested with grave and silent holiness.
You cannot allow another working to be realised. Tracking the flow of his swordsmanship, you twist from toe to torso to palm, slapping the flat of the blade as it nears your throat. The vibrational force, enough to liquefy natural steel, echoes down its length into the Hero, his fingers suddenly nerveless as though hemiplegic. The runes shake and splinter, half-drawn into the world, and you strike the sword once, twice more with the Nerveless Jellyfish Stinger until the Hero with the last strength of the limb drives the sword through his other arm, affixing it between his bones. With a twist he sweeps his limb, writing an arc of obliteration that decapitates your pompadour. But his off-hand is just that slight ounce weaker, less agile; in the inch between movements you seize the Hero by his limp arm, levering his arm to drive his face into the abyssal glyphs of his working. The glyphs, like ink dripped on water and fading into gossamer shadow, yet retain their terrible power now turned against their scribe, the Hero's flesh flying away in a sandblaster spray.
The Hero turns his reaper's visage to you, the golden flame of his brainpan shining uninhibited by eyes. He slashes at you, the cut of his blade flying around your chest many times over, and as you leap back he turns the blade on himself to lop off the limp arm and flick it into your face. You turn it aside, and the Starbane, hiding in its shadow, drives itself into the hairpin of your left forearm. With a twist, the Hero wrenches your arm into a forking branch. Yet the fingers of each half of your arm intertwine and you twist to pin the sword; with your right hand you deliver a raw haymaker at his wrist, shattering gauntlet and vambrace into a fine spray of green and grey and loosing the Starbane from his grip. It spins wildly, cleaving apart your left arm in a whirlwind, and you kick it down into the earth. It does not bounce but sinks as though passing through hologram, your enhanced Cement Quirk sending it deep beyond retrieval.
Your Attractions are weaker now; the air roils like a desert wind, the earth cooling into dark basalt. The Hero, though his head is a half-pulped ruin, takes his ruined wrist and bites hard, crushing the grimsteel plate and bone into a crude stabbing implement. You, with your one good hand, set yourself into a stance of power, calling up reserves of might not easily drawn.
You push your fist forward into air and find resistance. Like a man pressing his hand against earth, then stone, steel, the space ahead of your fist seeming to swell with the press of the world itself shouldering against the door. You could no more move your fist forward than word can write itself off paper. Your flesh is a prison whose bars are the irresistible alloy of physical law, as inescapable as the forces binding electron to atom. You know, with absolute certainty, that this is as easy as it will get.
"One Fist…"
You strain. You grit your teeth. Your sight dims, darkens. All around you land and light and sky seem to bend, shrink and draw into the space before your fist, leaving only darkness, then the place beyond darkness, and likewise you feel your vigour and consciousness swirl and drain into the all-consuming hunger of the Praxis. From cracks in your knuckles, threads of purest, richest blue sear out into the horizon like coronal ejections.
"...Approaching…"
Even the Hero is drawn into that inescapable vortex, his feet skidding on the hard stone. He leaps toward you, his armblade a buzzing hacksaw, intent on breaking your stance. You precede him, unfolding like a stack of paper sheets caught in the wind, the light of Praxis dying as you elongate to strips of coriaceous skin that bind the Hero like the capture-tape of your sensei all those years ago. Though the Hero's armblade manages to slice away your legs and lower half, what remains suffices as you transform your ribs into caltrops and latch on. Plate and spaulder buckle like accordions, jointed mail crushes and squeezes, as you embrace with your whole might. He writhes and tears at you, great tangled snarls of muscle and tendon flinging away, but it's too late.
Behind him rises a slender stick-figure assembly, your arm and the Hero's arm once discarded now merged and extruded into this frail rigging of ruined flesh and bare ligament surmounted by a hollow caricature of bone, designed and built only to make one motion.
You take the stance of power. The vortex opens, heaven and earth intermingling as they are drawn into that eviscerating aperture of blue eternity. The Hero utters, "Useless! USELESS! USELEEEEEEEE–"
Despite your form, you cry out:
"GooooooOOOOOOOOOO–"
The fist of apotheosis grinds through reality, and you feel your makeshift body burst open with eggshell delicacy, a clenched ram of sheer obliterating might thrust through the Hero's cuirass to seize his still-beating heart in fingers of light. In realms high and low, the scouring radiance of the Hero's Attraction diminishes like dew before the dawn, his edifice of spiritual potency now crumbling into ruin. He takes a step, another, but his strength flees him; he collapses to his knees, face turned skyward.
