Black Knight of SO
Owner/Operator of SO’s Item/Weapon Shop
Claimer of the original Rumbles 2,000,000th post
CBR GM/DM
Katchin quivered in Zaofan's hands, and leaning his weight upon it it began to chip into the floor of desolate Avalon where the Queen now held her mock court. Braced upon the adamantine staff, it was by the Sheep's Fortitude that Zaofan's rattling grip painstakingly held his position.
"Looking...up at somebody....is one thing," Zaofan stammered, yet his eyes never quite left hers, "Don't...think anyone likes...to be looked down upon...regardless."
The pale blue ki he put into his katchin weapon sharply shrank its aura. It was taking all of his strength of will to stand, and even more to remain cordial when all his instincts screamed at him for dread.
Run. Run!
"But if it makes you...feel better...how about...reaching across the aisle...for friends of Morgan La Fay?" He faltered, for the weight upon his back was great, pronounced most where it lanced into his heart and mind. "How many...thousands of years...waiting...I don't think...she wanted to...come back to this...?"
Even with the Bear's Strength coiled within his legs he struggled to keep himself upright through the power of ki.
And perhaps, that difference was just it. The energy in this dead chamber, if it could even be called something like ki and far from magic as he had known, it was twisted, uncanny...it was not alive.
Far more sensitive to this subliminal matter was Ochazuke. Fallen to a knee in silence, by all appearances he had been the first to fall to Persephone's decree. The Guardian of Earth?
Her brazen statement struck him in tandem with the undead witch's worship. There was no Spark of Creation to be seen here, what growth had emerged from the ice-sheets and tundra an artificial synthesis of matter and that horrid substance prying between spaces in the twisting ether. The Void that had brought Cthylla to their company was the very same that birthed Amdapor's sleeping gods.
Yog-Sothoth. The utterance of that name even in his thoughts racked his insides with an icy, crawling sensation, as if to speak it would draw manifold eyes and feelers towards him. Yet she who had returned from beyond the veil spoke it freely. At last he understood quite clearly this place no mere machinery.
Neither tomb nor sanctuary. This is a living passage between the worlds.
Planting the flat of his fist downward, Arthur's ring pressed flat against the orichalum substance of the chamber floor.
"Nobody comes to this place by chance...was the death of your kingdom merely by chance as well?" Ochazuke faced downward, his voice tightened with a silent rage. The creatures that sang her worship, they were once human; their flesh stretched to vapour now reconstituted her new physical form.
At the very least, Rex did not put on airs when he twisted a life for his own needs.
"What hope did you have to revive it," Ochazuke continued, "when your charges, you guard, your degenerate heir could not uphold it?"
By the Colonel's lead, Kenshiko found the wind-blown path along the blasted, black rocks. The torrid sea carried such a chill that cut through the air like cruel blades. there they found the passage.
Whisps of vapor escaped with a low hiss between Kenshiko's teeth. She raised a hand, gilded with a crackling golden glow. By this illumination, as she passed through she saw steel support beams, like uneven surgical staples, bolting the cavern open.
As the winds rushed past through that rocky slit, its passing howl trickled through the dark hollows past the surface, it seemed as if a low wail called out from deep below.
Buried by the passing ages, the ghosts of Vermilion called their company below.
Kenshiko moved past the entrance and cast a long gaze over the mine shaft. Stretching her arm over the yawning chasm, there was a rush of air from below that wicked past her, blood-warm. The glow in her palm swelled to a globe, and tipping it over, she let descend.
Tracking its path as it fell, all too shortly the light faded the deeper it fell into that darkness The Sergeant peered over the edge and muttered silently to herself. It seemed the thing had no bottom.
Then in an instant, there was a flash, as of the light offered had been collected and returned several times over. Something deep within the Earth had responded.
Heedlessly, she leapt after it straight into the abyss, the impact of her landing buffered by a short kiai. When she looked over to where her energy orb illuminated, she found the crystal formations standing under the excavation drones as they whirled above in clinical examination. Prismatic geode formations stood, silent crystalline towers. Their flat edges collected the light cast from the light source of her own ki into broad rays, cast from one to the next as they spread. The deposit field that lay below the entirety of Charlie Base stood alit, and where the facets caught the light they stood a field of fiery tongues.
Sequestered in the darkness, the secret history of this place was soon to come to light.
She pressed forward, each step forward carried by a burning within her. Something was down here, and all she had to do was reach out and grasp it.
Black Knight of SO
Owner/Operator of SO’s Item/Weapon Shop
Claimer of the original Rumbles 2,000,000th post
CBR GM/DM
Zxu'ro's words struck him with a weight he'd never felt before, and taken quite off-guard by the revelation he was not here, he found himself quite short of words for a moment.
