Crossovers that Shouldn't Be: Guyver/Familiar of Zero, Agito version Chapter 2
Disclaimer:
This fanfiction is written under the auspices of Fair Use of the likenesses of characters, environments, and situations from the various Guyver and Familiar of Zero properties. This means that this work will avoid plagiarizing the existing properties, and thus things will deviate from canon.
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In the early day of Zeus Thunderbolts when they were working with little more then scavenged military equipment, Agito had personally overseen the training of various members although he was smart enough to leave the actual training to those best qualified to do so. Learning how to properly use and operate their weapons and the tactics that would allow them to effectively take out anything short of an armored hyperzoanoid always had a confidence booster effect on the men. Louise was about as far removed from them as possible, but the enjoyment of blowing targets up seemed to be universal.
It was good to see her gaining self confidence and a little discipline in the process, but he was still leery of what he was potentially unleashing. The girl was simply not mature enough to not worry about her misusing that power. Not that she was even vaguely alone in having that issue... Arguably the worst offender along those lines was actually a Noble named Guiche de Gramont, although his issues were more depraved then wrathful. He was the local playboy, who had a habit of dating more then one girl at once according to the staff. Normally that'd only be his and his girlfriends problem, but these were young Nobles and the boy was nothing more then the third son of a General of the puppet state the school was located in. That created serious potential for much larger problems, and that was something he could not allow.
This left the question of when to deal with him. If he acted directly he'd need to be able to leave Louise unmonitored, which meant she needed to be responsible enough to be left unmonitored. Something she was far from by his standards. She'd shown her true colors when she thought she could manhandled him as a servant. As they say the true measure of person can be seen in how they treat their inferiors, not their equals or superiors.
And Louise's true measure was spoiled rotten from being the youngest child of parents who apparently were uninterested in properly developing discipline. That would increasingly become an issue as she moved from being dead last to potentially having a leg up on her classmates. The potential correspondent shift in her perception of her classmates from superiors to inferiors was a source of potential future problems. Particularly the more they were accommodating in the encouraged and shaped the girl's behavior as it developed, which was not outside the realm of possibility. While none of that was liable to occur overnight its development needed to be controlled if a positive outcome was to be the result.
Sadly for Guiche de Gramont, he didn't need to act directly.
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Louise found her familiar to be oddly quiet since their outing to the quarry, when he was even around. It was like he was content to just observe. She had quickly realized that this was not someone she could treat as a servant. He was normally pleasant, but that was backed with steel, and a amazing ability to turn situations around on her.(1)
"What is this?" Guiche's voice didn't so much yell as screech, like a girl.
Her familiar caught Guiche's upraised hand before it had a chance to strike its intended target. "Your father should have told you, you shouldn't kill a messenger that delivers bad news. You kill them when you want to make a statement to their masters. So what statement are you trying to make?" He said in a pleasant voice like he was discussing the merits of various varieties of tea.
Guiche looked at him dumbly, his mouth moving but not making any coherent noises in the process. The servant took the opportunity to disappear, with little more then a nod in her familiar's direction. Eventually a coherent thought seemed to make its way into Guiche's head.
"How dare you touch me, a Noble." He declared putting on his full airs. "I challenge you to a duel." He added after taking a dramatic pose he utterly failed to pull off.
After a pause her familiar simply said. "As you wish." Almost as soon as the words left his mouth Guiche's head was slammed into the stone wall of the corridor with a sickening thump, where her familiar pinned him against the wall twisting an arm in a way that left the boy crying in pain. "What would you like on your tombstone?"
"Stop it! What are you doing to him?" She demanded as soon as her mind registered the rapid brutal actions.
"He asked for a duel and specified no conditions. This is simply the natural consequence." He declared before unceremoniously releasing Guiche, who immediately collapsed. "We can try this again in the large courtyard within the next hour. I suggest you have a set of acceptable conditions then."
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"Old Osmond! Old Osmond!" Osmond looked up from his examination of Miss Longueville's beautiful posterior in annoyance as some fool beat on his door. Couldn't they see he had went to all the trouble to procure himself a lovely secretary? Couldn't they understand that he might actually want to appreciate said lovely secretary? And couldn't they respect their elders enough, not emphasize the fact he was old?
"Miss Longueville, could you get that?" He asked cheerfully, enjoying the view as she walked up to the door, revealing that bald guy whose name could never seem to remember long enough to complete the paperwork to have him removed for interrupting him. Last time he'd accidentally fired his favorite janitor Coldbert. Now who was supposed to take care of the magical observation devices he'd had strategically placed throughout the school?