Even now, knelt by weakness, the Hero speaks, though he lacks lips, teeth, tongue, or even the front of his throat, his words carried on the rapidly shrinking radius of his Attraction. "One fist approaching god… So this is how Jotarun of Yor passes." He grimaces. "What an outrageous thing to stand against."
You reform yourself, folding back like coiling rope into a torso and head, suspended on your one hand, entrails hanging dry from your guts. On your face is an expression of surprise. "Your name's Jotarun?" He does not respond. You hop over, grabbing onto his shoulder.
You grin, gracing the Hero with a perfect smile. "Maa, Jotarun, you've missed out on the first lesson of all Heroes." With a wrenching motion, you deliver a crushing headbutt once, twice, a jackhammer series that sends brainmatter soaring on the wind in a wet haze. "The job of the Hero… is to overcome the unfairness of the world with overwhelming strength. And to do so with a smile that never fades! That's… your Hero Academia!" So said, you open wide, and bite down on the neck stump.
~~~
The great thing about orcs is that they don't taste that bad! Somewhat like matsutake suimono with a generous dash of miso. Eventually you stand up on your own two feet, stretching your freshly reconstructed body, feeling the spoils of victory join with you. When you open your eyes they blaze with golden light; you experiment with it, before restoring their typical emerald hue.
Task complete. Cursebearer, you have slain <The Hero Out of Legend>. You have gained reprieve. Time remaining: 10 years.
Sadly you could not reconnect with your exterior systems. Without your input, alas, they'll fall back onto their programmed directives until you reconnect manually. Still, you believe in Jeannie-chan and the discipline of the JSDF! Ganbatte!
You lick your finger, sticking it into the wind, and orient yourself to the Joanian Empire. The western sky is aflame with the light of the setting sun. The earth is awash with greenskins, Warlord and Orkhan and Orkaiser, wary but growing bold in the wake of your battle, clambering toward you now with steel and claw. It's four hundred miles to Joania, and you've got no pants.
You leap to the nearest promontory of fused basalt, leaning in full view of the horde, and slap your knee. The peal of flesh on flesh rings out for miles, a skyful of lights turning to you; faced with such an audience your Attraction ignites, a bonfire glory of warrior's will. You shade your eyes with a hand, squinting into the sun, and your grin widens.
You leap at the nearest Orkaiser, pulping her torso into a radius of giblets. In the rain of gore, you pose, proclaiming, "Villainous orcs! The stars turn aslant, the crane perches on the bough! Moon and sun conjoin once in a century, and the earth trembles with timorous frailty! Fear always, fear eternal, for I… AM HERE!" Without looking, you catch a spear and hurl it back, impaling twelve in one stroke. "Hah! Hahahahaha!"
Before was business. This is pleasure.
You beckon with an outstretched palm. "Now, COME AT ME ALL AT ONCE!"
Words: 5674
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[Previous Update][First Post]
Brand-name Genes
IV
IV
Some time into the future, but not much…
Once upon a time, you, Jiko Tanaka, had chosen the curse of interesting times. You do not regret this decision; the Jiko of the past had grown lazy and unmotivated, content to exert the merest fraction of power outward while investing the rest into continuous battle within. And even that inner battle was a matter of habit, finding the only true opponent in a world bled dry of war.
But here, in this Manifest Realm, you have never felt anything less than utter, overwhelming exhaustion. Deep reserves of willpower and metabolic contingencies, all fired. New and bizarre configurations of neural computation invented, prototyped, refined endlessly with mad abandon. Experimentations of subcellular biology that would have earned the Martial Hero total government censure now pouring forth by the billions into testing crucibles.
After all, the dead do not care for your tragic backstory, your ennui, your despair. To think those things matter above saving lives is the logic of the Villain. To the Hero, all that matters is the salvation of lives, and the inspiration of hope.
Far behind the red line, within clandestine catacombs, a spire of flesh everts from a pot of nutrient mix. Within seconds it swells and digests its container, engorging rapidly into a translucent chrysalis, before you emerge with a splash of waste liquid, slick as a newborn.
The chrysalis retreats into its inert form, the wastewater evaporating into the atmosphere. You stick the respawn seed into a fresh pot, and it sprouts a miniature effigy of your face with maturity indicated by a widening grin.
"I saw him again," you say, combing back your mane. "The Hero. He's gotten stronger! Five percent above the curve, at least."
"Your Curse?" asks Jeanne de Tymarie, the closest thing to a chief strategist you have, though her meagre intellect only rivals your own in select matters. In practice she serves to interpret your own cogitations to the ranks of mortals that have joined the Land of Man, a transitional figurehead to the rural populace of Wacky Mirror Witch France.
