The Achromatic Eclipse of the Psyche, part II.

[Nayt]

Pain. A horrible pain. It would erupt within Eilert's stomach, right against his spine. It might have been a numbing pain at first, numb right after the initial shock, and were he to look down, he'd find then that a Cizokian blade would be pushing through his stomach, entering through his back, with its side positioned right upon his spine. It would pierce through, back to stomach, just millimeters from Eilert's navel. The blade was intensely sharp and would pierce through him effortlessly, through flesh, organ, and muscle all alike.

And then, were he to look ahead, he'd find something else extremely problematic in his situation. Gaia's body was no longer there upon the ground--no, no, it was elsewhere, holding the blade. Gaia's blood, spilled before, as far as Eilert had seen, was also gone.

Holding the blade was, indeed, he, Gaia--behind Eilert, with his back to Eilert's back, blade in both hands, pushing ever back, to jam it up to the hand-guard, twist, and with a sudden force of strength, pull it to the side, to rip its way out from Eilert's body in the second worst of ways. It was the only option, however; tearing through the spine was unnervingly difficult, after all.

However, as Eilert knew Gaia's appearance, there was something different about him. It wasn't the absolute lack of damage from the presumably killing blow before, but something much more worrisome, perhaps. Gaia was . . . blindfolded . . .

[Zach Kaiser]

Eilert was hit, his opponent having used one of the very same principals he used himself: that an attack undetected was guaranteed to hit. Unless a person had the ability to detect mana, chances were that they wouldn't notice a glyph until it was too late. And similarly, Eilert had not detected any attack until the curved blade had already run him through.

He gasped, immediately coughing up blood, but it did not end there--the blade was then removed, but not the same way it came in. It slashed horizontally outward, severing half the flesh of his torso from his waist.

Shockwaves of pain wracked his body; it was the single most grievous injury he'd ever sustained, and what dim level of concentration he maintained was unsure if even the heightened regeneration could heal it. Even if it could, it would take time...his assailant could easily finish him off before then.

He spun as he fell, turning to face the man who stabbed him and landing in a position not unlike the one Gaia had seemed to...but to his surprise, it wasn't Gaia who attacked him. He did not show any sign of the wounds Gaia had suffered...and furthermore, his eyes were masked by a blindfold.

Awareness blossomed through the pain; he only knew one person who wore a blindfold, and he had not seen him in some time now.

"Ex...i...tus?" he asked weakly, coughing up more blood.

[Nayt]

The blindfolded man turned slowly. Eilert was grounded, there was no further need of urgency. He could, then, be finished off quickly. With a flick of his wrist, the blade was cleaned of blood, and quickly found its way into the confines of a wooden sheath at his left side.

Eilert would find, then, that the opponent was not Exitus at all. He still wore the same clothes as Gaia--the same button down shirt, black slacks, and loafers, all stained sporadically in bloody. He had the same face and facial hair, and his hair was still just as short as Eilert had seen him last. The only difference, here, was that Gaia no longer held a large blade. The blade which Eilert had been stabbed through with wasn't even a katana. It was a curved Cizokian blade, but it was shorter than a katana. The other difference was that, now, Gaia was blindfolded. Beyond these two changes, nothing was different. His right arm was even still scorched up.

Just like Exitus's blindfold, there was a symbol within the middle of it. It was stitched in with fine, golden thread, and it was very similar to that of Exitus's symbol. It was an eye, but the design was different. It was more like . . . a phrase, a phrase in another language, small, yet shaped like that of an eye.

Someone of Eilert's expertise wouldn't have to think too hard on it to figure out just what it was . . .

[Zach Kaiser]

No...not Exitus. The weapon, the blindfold...it was all his style, but it still Gaia--the largest difference being the blindfold, or the symbol on it. It looked slightly different; this one was...a glyph?

Ah. That's how he fooled me. He knew glyphs were an ancient art; were they used by the creator himself? That would be something worth looking into; a scientific breakthrough.

Vaguely, he was aware of the fact that he was losing focus as he was losing blood; was the wound fatal, even with his regeneration, or would he be finished off? He tried to crawl, to drag himself away, but it was a futile effort...he was, for all intents and purposes, done for.

Sturm, Icsorue...forgive me...the burden of the entire world was too much for me to bear...

[Nayt]

Gaia stood before Eilert, his head facing his as if he were looking straight at Eilert, but without being able to see Gaia's eyes, Eilert wouldn't be able to tell if he really was or was not. As Gaia hadn't exerted any other drive but to kill, having not even let out even the slightest hints of a voice, it was likely that he was just going to finish off Eilert right here and now . . .

