Deuce Ex Machina

Circular breathing was maybe the only thing she had going for her. Deuce side-stepped the urge to clench her teeth, instead keeping a space painfully open as her diaphragm forced air past her lips. The sound was weak, and she frantically went more rigid which threw the pitch off completely. She gave up and rolled backwards, sprinting to gain distance before putting her weapon back to her lips. Keep moving, she reminded herself. Running would make it impossible to take any kind of offensive action, but she could at least walk and, slowly, keep from being a stationary target.

Since turning her head wasn't easy at the moment, her weaving tread helped her try to keep tabs on the targets she was trying to take out. The wall of the arena was likely twenty yards behind her, too far to use as a rear guard. On her left it was only fifteen feet away, but there was also a hostile in between her and it. He was bearing down on her rapidly, grim and implacable, and she took a breath that was immediately pushed out again as she racked up the amplitude on the frequency that would cause disorientation.

Theoretically.

Realistically, she had to dive to the side again to dodge a strike that was only a little wobbly. Scrambling, she tried to align her lips correctly and hold her weapon steady as she focused on the figure in front of her.

Lilting, piercing, she found the sounds that would rip through her opponent. The pulse was extremely hard to keep steady, however, and it lazily darted this way and that. In between, it hit and tore through what it was supposed to. Deuce suppressed the smile that would play havoc with her ability to keep her lips in place. The energy fizzled and burned through her opponent. Once, twice, two more and he would probably go down -

Deuce blinked her eyes open in confusion, and then sighed. She was looking up at the ceiling of the antechamber used for reviving those who inevitably got knocked out in the training arena. It would've been nice if the academy administration hadn't decided to adopt the train til exhaustion principle. Someone in the crew assigned to drag unconscious students out of the arena had a twisted sense of humor, because she'd always woken with her hands folded like she was in a coffin.

She emitted a slightly forlorn hum, then folded her legs to the side as she pushed herself up into a sitting position. Whoever had lain her out like she was at her own funeral had also conscientiously left her weapon right beside her. She rolled it under her fingertips for a moment before picking up her flute. There should be a recording somewhere that she could look over to learn from her mistakes and see what had definitively taken her down. She already knew the general picture of it, though. She'd lost track of her other two opponents and one or both of them had taken her out while she'd been trying to decrease their numbers. It wasn't an unusual way for students to get taken down in the arena. Getting overwhelmed when you were outclassed was also fairly common. The difference between her and everyone else was they didn't go kaput until sometime after the fiftieth wave while she was struggling to get out of the twenties.

She twirled her flute through her fingers before she started lisping out one of her non-lethal tunes while she tried to visualize the sequence of events during her fights. There had been some good moments. Unfortunately, nearly all of those had still been when she'd been mowing through the lower levels of the training. Even on the beginning tiers, she could hardly ever start out with an attack. Her strategies and successes almost always hinged on bolting as soon as she was able and taking down her opponents one by one as she caught them off balance or they committed to an action she had time to slip around.

Some of these tactics she would use in actual combat, but all the exercises were mildly frustrating because her fighting style changed drastically as soon as she got on the field. Everyone else, though, instructor and student, noticeably improved in real combat when they practiced and advanced in the arena. Excepting the rookies, she was the only one still stuck at her level in practice.

It wasn't very encouraging.

The flash of dark indigo hair and swirl of red cape from the very, very good performance on the 'inspiring' viewscreen right across from her was further disheartening.

She watched the string of victories on screen with a dogged sense of hope as she recognized the student. Machina; he almost always paired with Rem for missions, and they were a slashing, drilling blur that left corpses in their wake. He scored higher than anyone else in the arena by ten waves. Currently, he'd broken into the eighties and was still draining his way through his powerhouses of opponents. Of course, part of his advantage was his weapons and the way they sluiced the life out of his assailants and poured it into his own body. She stopped playing and squeezed the metal of her flute in her hands.