More than the fire in the kitchen hearth and even the simple pleasures of flavour, he'd never quite found a sense of place in his travels.
Ryuu-Shingen's technique had piqued his curiosity, only for the bloodlust to destroy the entire Hokuto order; Toh Magoh's promises of strength had played him for a fool; and Eskrimato's faction of the Turtle School, well, by then the training was far too late. The damage had been done, and he didn't want a master so long in years to waste his time on an uncommited fool like him.
In the end, perhaps it had only been the kitchens where he belonged, and for years he'd wandered, but never stayed in one place too long. The world was a great, wide place, after all, and the heritage of the Earth had been his anchor. Rooted in its strength to endure a great tumultuous history, he'd clung to it in an effort to find his place.
Only after meeting Ochazuke and Sasheem did he finally have an inkling of what that might be, and with that all had befallen Master Balon, he swore, then, that he would do his best to ensure none of this would be forgotten. There was something in the knowledge they shared that went beyond a simple friendship or tutelage.
Eventually you and the other chosen will meet the real me.
His heart shrank and he felt his insides hollow, as if the entire world fell out from beneath his feet and cast him adrift once more. Mara the Wolf, Tao'ro the Spider, the diaspora of the Bedlam clan, Cinder's fallen Phoenix ashes, and the tainted legacy of Leon's student, the World Champion. For all the ugliness that had befallen this world, he wanted to do right by them. The path they set out led to counsel with the Master.
All that struggle, secrecy, and lives lost, and he wasn't even really here.
It is there you’ll truly take upon my legacy.
The whole time, was he only ever chasing an idea? Right now, he was having words with a phantom.
He'd crossed hands with a Saiyan Elite, stared a Time Elemental in its fateful vortex, fought within the factories of the First Race, and breached the veil to glance headlong into the Void...
But it was never enough. No matter what he did, he would never catch up while the entire universe left him behind.
"I don't know what good it will do," he said, eyebrows raised over heavy-lidded eyes, the facade of a thin smile stretched over his face, "But we've come this far...so you tell me."
Having reached into the gathered ki that made up the shape of this living memory, Zaofan sighed and entered a deep, crouching stance, gathering ki towards himself as the agility of the Wolf and fortitude of the Bear entered his frame. Kicking off into a series of rapidfire blows, there were hints there. The arcing shell of a Turtle in the After-Image, traced upon the Crane's evasive footwork, feeding into the coiling limbs and snapping claws of the Dragon.
A gout of the Flame taught to him by Balon-sensei animated the next sequence, impossibly hot as it swept upward, but so controlled it caught neither leaf nor grass as he thinned and fanned it, caught spread wide by the Spider's silk, invisible.
Closing out the blended kata sequence, Zaofan felt ill at the display. It was his; it was an unorthodox hodgepodge.
"...and my colleague over there," he pointed to Sasheem, "he's carrying on the legacy of the Snake."
Black Knight of SO
Owner/Operator of SO’s Item/Weapon Shop
Claimer of the original Rumbles 2,000,000th post
CBR GM/DM
Sasheem sniffed as he stood up, still fuming. It honestly hadn't occurred to him just how much he'd been left out of until Zaofan showed off techniques he had no knowledge of.
Still it didn't matter. What the Majin lacked in quantity, he could make up in his concentrated studies of the handful of styles he knew. His quest to master the Snake School's ultimate technique would require no less. Centuries of lost history and then some resided within Sasheem and through Balon's training he knew how to further utilize them towards their maximum potential. "Excuse Sasheem if he doesn't have as many techniques to show off, but if you really wanna see what the sole heir of the Snake School has inherited..."
Sasheem quickly motioned his arms until his right stood pointed out in front of him, his left held behind in reserve as both limbs quickly cycled through various motions, imitating the precise movements of a viper, readying it's fangs to lash out and strike.
With a subtle motion, he shot a small ki blasts shoots into the grass below, nearly undetectable thanks to swift usage of The Spider's Blessing.
The small blast kicked up a single blade of grass and from Sasheem's knuckles grew razor sharp blades of The Bear's Clawsas he took a ferocious stance, before shifting swiftly back into the quicky and snappy strikes of the Snake School, jabbing at the blade of grass several dozen times within the span of a few seconds.
The single blade spun around in mid-air, looking no different, despite being the Majin's assaults....until one gazed upon it with closer inspection to witness several tiny holes pierced into it. The holes began to fizzle, soon consuming the grass into nothingness with Venomous Ki.