"Jeez! Areyastillreadin'that?!"

. . .

[Zach Kaiser]

Eilert opened his eyes, not even aware of having closed them. The situation hadn't changed one bit; he was still terribly wounded, with Gaia towering above him, surely preparing to strike the final blow.

And yet everything changed. Apologies, he realized, would not be enough. He owed them more than that; how much harm had been caused because he never acted, never questioned? How much more could have been prevented if only he'd seen how things were from the beginning?

His death alone would not repay his debts; no, if he was to die, his death had to mean something. Surprisingly, the thought of death did not scare him; only the thought of leaving his mission unaccomplished. That mission which had become so complex had come full circle to being simple again: all he had to do was make sure he didn't die alone.

His wound was healing too slowly; he could not fight toe to toe with Gaia anymore. All he had going for him right now was the element of surprise, for surely he seemed to be out of the action entirely. He had one chance, one chance to stop Gaia's final blow and counter attack...and if that counter didn't lead to his victory, he was sure he wouldn't get another opportunity.

So he waited; he was not fast enough to intercept Gaia's strike on speed alone, but there were only so many places he could aim and finish him off in a single stroke. He simply needed to pick one, and hope he was right...

[Nayt]

Gaia's blade was slowly withdrawn from its sheath. For some time, he paced around Eilert, saying nothing--perhaps to be expected anymore. He paced like a wolf, ready to pounce at any given moment. His eyes, although covered by his blindfold, must have been on Eilert; his head face facing the man, and never moved away from that. He was focused; distinguishably focused, ready and waiting to strike the final blow.

And then, he took his blade within both hands, holding it down, underhanded. He stopped at that instant, standing near Eilert's head. His left foot was planted next to the man's temple, and Gaia balanced himself upon that foot.

He wasted little time from that point. With both hands, he jammed the blade down, down towards Eilert's throat, intending to stab through his trachea, into the spine, and through and through, to implant the blade into the stone beneath of Eilert's throat--to stab straight through him.

Such was an attack which would have killed the man in an instant. Any man, really. Even Death himself would have been hard pressed to recover after such an injury.

[Zach Kaiser]

A normal man would have not been able to move even an inch in the state he was in; in fact, a normal man would have been dead many times over. But anything resembling normal in Eilert's life had long faded away.

His hand shot forward, one of the blades on his wrist catching Gaia's blade in what was less a feat of speed and more one of precision. But at the stage he couldn't stop such an attack entirely; after a moment's pause, the wrist blade shattered and wakizashi continued downward, piercing Eilert's hand. He would only be able to hold off the blade from his throat for a split second, but that moment was all he needed.

He slapped a glyph onto the side of the wakizashi, another new one, and immediately activated it. Orange-tinted energy crackled across the nodachi in an instant, the bolts arcing to both of the combatants, at opposite ends of the blade.

There was simply no chance of victory through speed, skill, strength, endurance...he even seemed to be outclassed in reasoning. All that was left was to try a duel of sheer will, of which it took no small amount not to scream as the Glyph of Lightning ran its course.

[Nayt]

Whatever pain Eilert was in, at that instant, may have even been of very little consequence to Gaia. The orange sparks had traveled down the blade; they reached Eilert, but it meant little. Perhaps it'd mean little to Eilert, too, as once the electricity reached Gaia, something changed.

The sky. The ground. The air. It all changed drastically in a single instant, as sparks ran up his fingers, trailed down his arm, and cycled through his chest. The ground, it shook, it quaked as if the whole world was coming down around them at that very moment in time, and yet . . . there were no cracks within the earth. If they stood upon a sphere, it was shaking, perhaps even spinning all at once, back and forth in a constant gyration. Even Gaia was having difficulty to stand during it--but that had less to do with the quaking of the earth . . .

No, it wasn't the earth that broke, but the sky. The cracks permeated a horrendous yellow glow, as the ivory partitions of the heavens split ever further. Once, they were minor splits, just cracks in the sky, but now . . . now, the gaps were noticeable. There could have been hundreds of miles between them, now. The air about them had become thicker; Eilert may even encounter difficulty breathing. His throat may not have been cut, but at least for a brief period, there was little oxygen to be had, as if the trauma of the world's further shattering had sucked the oxygen from all, if only for a moment. Soon, it would return, but not for nearly an entire minute.

Gaia released the blade almost immediately after electricity entered his system, and with a hard push of his left leg, threw himself up into the air and forward, the land within the center of the arena.