"Not so! It's well within his current capabilities to develop without aid." You clench your fist, pitting the totality of your strength against itself; even the least imbalance thunders through the air, ruffling Jeanne's hair. Slowly, though still an eyeblink-smear of blurring motion, you run through a full-body calisthenic stretching routine, feeling that soul-deep grind of stone on bone as your Praxis grows. "I should slay him before it becomes inconvenient."
"The Council is demanding reopened access to the Sea d'Azure," Jeanne says, keeping pace as you stride through the passageways of your central headquarters. She adjusts her glasses, a scrawl of data running across the corner of its smartfilm glaze. "Your biomass harvesting has encroached fishing fields."
"Hmph! And yet they cut down my roads! How shortsighted of them. Is it not obvious that, without a reliable logistical mesh, my operations will shift to local stockpiling?"
"Your transport worms inspire horror," she replies, and takes a small breath, before gritting out, "Have you considered rendering them more palatable?"
Indeed you have, but your attempts at forming large facsimiles of your own beaming mien on their borer orifices did not go smoothly. A sad day for Tanaka Logistics and Trucking Incorporated.
Perhaps the solution lay in the manipulation of findross. Regrettably your own forays yielded only modest rewards. The Maiden was said to be strikingly beautiful, and even Jeanne is capable of transmitting complete information of her beauty to observers through the least channel of sensory data. You had once chewed on a strand of her hair to distract from a gnarly Sorceress who could shoot pain beams! If you could somehow apply a Grace of comparable bandwidth, you could simply transmit the sublime beauty of your own physiological canon.
Wait a moment, you're being foolish. You flex and Jeanne averts her eyes. Success. To gain headway even against her Grace of Clarity that turns aside all distraction mental and physical, is a feat worthy of mythic legend. You mentally construct a medal to commemorate it, award it to yourself, and relegate it to your mental trophy cabinet. Next you begin redesigning each transport worm to have a transparent corneal window where a limited-edition SSR Trucker Jiko effigy will be visible to peasants facing their onrushing maw, and make a note to print out corresponding collectibles.
You'd once thought you had escaped the travails of PR campaigning. But what was a hero, but a man with good PR? Aside from the altruistic will to save the masses, of course.
Jeanne reports briefly on the progress of your militia programme, collating what insights you couldn't observe through Quirk-mediated pericognition alone. Outlook: satisfactory! Numbers: going up! Orcs: going down!
Sorcery limited to females alone, you had initiated widespread Quirk Factor dissemination into the genetic pool available within the red line. Even disregarding the perceptual and cognitive enhancement natural to any circulation of Quirk Factor, the average fresh Joanian Self Defense Force recruit was now capable of activating Quirk: Findross Rush, rapidly converting their natural findross production into significant physical augmentation rivaling even the hardiness of military cyborgs. With the neural programming capability of your enhanced Anivoice, strategic, tactical, even martial maneuvers could be transmitted through Jikochondrion nodes and translated directly into physical action. Any recruit that distinguished themselves in the Orcwaste frontier would be granted specialized engineering of their genome to manifest a Quirk tailored to their personality and phenotype; as dictated by Sorcerous paradigms you had theorized, fully leaning into certain metaphorical frameworks for psychological assessment was more effective than simply granting every sergeant Half-Hot-Half-Cold, which doesn't stop you from giving it to every second sergeant.
Speaking of Sorcerous paradigms, your experimentation into hybridising Sorceress and orc material is proceeding slowly. The problem lies in preventing the orc tissue from fully cannibalizing the findross-singularity generators; until that point of inflection, the superb neural proliferation and resilience of orc tissue makes it suitable for the operation of your JSDF Combat Automaton Series, and significantly cheaper than manufacturing myomers and quantum chips! Until you manage to design biological safeguards that enforce homeostasis, you'll have to mediate every unit directly.
Oh, you've detected some orc presences amassing. You send out some interceptors. Far into the outskirts of the march, a tree that stands like a swirl of noodles in a vortex opens a single port on the end of one of its branches. With the crack of hypersonic acceleration, you pilot the unfolding masses of nanoengineered superbone and Quirk-generated pressure jets as they briefly rise above the stratosphere, assume new flight profiles, and fly into a greenskin horde.
You nod at Jeanne while your interceptors splinter on their descent into a rain of aerial mines, their monowire payloads spearing miles of viridian leather and steel, drawing them together into masses of suborned flesh as your Quirk runs rampant. Soon, from the mesh of orcflesh rises a new batch of Kyojin-class Units, fresh waterfalls of blood gushing from your beaming grins.
