Chapter 16-
Gideon whipped around and threw his blade out; Warren’s feet had barely landed on the ground before he parried the blow and dashed to the side. He extended his arm out, his rose shimmered and a red beam of light burst from his palm. Gideon sidestepped just in time to avoid the attack, which left a fiery blaze in the air. As the swordsman moved, he noted that the blast did not reach to the buildings behind him.
“That beam- it has a definite range,” he thought. “But it’s slow!”
Two minutes ago, the circling horsemen had abruptly vanished into thin air. Warren had shown a muted reaction to the sudden disappearance, but internally he knew that he needed to finish this fight quickly.
“If Malvado falls and Ajax arrives here, I don’t know if even I could defeat both of them…” The plan, to create a distraction on each side of the town, had not fallen apart, but its status was now much more dire.
His opponent had taken the vanishing horsemen in stride; Warren was unaware of Captain Jepta’s motto: “If you can see it, you must follow it.”
Gideon rushed for Warren, following a tricky zig-zag pattern and moving at changing intervals, making it difficult for his enemy to predict his approach. His saber came out once he was within the maximum striking range, and Warren easily blocked it, throwing it off once more with his arm, covered again in that reddish glow.
“That’s it!” Gideon thought, as he used Warren’s parry to skip backwards, out of melee range. As predicted, Warren, having thrown his arm up, brought it down once more and focused his energy to his palm. A beam shot out in Gideon’s direction, he leaned forward, braced his legs, then brought one foot up and struck the ground with the tip of his boot. He launched upwards and vaulted over the Warren’s attack.
“That’s your weakness!” he thought.
Gideon’s sword flew down as he descended.
“Damn!” Warren could see the edge swiftly approaching his center.
“[SALAMANDER]!!”
The world was bathed in a crimson light, and before he knew it, Gideon’s blade had come down on nothing.
“What-” he thought, barely able to turn his head as Warren had suddenly warped behind him midair, delivering a hard kick to his side.
“Gagh!” Gideon cried out, being thrown to the side.
Warren hit the ground himself, and watched his opponent readily rise to his feet.
“That was a good one,” Gideon called, smiling. “I don’t think I’ve taken a hit in five years.”
---
Janna looked out her window in time to see the illusion of Treachery dissipate into thin air, leaving only Gallow, Sonsee, Malvado, and a young boy about her age.
“What in heaven is happening out there?!” she cried from her room. In about a minute, she was out of her night-clothes and into a long skirt and white blouse; not even enough time to comb her hair.
---
Malvado’s situation had suddenly become much more challenging. He had been relying on the shadows created by the illusions to increase the effectiveness of Alone Down There. Now, that option no longer existed, and he needed to rely on the shadows cast by the rising sun to face off against two opponents. He knew that this was highly unlikely, if not impossible, to accomplish, but there was a kind of naive spitefulness in his heart. Spite that originated from, if nothing else, a grudge over the wound he had sustained on their first encounter.
“There are supposed to be three men,” Gallow addressed to Malvado. “One is a native, and clearly Warren is somewhere else, so where is that third man?”
Malvado, still locked with Sonsee, replied coolly: “He’s off to destroy the Garden.”
“What?!” Sonsee cried.
Malvado smirked, this was his chance to split their attention. Sonsee raised her leg back and kicked him squarely in the gut.
“Gagh!” he grunted as he fell back. She disengaged from him and turned to the direction of the stump that held the gateway. Malvado recovered from the hit and raised his gun to fire, but before he could pull the trigger, Alone Down There sent a warning signal to him. He reeled back just in time for another bullet to whiz past his arm.
Gallow’s gun smoked, he clicked the hammer. It was clear that he wouldn’t let him go that easily.
“Alright, have it!” Malvado yelled, and strafed to the right with a burst of speed, firing off a shot to kill.
---
Gideon’s sword danced through the air with such velocity that the only thing visible was the glint of sunlight off the blade, shimmering through the clouds of dust. He turned back, Warren was off the ground, he struck again, making three cuts in under a second. Warren spun around like a top, batting each hit away with ease before halting his rotation and drawing his arm out in a sweeping descent. Gideon sidestepped the swipe, and Warren hit the ground a foot away, knees bent and feet pivoted, ready to spring back immediately.
From above, in the inn, Gabriel had retreated upstairs to view the excitement from behind the safety of a glass window, which, he reasoned, was better than nothing. As the brawl unfolded, he stood and watched, entranced. Sigrit was not a particularly chaotic town, but in his old age he had seen his fair share of fights: shootouts, fisticuffs, dirty scraps, you name it. This was different, however.
“When they fight,” he mused. “It isn’t like they’re fighting, it’s like a ballet, it’s like art.”
Warren pushed forward in close quarters with a barrage of punches, each blocked by Gideon’s blade.
“This shouldn’t be playing out like this,” Gideon thought. “If anyone gets within three feet of me I should be able to deal a fatal blow in under a second. This is unprecedented- that I would be on the retreat against an unarmed opponent- that he could push me back. I can feel that sensation again, like…”
He planted his foot and made a hard strike that managed to beat out Warren’s punch.
“It’s almost like…”
Gideon took advantage of his posture and the opening to send a piercing strike towards Warren’s heart. The Outlaw Rose felt a tinge of panic and his left hand flew to the approaching blade, directing it away before he brought his other hand up and charged a beam. Gideon barely moved his head out of the way before the pillar of light shrieked from his opponent’s palm. He was on the razor’s edge of death.
“Like I’m having fun again!!”
---
Gallow dodged away from the flurry of gunfire sent his way, his speed amplified by The Navigator.
“I can tug my spirit body along,” he thought. “To enhance my real one’s movement!”