Eventually, Machina's humanity reasserted itself and he got taken out just short of the ninetieth wave and the viewscreen flicked to Cater's not nearly as high, but still impressive, performance.

Deuce stopped paying attention and started picking out a light and quick tune while she waited for the medics to bring Machina into the recovery room. It only took a few minutes, and having her staring at them apparently deterred whatever prankster got a kick out of arranging the students in funeral positions. They laid Machina out in the standard recovery position and vamoosed.

She watched his easy breathing and counted two measures before he stirred. For someone who'd just been ripping through opponents with jaw clenched and eyes blazing, he woke up very sedately.

Wondering if she actually had a plan, Deuce continued to play as Machina's eyes shifted over to her and his head slowly followed the movement.

"...Deuce?"

She had to stop herself from spluttering off into a sour note. With an effort to move her smile past befuddled, she said, "Right."

There were a couple of different reasons why he would know her name. The most likely was that her scores had just tripped from not noteworthy to notorious.

His face smoothed out pleasantly. "You would've been useful in there."

Her eyes widened and she looked at him closely. He didn't seem like he was mocking her, but a touch of incredulity still sidled into her voice when she asked, "Really?"

"Yes," he replied guilelessly. In one motion he was standing upright. "I don't do well against crowds."

Maybe he was very good at hiding his sarcasm. "You seem to do pretty well against the arena groups."

"Three's not really a crowd," he said implacably. Hoisting a sword he ran one finger right under its spiraling edge. "No real enemy is going to have the manners to attack just one or a few at a time. No competent enemy isn't going to coordinate his attacks with his teammates. How often do we get into fights in this kind of terrain? This whole thing is just training. The drones don't even bleed."

His hand flicked away from the blade, and she was thoroughly distracted wondering what he was used to cleaning off of it.

"I saw the reports on your mission to the Aqvi Forest."

Her eyes jumped back to his and the appraising look he was giving her. That mission had been a week ago when she'd been on detail with Ace and Cingue.

It had gone...well. The mission had been accomplished, and it hadn't been an easy one. Despite that, they hadn't been in any near lethal close calls that would have their instructors screaming at them or giving them that silent glower of disapproval. What galled her was that she hadn't decisively taken down even one of their opponents. They'd been sent to neutralize some of those hostile animals that would mob and chew on any hapless traveler. Ace had pocketed most of the kills and even Cingue had a respectable number. Deuce had zero, so her rank didn't increase at all.

"It went alright," she shrugged.

He gave her a measuring look. "Have you heard of the Corsi Cave Coeurl?"

Looking up as her thoughts tracked backward, she nodded. "It came up in the mission pool awhile ago."

"It's still in there."

"But that was weeks ago!" she protested in surprise. It wasn't unusual for missions to get cleared the same day they were issued. Hardly any of them lasted for more than a few days.

"The initial teams didn't even make it past the first few caverns," Machina said seriously. "Trey was on one that made it to the objective, but he almost lost his leg and they had to bail. Queen was on the latest attempt. She was barely standing when she dragged Eight and Jack back to the city. The coeurl's still there."

Deuce felt the pricklings of chilly fear as he named off several people who were infinitely more capable than she was. "Did they try a long range team? Cater, King, and Trey?"

"Yes, that was when Trey got hurt. They're not used to working together, and none of them got off a crippling shot before the cat got right in their midst. Things...deteriorated quickly."

"Well..." Deuce shifted her fingers over the holes in her flute. They could just put a ban on the caves. There weren't large numbers of people who went there anyway. The ones who did, though, were searching for elite minerals and fungi and other things that couldn't be found anywhere else this side of the planet.

That they knew of. Perhaps they should set up a mission to look for another cave or place with similar resources -

"We should take it down."

There was still that option she mused, and then noticed the direct look he was giving her. "...We meaning us?"

He nodded.

"Why?" she asked, completely baffled.