"FEAR, VILLAINOUS SCUM, FOR I AM HERE," you boom, arms stretched like blades and brought to cross in front of your chests. "JIKULTRA BEAM." Like swords of daylight high-energy beams smash into the onslaught of Orkhans, the sweep of its severity like the child who holds a lens above ants, writing his name in flame and corpses.
"Are you listening to me?" asks Jeanne, adjusting her glasses to shine menacingly.
"Of course!" you say, then amend, "No, I was thinking about fighting. But I was still listening to you, Jeannie!"
"Don't call me that."
~~~
You extrude yourself from a cavity, stepping into a realm of steel.
Stainless metal embraces stained glass in intricate facades, countless fragments hammered from shimmering aurora depicting your triumphs (factual and imagined) in stark relief. Their presence is among the vanishing few acknowledgments of local cultural standards in this, the beating heart of your technological renaissance.
Echoing your last moments in a dimension you once called home are a bevy of familiar sounds, the steady drone of progress music to your ears. Familiar to your eyes are the silk embroidery and brocade of the Orient, amidst rice-paper screens slashed dark and grey with calligraphic mountains. Nearby, a miniature Zen garden hosts a suikinkutsu, clear peals ringing from water into stone.
"Darling!"
The voice of Gisena Allria, Traitor Sorceress, rings out, soon followed by the genuine article in a white labcoat over her low-cut kimono. Publically reported fighting for the side of the greenskins, her capture proved somewhat difficult; armed with a form of Sorcery mimicking Eraserhead, you almost faced the critical failure of Quirk neutralisation that so often issued from your favourite sensei shortly before your many classroom concussions. Fortunately, you improvised a capture-ball, a flagellated flesh-sphere of organic nanotubing pseudotentacles functioning without a scrap of Quirk genetics, and after roundly subduing her bodyguard of orcs she surrendered herself into your custody. Of all the captured Sorceresses you have subjected to your Heroic Therapy: Restorative Japanese Meditation technique, Gisena proved most mutable; you'd almost think she didn't want to work for the orcs at all!
"Why, I didn't expect you today, Mister Godfist!" She leans against a nearby washi fresco depicting your dismemberment of orcs. "Would you like supper? A bath? Or perhaps… moi?" Her eyes glimmer like polished emeralds held before candlelight.
"A supper sounds intriguing and mysterious! Lead on!" You stride into the transept, where a rudimentary chemical synthesiser chugs along, one of many crude machines you have given Gisena access to as reward for good behaviour.
She hurries around to present a finely gilded platter loaded with brown bars. "Behold, the ration! All the necessary macronutrients for human function compressed into an efficient meal! One bite is enough to fill a man's stomach for a day!"
"A bold claim, Sorceress!" You grab one bar and swiftly chew it to submission before swallowing. Bizarrely, it is piping hot, as though fresh from the oven; you huff and puff steam from your open mouth. Your tummy rumbles and grumbles like a cage of a capella lions.
Urgh! Ughk! Gaah! You tumble to one knee, clutching the mad dervish of your insides as they threaten to become outsides. "Treachery… poison…" But upthrust flies your fist, and you ascend with it, looking down upon the Sorceress. "Or so you would think! But it'll take more than that to destroy me!" You belch, emitting a thin lance of superheated air.
"Darn," says Gisena from the vicinity of your pectorals, snapping her fingers. "Foiled again."
"Indeed, your stratagem was weak! Though its taste may be heinous– nay, I would even say atrocious– your poison could not kill even a mortal, though it may give them indigestion!"
"Alas, defeated once more."
"And though your scheme may have failed, I must punish this lapse of good moral behaviour!"
"Oh?" Gisena flutters her eyelashes. "And how will you punish me?"
Immediately you begin squatting vigorously. "Look closely, Miss Allria! We'll see how dastardly you feel after a good round of sweat!"
Gisena observes your flexing form fastidiously. Afterward, she wobbles on unsteady legs, supported by your chivalrous bicep.
"I don't think I can walk," she says. "Could you carry me, darling?"
Having doled out her punishment, further negative reinforcement would be unnecessary and unethical. You heft Gisena onto your forearm, securely ensconcing her pliant form into the crevices of your biceps and firm, unyielding grasp. You feel her squirm into position for many long seconds, but in vain; your calculations are impeccable; comfort, maximised.
"How goes your studies into big orc balls, Gisena?"
The Sorceress makes the same face she does when testing her soups. "Darling, please don't call it that." Nevertheless she leads you to the vivisection cell, where a limbless, faceless, bisected, mostly eviscerated Orkaiser hangs from a hook, straining against its high-gauge carbon-reinforced mechasteel as the surgery arms strip away the daily pound of flesh. You examine the series of scalpels that have been exchanged each day, each blade corroded down to a bone of polymer. The air around the specimen pulses like unfolding sheets of mirage heat, the heat of burning probabilities.
