AN: If you don't know who Arian O'Connell is, be a dear and go to my profile, click the link to her character profile, and skim it to get the gist of the character. Or don't. This should give you a good idea of who she is. Oh, and DEFINITELY not intending Kanda/OC or OC/Kanda here. They're...er..."friends". Meaning they work together well during battle and get along sort of okay outside of it. On with the one-shot. Oh wait! And I'm really sorry about my crappy title.
The smell of fresh blood on the wind alerted me to the fact that we were not alone. My eyes locked with Kanda's, navy and bistre, dark against dark.
"Akuma," he murmured. I nodded once, sharply, my hand subconsciously darting to rip Blaze Blade out of its black leather sheath. Mugen hissed, disturbed from its rest, as Kanda drew it. Had we been working together for so long that our thoughts were coordinated to work as one?
My brief pondering came to a skittering halt. Twenty-odd Level One akuma burst through the treeline, cannons aimed at the two of us. We snapped back-to-back into battle stance, bloody, sweaty, sticky uniforms sliding together uncomfortably.
"Don't push yourself," I hissed over my shoulder. Kanda had been injured in an earlier fight; a wide, shallow gash trailed from his left shoulder to his hip. If he overexerted himself and became weak, he would be useless later on.
Kanda nodded, the same single, sharp movement I had used a moment ago.
As if commanded by an unheard voice, the battalion of akuma fired as one. I darted forwards, deflecting bullets that came too close for comfort with a blast of icefire. I leapt, the force of my sprint propelling me high in the air, and slashed the first of the akuma straight through the middle. It exploded in midair, billowing orange laced with the blue flame my weapon had wreaked.
I smirked. "Easy." The next two akuma that fired on me met much the same fate, exploding in midair blasts of orange and blue.
And then it happened, the thing that I knew would and always hoped wouldn't.
The Level Two was huge. Kanda and I have fought countless of them, but yet I was still intimidated by the sheer size of the monster. It looked like a robotic cross between a wildcat and a dragon, a sort of animatronic chinthe, and towered above the forest like a cat over a bowl of milk.
"Oh, look, my kittens! You've found me a pretty pair of exorcists to play with!" yowled the Level Two in its echoing, growling, alien tones.
I lifted Blaze Blade aloft, holding the hilt with both hands. "Duel Blades," I murmured, sliding the two forces apart, blade in my right, blaze in my left. "You're batting around the wrong mouse," I growled cockily, more for my own benefit than the enemies'.
Above the clatter of battle behind me, I could have sworn I heard Kanda say, "Sure is."
I smiled and resisted the urge to yell something like "So you DO care!" just to irk my stoic Japanese 'friend'. Instead, I darted forward, using a tree that one of the Level Ones had knocked down as a springboard. I leaped onto the akuma's back, landing ungracefully and grabbing onto its mechanical shell to keep myself from toppling off.
Feeling a little silly, or maybe like I should be yelling "I AM BEOWULF!", I thrust both blades into the back of the akuma's neck. It was like jamming toothpicks into a pound block of butter. They sunk in easily, but didn't do a whole lot.
Except that the akuma noticed me.
Apparently, it had been focused on commanding its 'kittens', rather than getting into the fray itself, and now I was the target. The enormous cat-fiend hissed, shaking its head around as a cat might do to break the neck of a rat in its jaws. I dropped onto the akuma's neck, clinging onto the hilts of my blades, still embedded in the akuma's neck, and tried to find a crevice in its metallic carapace into which I might wiggle my boot-clad feet. My body slipped side to side on the smooth surface dangerously. I glanced up to locate Kanda. He appeared to be surrounded by all of the Level Ones, taking them out one at a time. I hoped to the God in which I did not believe that he could hold out. The world swinging back and forth, drilling into all of my senses, threatened to form a knot of nausea form in my stomach, so I closed my eyes and waited for the motion to stop.
When the demon realized I was a particularly clingy subject which it could not rid by shaking me off, it stopped trying to do so and instead reached up with one towering foot--a mixture of paw and talon--to swat me off. I looked for some escape, anywhere to run, to hide, and noticed the joint in the robotic beast's chrome armour along its flank. Perhaps just wide enough to grab onto. I took a leap of faith and found myself dangling by the metal blade in my right hand, which had plunged into the crack and caught. Now how was I going to get out of this one?
My thoughts were scrambled, the rush of adrenaline and sweat and body heat and the thrum of my heart glazing over my logic.
"I see you, little rat," the akuma giggled, sinister and disturbing. And its hind leg lifted up to brush me off of its side, a housecat scratching a flea...
"Arian, goddamnit!" Kanda's snarling, sweat-soaked face entered my view. He was laying across the akuma's back, looking down on me. As usual.
"Kanda! You were supposed to stay out of this!" I hissed.