He fell to one knee amidst the world's quaking, a tremendous shaking which would find no rest until the blindfold fell from Gaia's face and drifted in a sudden and abrupt wind . . .

[Zach Kaiser]

At first, Eilert hardly noticed the condition of his surroundings; he was hit with the lightning just as hard as Gaia was. Gasping as the orange energy arced up his arm and through his whole body, he slumped back to the ground, momentarily losing muscle control.

For awhile he couldn't gather his breath; the sky seemed to split, though he couldn't be sure if it was real or if the voltage was affecting his vision. The cracks had widened, like a fault growing larger in the wake of an earthquake...

While the electricity was extremely painful, the time he bought allowed his wound to start healing. Slowly, he stood up, putting glyphs on the ground as he did so, just in time to see Gaia standing in the center of the arena, his blindfold drifting in the wind.

[Nayt]

Metal grinded against metal in hasty precision. A silver metal jutted forth from Gaia's back, at first with the appearance of a blade that ran him through at the shoulder, the left shoulder to be precise, until it snapped at the end, and as if guided by invisible gears, erred downwards at a singular point. It moved and grew like bones, artificial bones, that demanded to be free of Gaia's body--and with as much haste, the pink of muscle swelled from the wound caused by the steel protrusion, and with expert precision, glided across the steel in a dripping, volumous, seething mess, secreting a scarlet fluid as it crafted the artificial limb and the long offshoots on its undercarriage: feathers. Feathers like blades, comprised of perfect, silvery metal, and jutting out with an audible grind.

A wing.

A wing of blades.

And soon, Gaia turned to face Eilert. At that very moment, to Eilert's vision, all would take a horrifying tint of red. It was very slight, but it was a blood red, and as even the yellow faults in the sky took that tint, it would be clear enough that the world itself had not been effected by anything at all, in that single moment--but that Eilert himself, or his consciousness rather, had taken a hefty turn for the worse. There would be, upon that subtle shade of red assaulting his gaze, a slight pain in the back of his skull. Gaia's eyes, especially, gleemed a horror of scarlet.

Eilert's wounds would heal rapidly at that moment. It wasn't that his healing glyph had gone into any sort of overdrive, either; an overdrive would have been a wonderful this. This, on the other hand, was much akin to an infection--a rapid increase of effeciency of glyphs placed upon Eilert, with an excruciating agony left in its wake, as no matter how much he might try, he would no longer heal his skin in this world. Organs, bones, and muscles would replenish, but not his skin. Cracks would even appear upon the marks all over him, where the glyphs of speed and strength commanded his body to act with the utmost efficiency: cracks in his skin, faults much like those of the sky's.

If Eilert recognized what was happening, he would know then what trouble he now faced. Standing still was no longer an option. Playing the defense was no longer effective. Being passive in any way, shape, or form would get him killed--killed, and dying alone . . .

. . . for the inevitability of death was the nature of Plague, an utterly inescapable demise wherein the most viable option was to do as much with one's life with what little time had been allotted for it . . .

[Zach Kaiser]

Gaia's transformation was disconcerting enough as it was, but as he was waiting for his wounds to heal he suddenly found himself wracked with pain. What...is...this? he wondered as he doubled over. He hadn't seen an attack, Gaia had only looked at him, and now his vision was tinting red.

It wasn't until he recovered enough to look at his wounds that he realized what was going on. The way his skin cracked...it could only be one thing: The Plague. He remembered hearing about outbreaks of it when he was still alive; none in Greoul, but there was always concern that it might make its way there. And there was his more recently uncovered memory, of letting its source inside their fortress to kill their leader...one of perhaps many acts of treachery forced upon him, that he still needed to repent for.

But now it was too late. There was no cure for this, that much he knew. Regardless of how the battle went from here, he would not survive much longer. Even if he killed Gaia, he would not see Sturm or Icsorue, or any of the other Enigmas...he would never see his homeland again, and there was a strong chance that with him most of the remaining knowledge of glyphs would die.

To some, such knowledge could be a crushing weight, to make it unbearable to continue on. But to Eilert, that very same doom set him free. He would not have to figure out what to do after he won, to live with the guilt of everything he'd done...he could fulfill his purpose and then fade from existence...perhaps, that was for the best.

So when he rose to his feet again, it was not with despair or even grim resolution; his face was absolutely serene, with neither a smile or a frown. He could see it, finally...his acts throughout the whole battle had started it, and now all that was needed were the finishing touches. His path to victory was clear, and now even if it involved invoking his most forbidden glyph, he was willing to walk it.