Suddenly, shifting into his Naga Palm technique, multiple arms still emerging from his body, Sasheem took a stance reminiscent of that of a crouching spider, masking his ki again before firing a blasts from each of his hands off into the distance.
The blasts began to circle around the skies, back towards their target, Sasheem himself. The Majin smirked as he raised up both his arms, taking a stance and utilizing a yet to he unveiled technique that he had developed whilst training under Balon. "Daijinryuu-Ken!" Both arms became coated in Katchin....but then became serated, not unlike the hardened scales of the great beasts summoned from the Dragon Balls.
Sasheem took the brunt of all seven blasts, and while the force of each skidded back, until he swiped both arms forward and the blasts suddenly dispersed.
Returning to the hill he had previously sat upon, Sasheem took a seat once more. "So, master of masters," The Majin added with a hint of mockery. "Whadjya think of that?"
The Queen's... reluctance to acknowledge the saurian's presence was noted. It was fully intentional, after all, that he knew all too well. She was trying to rile him up by pretending he didn't exist in her presence although he was the one who had ruined her blasphemous kingdom in the first place. He could feel the veins bulge from his forehead in seething hatred as he blood boiled even hotter than the effects of Charco's lingering explosion had felt.
He would not go quietly into that dark night, even if it was her intention.
"I would not get comfortable if I were you..." He began, exhaling his rage in order to conduct himself, "Your awakening was merely a side-effect of cleaning up the garbage that was and still is, Avalon." He hoped the venom in his words would twist the knife in what desiccated and frigid heart she had left.
The small globe of ki fed its light into the field of crystals. Its light refracted upon each great facet glittered, the darkness fell back to reveal the little machines and the small whine of their rotary jets flit in small echoes as they resumed their delicate work, unveiling a sight unseen for ages. From the fissure entrance, any traces of daylight above soon faded from view, but paradoxically the projected light of her ki shone all the brighter, carried from prism to prism. A crude road leading deeper into the pit.
Kenshiko pressed a button onto her comm, static sounding out a channel to Willa and Damask miles above. "Contact. Moving forward."
Raisng a hand alit with energy, the Tiger Master continued to forge ahead where these wild, icy protrusions erupted from the stony strata.
soon the forms refined shortly, soon replaced by surfaces, geometrically rounded and square-measured.
Here was the remainder of a civiliazation thrust far underground, and the crystals served as a strange system of beacons that reacted accordingly to a living presence. When Kenshiko raised her hand, the bejewelled veins ebroidered into the facet construction bathed the area in a geographic masonry.
"Looks like it's not just a crystal mine. Somebody else got to refining your treasury far before we got here."
What sort of civilization was this? It would be impossible to measure entirely from here, but there were faint hints on the rock surface, where mineral leached through the condensation into drips. It was soon that she noticed amid the ruins that although columns rose , they served to hold no roof; The deposits of eons smoothed over the damage, forcefully conjoining them to a ceiling of shifted earth.
To her sensibilities the stalactite drops above came blood-warm as they fell.
How do you destroy the soul of a people?
Every step closer to this answer was with great trepidation. The Red Raiders knew the answer to that far too well, but as Heir to one of the Five Schools, the sheer scope and length of this repeated cycle caused Kenshiko to seethe. When she approached what Willa had designated the armory and library, and near their shattered walls, the light carried through the mineral veins revealed something horrid.
There was some faded shape she could make out. Extraordinarily faint, like a trick of the light. Perhaps the illumination past the shadows itself eroded the shapes as much as the mineral issue dripping from the roof. Carved into the rock was a watery motif bearing acute stains of time.
A threat from the heavens to the mundane world below, its arrival heralded upon a falling red star. A bringer of light composed in awe and terror in equal measure stood in opposition.
What does this mean?
"Area's clear," she called out. "I have visual on something you and the Major ought to come see."
"You tell me, Colonel."
There in the darkness, there were twelve pillars gathered in a semicircle before the remains of the armory. Upon closer inspection, the shape of broad helm and worn standards were found, smoothed under layers of trickled limestone collected over their frames across countless years.
"The reason you and Damask found each other was because this is where you discovered your roots," she said.
Their swords and featureless visages pointed down, their features smoothed from eons' erosion. At the head of them their leige lord raised his blade to Heaven in the darkness.
"Heh, maybe you were meant to slay dragons instead of raiding."
Black Knight of SO
Owner/Operator of SO’s Item/Weapon Shop
Claimer of the original Rumbles 2,000,000th post
CBR GM/DM
Black Knight of SO
Owner/Operator of SO’s Item/Weapon Shop
Claimer of the original Rumbles 2,000,000th post
CBR GM/DM