Gallow responded with a barrage of his own bullets. Malvado used Alone Down There to weave out of their way and gain time to reload; Gallow needed to refill his chamber as well.
For two minutes straight, this pattern continued. Gallow realized that, despite Navigator lessening the amount of energy he needed to use up to move, he wasn’t gaining any ground on the roughly even battleground.
“What I need,” he realized, “is to make use of this gift. Time to try something for the first time in a life or death situation, good idea!”
“[NAVIGATOR]!” he called out. The sigil lit up and his spirit body split out of his physical one, energy crackled wildly as it was freed.
“What the hell is this?!” he thought. Having never separated the two before, he was completely unprepared for the sensation. His physical body felt suddenly warm and tingly; he could still control it, but it felt… different.
“Like shaking your arm after it falls asleep!”
Meanwhile, he was simultaneously aware of the world through his spirit eyes. The best comparison he would ever come up with to explain it would be a sixth sense, being able to tap into something previously unseen. Now that is was entirely disengaged, the world through his spirit eyes was like an endless void of space, where the movement of objects outlined them in a ghostly blue-white wireframe. Malvado’s figure was clearly visible, or to put it more accurately, his spirit.
“He looks different, his spirit has some kind of red heat coming from it.” Malvado’s soul was generating a noticeable energy: it was his Vocation. Gallow traced the heat signature to the ground, where it formed strange shapes.
“What is that? There needs to be some kind of pattern…”
All of this had happened in under the span of three seconds, and he suddenly realized that he needed to fire back at his enemy. Malvado fired a shot at him; Gallow, using his physical consciousness, attempted to dodge. Using Navigator to amplify his movement had spoiled him, and being torn between two states of being demanded more of his concentration than he realized. His reactions were sluggish, and despite his best effort to move in time, the bullet landed in his abdomen.
Gallow howled in pain. From about twenty feet away at the Halloway house, Janna hit the bottom of the steps and looked out the window just in time to see the hit.
“Gallow!” she cried.
“Janna!” Eli exclaimed, rifling through a trunk in the living room. “My God, please get away! Get back to your-”
“What’s happening?! Why are they-”
“I don’t know!” he shouted back. “I need you to get to safety while I look for the gun!”
“Gallow…” Janna whispered to herself.
Outside, Gallow reeled in pain from the injury, but his abstract form was, miraculously, unaffected.
“My spirit body didn’t take any damage,” he reasoned. “So I can still do something about it!”
As he staggered back, clutching the wound, he looked at the ground ahead of him.
“Of course!”
For a moment, his view of the real and spirit worlds converged in the rush of adrenaline. He could see every shadow cast by every stray rock, every blade of withered grass, and by Malvado himself; each one matched perfectly to the shapes created by the heat signature. A string extended from each shadow, tying back to Malvado.
“That’s it! His ability is in the shadows! It can’t be a combat ability, or he would have used it to take me out at the beginning of the fight; that means...” He racked his brain for the moment that Malvado’s reload allowed him to.
“That means he’s tracking my movements with them! Look-” as he took a step, his spirit eyes watched a wave resonate from the shadows up through a faint red string and back to the source at Malvado’s soul.
“Every movement, he’s picking it up; I thought his reactions were a little too fast!” Gallow put his plan together. “I don’t know if this’ll work, but that hasn’t stopped me yet!”
He dove his ethereal body into the ground, immersing himself in the black void. He brought his spirit hand down on a shadow string with a swift chop; the impact cut the thread and, thus, its information to Malvado. The wicked gunman reacted to the cut.
“Hey!” he shouted, strafing to the side. “What the hell did you do?!”
“Is he unable to see my spirit form?” Gallow thought. “This might be… better than I expected! Time to test the limits of this thing!”
His spirit body made a mad rush for every string in sight. In under a second, he was able to slice five, before Malvado could even realize what was happening. After about thirty strings were sliced in two, he finally understood what was going on.
“What the- you!” he shot off another bullet, wildly.
Gallow was too preoccupied with cutting off his opponent’s ability to dodge in time, and another blast nailed him in the side, right above the first injury. He grunted loudly in pain, then planted his foot on the ground and closed his eyes for a moment. When they opened again, he was smirking, and there was a life in his eyes that was seriously inappropriate for a man in danger of bleeding out.
“Don’t get the wrong idea,” he yelled. “I just started winning!”
---
Sonsee made a mad dash for the entrance to the Garden. She passed the stump and looked around for where this mysterious third man was. After performing a quick scan of the area with her eagle-like vision, she discovered that the coast was clear.
“But-” she panicked. “What’s this- this feeling? Like I can sense someone nearby-?” She turned around to view the side of the stump that hid the gateway. She was suddenly able to peer into it, as if she was inside, but all she could make out was that there was, in fact, a person there. She gasped, as she had never had a vision like this before.
“He’s going to destroy it! I need to- somehow-!”
She threw her arm out. “[VANISHING POINT]!” From deep within the Garden, on the other side of a dimensional gateway, she could sense this soul, like none before. There might be a chance, just maybe, that she could use Vanishing Point to take hold of that soul and pull it away. The world darkened around her, all she could see was the faint flame of this spirit, from a seemingly endless distance away. Her consciousness rushed towards it at what felt like a million miles per hour.
“To me!!”
With an incredible burst of energy, the soul was sucked towards her, passing through the borderline at an incredible speed. Dasodaha’s feet hit the ground with a thud, kicking up dust. Sonsee opened her eyes.
Her heart dropped.
His eyes suddenly blazed like a firecracker.
Her body trembled. She opened her mouth to speak. When she spoke, it was in their Native tongue.
“Josaieh…”
The word meant, “brother…….”