"Because of what you can do," he returned sounding somewhat confused."No one on a team with you has ever had worse than a scraped elbow after a mission."

She stared. People had gotten hurt on her teams, though with first aid equipment it had always been possible to get the injuries to a negligible level before returning to the city...and Machina hadn't phrased it like people never got seriously wounded when she was working with them, just that the injuries were manageable by the time they returned. Infrequently, students had died on missions, and it wasn't strange for one or more of them to be unconscious or maimed when they got back from the field.

Still, it wasn't as if it were unheard of for a team to sustain only minimal injuries.

"Why don't you go with, Rem?" She wondered aloud, referring to his usual partner.

"That only makes a team of two," he said, disregarding the fact the he and Rem often undertook missions with just the two of them. "Besides, she's been having...hair issues lately."

Deuce decided not to comment on that. "But two of us is still only two," she reminded wryly. His successes would be easier to stomach if he had problems with basic counting. However, it didn't detract from her primary objection. "But why me?"

"Rem is faster than me," he remarked with apparent heedlessness to her question. "She almost always gets more hits and fewer injuries than I do. When we're together, though, almost nothing can touch us. But that's only when we're fighting virtually back to back. When we're more than a few yards apart we start getting more injuries and fewer decisive hits against the enemy. I've been spending more time in the arena than I have in the field trying to get better. I have something to prove."

He fixed her with a pointed look. "I've seen your scores."

This time, she knew he wasn't referring to any of her supposed successes.

"I have something to prove," he repeated with a slow deliberation. "And so do you."

Deuce marched along determinedly, trying to hide that she was having eighty-seventh doubts about this whole thing and wondering if it was a horrible idea. The walls of the cavern were dank and threaded with a faintly luminous algae. It was enough to get by, but they'd already been surprised six times by lurking cave creatures that had crept close in the gloom. Her limbs were beginning to tremble from a mixture of anxiety and fatigue, and the still hadn't reached their goal.

"Alright?"

She suppressed a frown before briefly nodding at Machina as he swept along in steady confidence. It seemed ungrateful to maintain annoyance at someone who had twice slain an animal right before it sank teeth or claws into her back. On the other hand, resentment simmered up again thinking about how he hadn't been completely forthcoming.

After getting persuaded to join him on the extermination mission, she'd packed copies of Machina's mission summaries to go over on the cross-country trek to the cave system.

If only she'd thought to do that sooner. The carnage that he and Rem had inflicted had been systematically noted, but so had a number of failures she'd never heard anything about. The two students were effective as a team, but they didn't have an untarnished field record.

She'd gotten a firsthand chance to observe his shortcomings during the violent encounters they'd had during their journey and cave wanderings. The blows he dealt were powerful, and the shock and pain of being impaled by both of his spinning blades left his enemies twitching and immobilized until he withdrew and they collapsed lifelessly. The process, however, took longer than was expedient. When he was only fighting three, he could usually maneuver for the space and time necessary for completely draining one of his opponents before the other two converged on him. In real combat, where their adversaries tended to number five or more and there was natural cover they could use for sneaking up, he almost never had the time to fully siphon out an enemy before he was interrupted. Which meant the opponent he'd been trying to take out was usually still powerful enough to take a swipe at him as well. Add to that how it was also distracting for Machina to have the life of his enemy pouring into him and they would have been dragging his carcass home if Sice hadn't taken the head off one of the charging lesser coeurls.

Deuce looked over at the girl who made up the third member of their party. If there was ever someone who could get by on intimidation alone, the student with the dramatically pale hair and jagged cape was her. The hair pulled back on her head was like icy spines, the focused intensity of her expression made Deuce want to step back, and she carried a scythe like death itself.

Unfortunately, Sice was another exhibit A in the dissertation not to judge a book by its cover. By their second fight, Deuce had discovered that Sice hadn't come close to smoothing out her personal combat style. She wasn't as adept with her weapon as she looked when she was just standing there.