"Do you want to die?! Baka--" Whatever insult he planned on throwing at me died on his lips as he forcibly hoisted me up by the wrist, cursing as the akuma's deadly talon-claws arced in quickly to kill both of us in one swoop. The force on my arm seared the joints at first. Then my shoulder popped. Loudly. Dislocated.
The flood of pain that I knew would accompany it at some point was delayed by the coursing adrenalin rush. Kanda swung me up onto the akuma's back.
"The Level Ones?" I asked.
"I got most of them, there might be one or two left. Augh, what the--Arian! You cut me!"
"What?" But it was true. His sleeve had been scrunched up to the elbow, and he had lifted me up by the hand holding my blade. A shallow cut stretched from wristbone to elbow on the inside of his arm.
And now my right arm, my dominant arm, was useless.
I stood up, intending to figure out some way to kill this thing and get the hell out. The unusually large akuma was still confused as to how we got away and where we were.
That was when I had an idea. A very risky, probably suicidal idea. But if we were to have any chance of killing this thing, it would be my way. I could stab this thing a hundred times, and Kanda could release his Hell's Insects, and we still wouldn't kill the thing. But I had a way.
Facing away from Kanda, I commanded, "Get off."
"What?" Kanda replied, sounding horrified.
"Get the hell off the akuma, Kanda."
"What stupid suicide are you planning?"
Yes. I was right. He knew me way too well. "Just get off. Now, Kanda."
I could feel his eyes burning into my back. I waited.
"Fine. If you want to kill yourself, you're right. I want no part in it." And with a grunt of effort, he leapt over the side. I could picture his lithe, graceful landing on the earth below. I closed my eyes, steeling myself for my own attack.
"I see you, exorcist!" the chinthe akuma snarled, its voice vibrating my bones through my feet. It had spotted Kanda.
No time to waste. Had to protect Kanda; so said my instincts. I combined the blades so I could wield them with my clumsier left hand. I raised it up and opened my eyes again.
"Icefire storm!" I shouted.
It was all hypothetical. I have only done this once before, and that was against a Noah. Years ago. I nearly killed myself then. And now I was the centre of the blast range. If I survived this, I might just turn right around and start believing in that God all my friends so loyally trusted.
I'm not sure how I had time to think all of that--a blast of silver-blue flame erupted from Blaze Blade, a magnificent, deadly explosion. I couldn't be burned by it, so having it all around me was actually quite pleasant, for the moment it lasted.
The akuma let out a terrible scream, and suddenly all my blue flame was engulfed in a massive blast of orange-red-gold. I was tossed into the sky like a ragdoll. I must have been burnt, but I didn't feel it. And then there was a loud crack from somewhere and I stopped moving and the world dulled to black.
"Arian, if you don't wake up in the next two minutes, I'm leaving you. I'm not carrying your weight the whole way to god-knows-where when I'm injured. I'm fuc--"
"Kanda? What the hell happened to me?" I cracked an eye open and saw a blurry image of Kanda clearly attempting to look unconcerned and primarily pissed off.
"You pulled something SO FUCKING STUPID that I'm surprised you're alive. Dumbass."
"How compassionate, Yu-chan," I managed. Surprisingly, he just made an anger noise, and didn't bother drawing Mugen on me. I guess he doesn't want to have to deal with my corpse.
I struggled upright, and it was only then that I registered that everything hurt. "Jesus, you're right. Death would be nice right now." I remembered the explosion now. Everything burned. My face, knuckles, and fingers were the worst, since they hadn't been covered. I tried to pull off my left glove and stopped short. My arm wouldn't move.
Pain erupted, stemming from my shoulder and coursing through me as if it had been just waiting for me to notice it. I moaned and laid back down, rolling onto my left side and clutching the offending limb.
"We're gonna have to fix that," Kanda muttered.
"I dislocated it. I dislocated my shoulder and nearly killed myself over a LEVEL TWO AKUMA?! What was I THINKING?!"
"I tried to stop you."
I smacked myself in the forehead in an attempt at exasperation, then yelped, burnt skin stinging. I looked at my hand, which was raw and red, and appeared to be one big blister. "This is fun."
"Can I fix your shoulder now or are you gonna whine and moan like the Moyashi with a paper cut?" Kanda asked, looking irritated.
I sighed. I'd had this done before. It wasn't fun. "Alright. Go on."
He took my right hand--that alone hurt, due to the burns I sustained--placed a boot between my arm and my side, and gave one sharp yank. Another burst of intense pain bolted through me and my breath was knocked out for a moment.
When I regained the ability to speak, I muttered, "...Ow."
AN: How was it? Mediocre to terrible? I know. D: Sorry. I tried. This isn't my best and I know it. Hopefully you lived through it? It was sort of intended as an introduction to Arian's fighting style, but...she was an idiot here. Oops.
Reviews are nice. Con-crit is nice too. Flames make little children cry.
And as I've said before, CHINTHE IS A WORD STUPID SPELLCHECK RAWR