Whatever his name was stopped to catch his breath for a moment. "What was your name, again?"
"Colbert."
"Could you spell that?" Osmond quickly wrote it down as the bewildered belligerent babbled out the key to finally being rid of him.
"Now what did you want me for?" Not that he really cared. Ooh, polka dots.
"Osmond, Guiche has challenged Louise's familiar to a duel." Now if only he could figure out a way to get her to let him do more. Wait the way Culbert had said that almost sounded as if he was imply Guiche was in trouble.
"Are you implying a mere commoner is such a threat to the third son of General Gramont of Tristain? Has the gift of magic somehow left him that he should need our help?" It was patently absurd.
"But according to my research the only know human summons were those of the Founder." Soon-to-be-fired persisted.
"And you also said they had runes and special powers you still have no evidence of this man possessing." Shooing the man out of the office he looked to find his note missing. He was sure he had written one this time, now where had it gotten to.
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It was an unsteady Guiche that did not so much walk as meander onto the field in an aimless, and almost directionless fashion. By now the entire student body had heard one rendition or another of what had occurred. Where normally there would an expectation of a Noble putting a commoner in their rightful place, their was now more of an expectation that Guiche was about to die. Yet to express such would be a concession of a Noble's superiority over what was still to all appearances a commoner.
To even imply that a fight between a Noble that could still use magic and an unarmed commoner was unfair in the commoner's favor was unthinkable, although everyone was thinking it. It was integral to their fundamental right and privilege to be Nobles that they were superior. And yet at the unsteady Guiche stood facing the calm and composed commoner familiar not a single observer didn't have the sense that this time the scales were loaded to their disadvantage.
"If you do not wish to die for the sake of harming a courtier, I suggest you give yourself the option to yield." The commoner said as if making an observation about the weather.
Guiche started to arrogantly declare he did not need the option to yield, and then thought better of it. "That is acceptable." He declared in an attempt to keep his airs about him, which utterly fell flat, even to him.
The commoner made a point to pull his hands out of his pockets, and said. "This should be enough. Let's see what you've got."
Guiche's response was to wave him rose wand causing petals to fall off and upon touching the ground transmutate into feminine golems a head shorter then he was. The first was dispatched when the commoner simply sidestepped its blow and broke its arm off with a brutal maneuver before slamming it into the face of the golem it had been attached to. The rest were destroyed piecemeal in a series of actions that served to make them look utterly clumsy. Before that quite managed to sink in the commoner was standing before Guiche delivering a vicious right hook that left him staggered. The follow up high kick sent him into unconsciousness.
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As far as Agito was concerned it was mission accomplished. The boys father had responded as he expected to the small mountain of evidence anonymously sent to him regarding his son's activities. The result, Guiche de Gramont was getting his allowance slashed, fell within acceptable parameters as it would deny him the funds to continue his activities. He'd been able to peruse the relevant portion of its contents when he had defended the courtier. That Guiche de Gramont had flown off the handle had been anticipated, and the outcome had been shaped to serve his purposes on multiple levels.
The intelligence he had been able to gather and interpret proved to be solid enough. At the boy's current level of proficiency he was able to create a number of golems that were solid enough as a terror weapon. He'd had to use more leverage then he would with a human, but the strength fell well short of what their apparent construction. Hence the use of normal humans as soldiers, as with appropriate weapons and training they could go through such things easily enough.
The boy did not however represent the upper limit of what could be expected from local mages, although he was hardly below average. While he had chosen to make a spectacle out of things this time, the reality was he had taken advantage of the minor boosts the Bio-Booster Armor provided in passive form to insure he didn't get bogged down and thus it was a massacre instead of a fight. (2) Against more skilled opponents there was no guarantee he would be allowed such extravagances.
Obtaining appropriate local weaponry was a priority if he did want to have his hand forced in response to the potential threat of Nobles deciding they wished to correct what they saw as an error in the results. With Guiche de Gramont clearly morally in the wrong and the Valliere family effectively backing him up, whether it wanted to or not, such actions could not be officially taken. That did not mean they wouldn't occur. Particularly as he had just quite clearly demonstrated to the plebeians that they could overthrow their masters, and to the masters that they could be overthrown. Not that now was the time to be starting a revolution.