Not only extremely resilient in their biological structure, the orc species appears to have their own subtle arts. Like a bowling ball hefted onto a trampoline deforming the curvature of the polymesh mat, mature orcs distorted the paths of lesser worldlines with their own heft of spirit. Their reach extended beyond their own physical body to bend the world to their will, like stones hurled from ever higher heights to ever farther lands.
You contemplate the trampoline you created to enrich Gisena's containment. Strangely, she only uses it when you're here to observe. She should have more trust in her own ability to recover from falls!
Under the heat of that blazon-soul, even the most statistically astronomical events would occur with regularity, so long as it benefited the orc in question. Naturally this would lead to the dreaded "double bounce" scenario: hurling a bowling ball at the other side of the trampoline to launch yourself ever higher, granting more altitude to impart greater energy at the next throw, and so on, assuming infinitely durable bowling balls and trampoline elasticity. It is only the fact that most orcs are subsapient that has permitted the Joanian Empire to persist as long as it has.
Most, but not all.
You place Gisena down on a nearby chaise lounge, and enter the cell. Even bereft of all its sensory organs, the Orkaiser turns its hollowed head to you, the pulsating golden glow of its cerebral node exposed to the air. A harsh exhale from its half-lung you translate as an orcish roar.
You feel your skin spontaneously erupting into flames as cellular stockpiles rupture without cause. You sweep your hand down, your knifehand chop dulled by a bizarre atmospheric hyperbaric coalescence focused precisely to interrupt your motion, just as several of the same anomalies disrupt your stance. The power of the spiritual distortion to draw together unlikely factors essential to success, Gisena had dubbed the power of Attraction. Against it, even the least possibility of your failure to execute your techniques becomes almost certain; any creature of sufficient Attractive power could turn a 0.00001% chance of victory into 0.0001%, or 0.1%, or 10%. Like the Marble Trick from famed anime-manga franchise Gate/stay Night involving a portal in Tokyo leading to a land of living myth and heroic legendry, a vat containing ten thousand black marbles and one white marble would produce only white, every draw.
But what if that white marble was removed?
Again your hand descends, again you face interference. Like the smith hammering flaws from his blade, you sharpen your martial technique. Existing in the epicentre of a ravaging whirlwind of fate directed solely to your destruction, you resist. One by one, you pick out the white marbles and toss them away: stance transitions, cellular matrix substructures, force concatenations, imbalances of hormone receptor triggers, and more. Your hand reaches the Orkaiser, first with feather-force, then cudgel, then bone-rocking sledgehammer impetus, sending the orc swinging on its hook.
There is always one more white marble in the road to touch the Accursed's back, but it is no longer within the remit of this orc's Marble Trick to extricate it from its prison of black balls. Your pure mortal technique, long since eclipsing the efforts of the men of your home, has been honed to present an impenetrable wall of failure for any force of Attraction lesser to this Orkaiser. A future of nothing but black balls.
Having extracted the last useful data from this specimen, you exert the merest iota of your Attractive power. The Orkaiser evaporates into a green-and-grey mist of disintegrated matter.
You exit the cell, taking a seat next to Gisena, who immediately uses your powerful thigh as a pillow, tracing a fingernail up and down your abdominal muscles. Despite the obvious benefits of enacting prisoner-labour schemes to simultaneously rehabilitate Sorceresses and fortify mankind's geopolitical and existential security, you cannot help but shed a tear at this transgression against minimum-wage laws. Only by her work did you chip against your rostered fragment of Curses, with the aid of a mysterious crystal housing a child predator ghost elf (long story).
What use is the Hero, if he saves through Villainous means? If the Hero wins the preservation of society with means the society deplores, has it truly earned its victory against all that could have been? Alas, your shoulders are not yet wide enough to carry the Manifest Realm entire, and so you must resort to these truly exploitative measures, even if you have done your best to make this incarceration as efficiently painless as possible.
You gaze at Gisena, sorrow filling your Heroic heart at this heinous labyrinthine strait of circumstances you have constructed to force her aid. No doubt she will forever harbour a seed of resentment against you for this humiliating indignity of coercing her to your purposes, but needs must. Were it only you… but alas, you are still gainfully employed by the man called the Accursed.
Gisena squints at you, before winking with a poked out tongue. You weep internally, and then externally, collapsing to your knees and shaking both fists to the uncaring heavens. Would that this flower of maidenhood were not created in this bitter world, but in a time of peace.