He put a glyph on his left arm before pulling out the kodachi that was still embedded in that hand. He then placed another glyph on the blade. While the rest of his body was "healing" (even that was even what was happening anymore), he made sure the wound on his hand stayed open--an act that would be supported when he activated the first glyph. Blood went from pouring to outright gushing out of the wound, staining the ground red. It didn't matter--he was now regenerating blood at an even faster rate, and he would die of the plague long before blood loss. To Gaia, it would probably seem like a futile attempt to stall the disease, by ejecting potentially bad blood, but Eilert had quite a different purpose in mind.

Suddenly he was in motion, darting forward, weaving in an odd pattern, one that would make landing any kind of projectile blow on the Orange Enigma difficult at best. It was almost balletic, the way he moved in gentle curves, and sometimes spirals; rare were the abrupt changes in direction, and never did he stop.

And then he darted forward without warning, out of curve and straight at Gaia, still standing in the center of the arena. It seemed like a charge, but as Eilert thrust with the kodachi he stopped short--and the weapon sailed out of his hand, blade first, the glyph activating as it did so and causing the blade to crackle and burst with orange lightning.

[Nayt]

One.

A blade thrown at him. Gaia had kept his eyes on Eilert the entire time, following his extremely balanced maneuvers, motions that almost resembled a dance of some sort, motions that lead, inevitably, to Eilert charging Gaia, only to throw Gaia's own nodachi at him . . .

Without hesitation, Gaia swiped his right hand across from his body, catching the blade by the tip and swinging it across his body. Gaia's catching of the blade may have kept him from getting stabbed, but it did little to prevent him from the electricity that suddenly wormed its way through his body. He grit his teeth together as he threw the blade away and stumbled back. His body shook just as the world did. Further more, the faults in the sky grew wider. In time, they might detach and fall, but Eilert had not driven them to that point, not yet.

Eilert had set a precedent during the battle so far, a precedent that he would fight a purely defensive and passive battle. He set glyphs upon the ground and tried to lure his opponent into a trap, traps which failed, for the most part--specifically because he only had one game. He laid a trap, he tried to lure his enemy in. There was no further depth than that. There were times when he tried to trick an enemy into doing it, such as fanciful uses of teleportation glyphs and the like, but they were nothing more than tricks. Eilert hadn't been aggressive at all, and it had lead him to several painful moments, a near death experience just recently, and now a death sentence.

Showing direct aggression, at last, had actually thrown Gaia off guard . . .

[Zach Kaiser]

It was not Eilert's first aggressive act of the fight--he had attacked with his blades earlier--but it was his first effective one, combining both his increased physical abilities and his glyphs. It was an unorthodox way to fight to be certain, and it would not be possible if it weren't for the number of weapons Gaia had summoned.

Seeing him stunned, Eilert darted forward quick, attempting to place a glyph on his chest before retreating just as quickly, to again move gracefully but erratically around the arena. It would have seemed silly, as though he were dancing, were it not for the blood that continued to gush from one hand.

This time he eventually made his way back to another of the weapons--the axe, which he applied a pair of glyphs to. He was about halfway back to Gaia when he suddenly threw it directly at him, as he had once been attacked, the axe spinning end over end in a feat of strength that would normally be impossible for Eilert but now seemed utterly trivial.

[Nayt]

Two.

Although Gaia was stunned, the means had less to do with electricity and more to do with surprise. Yes, Eilert had surprised him. He had been aggressive once before, but it was menial, and Eilert seemingly gave up on it just as quickly as he did it, leaving Gaia to believe, presumably, that he wouldn't attempt such a thing again.

And yet here Eilert was, pushing for an aggressive battle.

Gaia would give him exactly that.

Eilert charged, but his hand would not meet Gaia's chest. Rather, it was batted away by the wrist, a quick smack below Eilert's wrist to throw his arm off, before either the blade attached to Eilert's hand or the man's hand in general could reach Gaia. It didn't take much; Gaia was horribly strong, after all.

This prompted Eilert's retreat, back to the axe that Gaia had discarded earlier. Gaia refrained from playing a passive battle. He would have stood still if Eilert was content with waiting--waiting to die, really, but as Eilert's game had drastically changed, so did Gaia's potential to play a passive battle. As such, Eilert was followed in his retreat--followed close behind by Gaia, Gaia who would move to the side of an axe thrown his way, if Eilert chose to throw it still, and tackle into Eilert not with his own body, but a burst of scarlet energy that might well tear into him and forcibly send him away, to rocket into the barrier between pillars, perhaps--not to shatter it, but to strike an unbreakable field with a breakable body . . .