She was also quiet, Deuce realized with a bit of a start. Besides accepting the invitation to join the mission, she'd communicated purely through nods, frowns, and gestures. Looking past her initial assumption that Sice was too self-controlld and focused to talk without purpose, Deuce considered the possibility that the girl might be shy...or simply anti-social.

Her eyes went back to Machina's ostensibly unconcerned pace while she internally scowled. He could strike with sufficient quickness, but he had limited agility in dodging. His situational awareness was nothing to brag about, and neither was Sice's. Deuce couldn't count the times the shrill voice of her flute had cut through din of battle and alerted her two teammates to danger and the one opponent it was vital they both focus their attention on right now.

Which all tied into the point Machina was aiming to make.

Which was making her nervous.

Deuce took a deep breath and an honest look at why she was so agitated. Machina didn't brag, hadn't tried to present himself as invincible, and actually detailed some of his faults. She just hadn't been willing to listen. Despite how much she wanted to improve, she'd been counting on what she'd supposed was Machina's high level of skill and not any of her own talents when she agreed to the mission. According to him, though, she was the piece that was going to make this work.

She wasn't sure she believed him. Nevertheless, they'd already come this far, and a stubborn corner of her courage wasn't going to back out without trying.

Trey was supposed to regain the full use of his leg, anyway.

Sice, striding in the lead slowed fractionally and looked back as her scythe dipped in the direction of the next rocky chamber. They were there. The cat was after the next tunnel.

Deuce ran through her knowledge of their opponent with the speed of near panic. The animal was huge, not as tall as even her unimpressive height but weighing more than at least her and Sice put together. It had electrical capabilities, several other students had come back with burns. It was decently fast, stocky, and resilient. It also had the ability to slip from one place to another instantly, like Rem and Queen. After the first round of blows, it inevitably let out a roar that gathered the lesser coeurls in the area to its location.

They couldn't let that happen, they couldn't give it any breathing room, they had to attack immediately. Even before they fully entered the room, her flute was at the ready and she'd started to play.

Her eyes latched onto pale, spotted fur and the tufted ears of the cat-like creature. There was a positively unnerving amount of muscle on the beast, but the way her stomach dropped didn't stop her from maintaining proper breath support. She put all her focus on the animal as Sice and Machina rushed forward.

She saw the way the cat crouched and she dropped to a lower note. Sice dodged and got in the first hit. Machina's came instantly after it. He didn't activate the draining drill on his swords. The cat might be big enough to shed off the effects, and one swipe had the potential to leave Machina dead. He used less heavy damage slashes and stabs instead, but he didn't let up in the slightest.

Unblinking, Deuce watched and signaled, seeing the weaknesses and openings on the animal, making sure Sice and Machina didn't leave any openings of their own. She clung to what she'd believed for as long as she could remember; music could lead, it could hurt, and it could heal.

The cat thumped to the ground.

Deuce continued playing for a full measure before she accepted it was actually dead, and in under thirty seconds at that. She felt an urge to ask if this was actually the one they'd been sent to eliminate, but it's clear size - and the odd assortment of broken weapons and scraps of clothing she could see in the cavern - would make that question seem inane.

Machina, cleaning his swords with his cape, turned toward her and, with what she had to admit was a commendable lack of smugness, said, "I told you so."

A/N: Virtually all my Agito/Type 0 knowledge stems from a demo my brother managed to get his hands on, and it was in Japanese which I'm by no means fluent in. At any rate, I thought it'd be interesting to write about the characters and try to develop personalities for them based almost purely on their fighting styles. So traits for these characters are heavily influenced by how I used them in the demo. It took a lot of upgrading to get Machina to a workable field level, but he got to the point where he was my most effective character in the arena. Deuce still isn't great in the arena, but putting her on a team can enable two other characters to take out an opponent that three individually more lethal characters couldn't defeat even when working together. The first time I thought to use her as my primary character when taking out that cat, I was shocked at how fast it went down.

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