Gisena sighs.
~~~
See the Manifest Realm. League on league of hills and valleys gently coated with green. Forests like elders bearing witness to the procession of ages. The little squares of wheat shining like mirrors kindled with sunlight gold, the castles of the Sorceresses reaching high with their fingers of stone.
Look a little east. See the red line, the jaws that bite, the eyes that blind, the wall of light and flame. The thundering blows and hurricanes of the JSDF swollen with almighty brute power. The Orcwaste, a cigarette burn on the face of the land.
Correct your course. It is time to slay the Hero out of Legend.
You nyoom your way through the air. Far behind you, Spaceship Jikoprise closes its elbow railgun and returns to its pose. Miles away on the sunburned earth you sense the Hero just as he senses you, and though you are a great distance away it is as though he speaks to you face to face. As two men who view each other from the treetops, achievement has made you comrades, even if the gulf between you is unsurpassable. You fondly recall your childhood training shot putting squirrels among treetops to perfect your Nutpounder technique. Truly, many nuts were pounded that weekend.
"Returning so soon," he says. The Hero stands no taller than his Warlords, his eyes like candles at dusk, but he alone wears the full plate of grimsteel forged beneath the Attraction of their greatest smiths, the snarling cuirass fearsome as an oni. Atop his pate are indelible scars stretching from brow to temple, the marks of ithilyor unfaded that shine like seething furnace-mouths, the battle-crowned Orkönig. "So the time has come. Then come, human! As close as you like!"
Indeed you do come, hard and fast. Like two bowling balls circling each other on the trampoline, collision is inevitable. Though country or world may separate you, your Attraction contains and confines you both to the inevitable smashing of your balls.
When you first met the Hero, his attempt at defense was pathetic. Fostered into a machine of extermination by the elves, Gisena said. How laughable! Perhaps his training would have been enough to destroy mankind, but to your eyes perfection was sadly lacking. Perhaps the elves had trained him wrong, as a joke. You soon corrected that error.
Your first blow lands as a meteor of brute force, a swaggering axekick that ignites the air, capsizes the earth into a bowl of scorching lava. As expected, the Hero dodged your traditional opening, flecks of liquid stone flying into transient chimerae of hurricane and quake. He leaps backward, vanishing in a typhoon backstep that upkicks a tsunami of bone-white boiling rock like a dragon's claw.
"My student!" you cry, and with a sweep of your hand the avalanche scatters like sakura. "Why do you flee my embrace?" Through the searing air you hurry after him. With raptor agility you leap high and land hard, your fierce toes stitching divots into the lava like a tracking machine-gun.
You feel his will set against you, his Attractive girth flaring out to swamp you. In higher realms he works, as do you, that realm of spirit weighing on the world like the gathering of a storm charges the air with electric potential. "Student?" says the Hero. "No. Now I am the master."
So uttered, the orc raises a palm to the sky as if catching rain. Streaks of pure black lance out from that palm, slashes of calligraphy across the skin of reality, runes of hollow darkness in the tongue of the elves. The Hero sags in enervation as though drained of blood and bone, as his working takes form, one of the fate-blessings of the ithilyor incinerated on the altar of victory. Suddenly the world shimmers as though beyond the two of you it is only a painted facade; your Quirk stutters, suddenly losing control of everything outside this arena. The Hero burns bright, a dominating fist clenching at reality.
What a clever orc. Ever has the orc race embodied elegance of motion and skill, true grace now rendered.. Into this Sorcerorc! He has cut off your escape route, binding spirit to body irrevocably. Destruction of your current corporeal form will be true destruction, wound of body now wound of soul. The additional auxiliary bodies sent after this one will likely splatter across the countryside without your direction. How inconvenient! And with his Attractive presence so deeply enmeshed into the Material World, its thousandfold hands even now clutch against you directly, sacrificing mere probability-burning for immediate, overwhelming power.
Death looms behind you, its specter both terrible impetus and sweetest comfort. Such a nostalgic feeling. Like meeting an old friend! Your soul now joined to flesh exerts its own Attraction, the sensation swaddling you like cloth. Between you, closer to you than him, the wall of your mutual Attractions grinding against each other screeches with earth-fracturing friction, a sheeting pane of tumultuous static like lightning illuminating a sunset sea.
The prelude to your clash engenders an electrifying frisson within your breast, a thrill that spurs your vocal chords to action.
"HAAAAAAAH!" you roar. Your abs slide apart with a hydraulic hiss, and you let loose a Navel Laser pulse, the energy of a solar event concentrated into a palm-wide radiation point. The Hero vanishes in a sidestep and the Laser makes a hard right turn, tracing a deafening, dazzling path through the turbulence of his wake.
You follow the road of light, swallowed up in the twinkling coat as Hagakure's Quirk bends planet-burning power into a whirling suit, your Naturalist's Brand forcing the Hero to turn back with a snarl. The least fraction of that sun-rivaling shine bursts behind you in twin scarves of light, propelling you fist first as the Hero meets you, his grimsteel plate blue with heat as the laser refracts from its stygian gaze, its umbilical tether drawing you together.
"Show me your progress, Hero!" you cry, and meet him.
Your fists fall as uncountable as the rain, a diluvial annihilation of realm-purging strikes that engulf the Hero in a deafening symphony of wind and light, the material static of heavenly force congealed into lesser dimensions. Your first blow pushes him back as though embedded in molasses, your second hurtling with supernal speed to strike before the Hero floats beyond your reach, imparting exponentially greater force. So comes your subsequent blows, each ever faster than its predecessor, pushing even further, the ring of your fist against steel growing sharper, forcing you to compete against yourself of yestermoment, faster and faster and faster–
The Hero unsheathes the barest inch of his grimsteel scimitar, the Starbane whose mettle is black as hate, and whose reflection cuts as fiercely as its edge; of its thousandfold slicing image, Hagakure turns away ninety-five parts in a hundred, riddling your skin with a dozen bone-deep scores that resist your regeneration, throbbing with agony and blowing you back. This is only a prelude to the full baring of that unseeable sword flying to his claws with magnetic Attraction, and with it the Hero holds it upright, a vortex monolith that seems to sink spacetime like silk cast onto water. He slashes once more his dark runes into the world, its cutting shine swallowed up and concentrated into its steel bite, an incising hemisphere of ideograms that burn with sepulchral glory, each stretch of darkness invested with grave and silent holiness.
You cannot allow another working to be realised. Tracking the flow of his swordsmanship, you twist from toe to torso to palm, slapping the flat of the blade as it nears your throat. The vibrational force, enough to liquefy natural steel, echoes down its length into the Hero, his fingers suddenly nerveless as though hemiplegic. The runes shake and splinter, half-drawn into the world, and you strike the sword once, twice more with the Nerveless Jellyfish Stinger until the Hero with the last strength of the limb drives the sword through his other arm, affixing it between his bones. With a twist he sweeps his limb, writing an arc of obliteration that decapitates your pompadour. But his off-hand is just that slight ounce weaker, less agile; in the inch between movements you seize the Hero by his limp arm, levering his arm to drive his face into the abyssal glyphs of his working. The glyphs, like ink dripped on water and fading into gossamer shadow, yet retain their terrible power now turned against their scribe, the Hero's flesh flying away in a sandblaster spray.
The Hero turns his reaper's visage to you, the golden flame of his brainpan shining uninhibited by eyes. He slashes at you, the cut of his blade flying around your chest many times over, and as you leap back he turns the blade on himself to lop off the limp arm and flick it into your face. You turn it aside, and the Starbane, hiding in its shadow, drives itself into the hairpin of your left forearm. With a twist, the Hero wrenches your arm into a forking branch. Yet the fingers of each half of your arm intertwine and you twist to pin the sword; with your right hand you deliver a raw haymaker at his wrist, shattering gauntlet and vambrace into a fine spray of green and grey and loosing the Starbane from his grip. It spins wildly, cleaving apart your left arm in a whirlwind, and you kick it down into the earth. It does not bounce but sinks as though passing through hologram, your enhanced Cement Quirk sending it deep beyond retrieval.
Your Attractions are weaker now; the air roils like a desert wind, the earth cooling into dark basalt. The Hero, though his head is a half-pulped ruin, takes his ruined wrist and bites hard, crushing the grimsteel plate and bone into a crude stabbing implement. You, with your one good hand, set yourself into a stance of power, calling up reserves of might not easily drawn.
You push your fist forward into air and find resistance. Like a man pressing his hand against earth, then stone, steel, the space ahead of your fist seeming to swell with the press of the world itself shouldering against the door. You could no more move your fist forward than word can write itself off paper. Your flesh is a prison whose bars are the irresistible alloy of physical law, as inescapable as the forces binding electron to atom. You know, with absolute certainty, that this is as easy as it will get.
"One Fist…"
You strain. You grit your teeth. Your sight dims, darkens. All around you land and light and sky seem to bend, shrink and draw into the space before your fist, leaving only darkness, then the place beyond darkness, and likewise you feel your vigour and consciousness swirl and drain into the all-consuming hunger of the Praxis. From cracks in your knuckles, threads of purest, richest blue sear out into the horizon like coronal ejections.
"...Approaching…"
Even the Hero is drawn into that inescapable vortex, his feet skidding on the hard stone. He leaps toward you, his armblade a buzzing hacksaw, intent on breaking your stance. You precede him, unfolding like a stack of paper sheets caught in the wind, the light of Praxis dying as you elongate to strips of coriaceous skin that bind the Hero like the capture-tape of your sensei all those years ago. Though the Hero's armblade manages to slice away your legs and lower half, what remains suffices as you transform your ribs into caltrops and latch on. Plate and spaulder buckle like accordions, jointed mail crushes and squeezes, as you embrace with your whole might. He writhes and tears at you, great tangled snarls of muscle and tendon flinging away, but it's too late.
Behind him rises a slender stick-figure assembly, your arm and the Hero's arm once discarded now merged and extruded into this frail rigging of ruined flesh and bare ligament surmounted by a hollow caricature of bone, designed and built only to make one motion.
You take the stance of power. The vortex opens, heaven and earth intermingling as they are drawn into that eviscerating aperture of blue eternity. The Hero utters, "Useless! USELESS! USELEEEEEEEE–"
Despite your form, you cry out:
"GooooooOOOOOOOOOO–"
The fist of apotheosis grinds through reality, and you feel your makeshift body burst open with eggshell delicacy, a clenched ram of sheer obliterating might thrust through the Hero's cuirass to seize his still-beating heart in fingers of light. In realms high and low, the scouring radiance of the Hero's Attraction diminishes like dew before the dawn, his edifice of spiritual potency now crumbling into ruin. He takes a step, another, but his strength flees him; he collapses to his knees, face turned skyward.
Even now, knelt by weakness, the Hero speaks, though he lacks lips, teeth, tongue, or even the front of his throat, his words carried on the rapidly shrinking radius of his Attraction. "One fist approaching god… So this is how Jotarun of Yor passes." He grimaces. "What an outrageous thing to stand against."
You reform yourself, folding back like coiling rope into a torso and head, suspended on your one hand, entrails hanging dry from your guts. On your face is an expression of surprise. "Your name's Jotarun?" He does not respond. You hop over, grabbing onto his shoulder.
You grin, gracing the Hero with a perfect smile. "Maa, Jotarun, you've missed out on the first lesson of all Heroes." With a wrenching motion, you deliver a crushing headbutt once, twice, a jackhammer series that sends brainmatter soaring on the wind in a wet haze. "The job of the Hero… is to overcome the unfairness of the world with overwhelming strength. And to do so with a smile that never fades! That's… your Hero Academia!" So said, you open wide, and bite down on the neck stump.
~~~
The great thing about orcs is that they don't taste that bad! Somewhat like matsutake suimono with a generous dash of miso. Eventually you stand up on your own two feet, stretching your freshly reconstructed body, feeling the spoils of victory join with you. When you open your eyes they blaze with golden light; you experiment with it, before restoring their typical emerald hue.
Task complete. Cursebearer, you have slain <The Hero Out of Legend>. You have gained reprieve. Time remaining: 10 years.
Sadly you could not reconnect with your exterior systems. Without your input, alas, they'll fall back onto their programmed directives until you reconnect manually. Still, you believe in Jeannie-chan and the discipline of the JSDF! Ganbatte!
You lick your finger, sticking it into the wind, and orient yourself to the Joanian Empire. The western sky is aflame with the light of the setting sun. The earth is awash with greenskins, Warlord and Orkhan and Orkaiser, wary but growing bold in the wake of your battle, clambering toward you now with steel and claw. It's four hundred miles to Joania, and you've got no pants.
You leap to the nearest promontory of fused basalt, leaning in full view of the horde, and slap your knee. The peal of flesh on flesh rings out for miles, a skyful of lights turning to you; faced with such an audience your Attraction ignites, a bonfire glory of warrior's will. You shade your eyes with a hand, squinting into the sun, and your grin widens.
You leap at the nearest Orkaiser, pulping her torso into a radius of giblets. In the rain of gore, you pose, proclaiming, "Villainous orcs! The stars turn aslant, the crane perches on the bough! Moon and sun conjoin once in a century, and the earth trembles with timorous frailty! Fear always, fear eternal, for I… AM HERE!" Without looking, you catch a spear and hurl it back, impaling twelve in one stroke. "Hah! Hahahahaha!"
Before was business. This is pleasure.
You beckon with an outstretched palm. "Now, COME AT ME ALL AT ONCE!"
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