This nation, if it was entirely appropriate to call it that, was created from pieces of territory conceded with the intent of creating a kind of diplomatic neutral ground. Hence the magical academy, and a supreme and utter lack of a credible military. As a result there was a serious potential threat from the nation of Albion, provided its rebels won, using Tristain for a beachhead for carving out a portion of the continent. Or at least at the level the staff were knowledgeable about such things, and chose to discuss them.
There was a good chance that there was more to the situation. What stood out the most was the simple logistical problem of launching an assault from a floating island and having to establish a beachhead when so far there wasn't any indicating of a strong means of transporting and supplying such an effort. That in turn would make the initial assault difficult due to need to assemble sufficient mass quickly to breakthrough any kind of serious counterattack, and make supplying a force in the field a serious issue the further inland they went. And there was always the political issue of Albion nobility being effectively held hostage here at the academy.
That however presumed, as he was used to, that they were rational and had the means to counter such offensives, and that this magical world didn't have logistical tricks hiding up its sleeves. He wasn't about to count on either being true under the circumstances. Not that he was about to count on it being true either. His sources were not military analysts, and they didn't seem to know of anyone actually engaging in wargames instead of routine skirmishes between the various countries here and there. The scale the staff indicated those operated in might be sufficient for a young general to be to demonstrate whether they had some skill, but not to really prepare and develop the skills for a full fledged invasion. As a result there was a good chance if things went that way of things devolving into chaos as what were ultimately overly optimistic plans bogged down and failed to bear fruit as per World War 1.
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The local town held a few stores which sold what were, by the standards of this world, conventional weapons. So far all of those were boutiques aimed at giving young nobles something decorative to wear on their hip, with potentially phallic implications. As a result even he, who had little interest in the subject was able to easily see that they were not practical as actual weapons.
So it was that he was now standing in what was reputed to be the cheapest weapon shop in town, whose owner seemed to be both slimy and more then a little desperate. His inventory however included weapons that were clearly not designed as wall hangers or accessories. For better or worse those weapons showed a clear trend towards having prior owners. Given what he'd found out about this world so far, that would almost assuredly mean that they had been collected off the dead from the routine small campaigns they engaged in against each other, which explained the low prices and less reputable nature of the institution.
To someone with the blood of more people on their hands then lived in this city however the taboo of using a dead man's weapon didn't hold much weight. What he wanted was what passed for combat grade arms in this place, and despite the nature of the source this place had them in spades. Picking up a rather odd model with a hinged metal bracket at the base of the blade that served no purpose he could divine, he partially drew the sword inspecting it to find nothing that stood out.
"What is this for?" He asked the shopkeeper actuating the weird bracket for emphasis.
The bracket slipped out from under his fingers as if moving of its own volition. "Stop that!" Declared a voice quite a bit different from the shopkeeper's.
Agito reassessed the piece of steel, before actuating the bracket again. "I said stop that!" Declared a voice now rather clearly emitting itself from the sword in time with the flaps of the bracket.
"How very interesting. You seem to have seen a lot of action for something someone made to entertain at court." Agito intentionally said the last in a way he knew would rile it up if that wasn't the case. He wasn't disappointed.
"Entertain at court! Entertain at court! I am Derflinger, not a rich man's trinket." It responded in a thoroughly disgruntled fashion. Excellent.
" I'll take this one." He declared placing what yesterday had been an excessively large lump of coal on the counter, but was now something a good deal more valuable. The merchant's reaction was priceless.
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"Very clever, Partner." Derflinger declared from his waist.
"I'm glad you appreciate I cannot simply take a talking blade at its word." Agito responded in his usual pleasant fashion. The blade was clearly at the very least serviceable and had seen quite a bit of action, and as a consequence it was a potential source of real solid intelligence regarding how the locals waged war. That made the fact it could function as a blade secondary in terms of its real value. Not that it was good to let it know that.
Personally he doubted a blade that could last as long and see as much use as was immediately apparent from the state of this sword was something to be taken lightly. That was something her could let the blade know he valued, as it wouldn't compromise its value in the process.
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She'd been known by many names, although none of them had been her proper name in years. Stripped of her title and her rank she had been forced to make ends meet by whatever means she could manage. The old man had bragged about a "Staff of Destruction" which had the power to slay dragons in a single shot, and putting up with the balding Colbert over a meal had been all it had taken to learn about the weakness in the tower's defenses to physical attacks. And yet as she used her magic to adhere to the stone face she found even exploiting the weakness her magic was inadequate.
"It appears things are not going as you planned." The voice was unnatural in a way she could not adequately describe.
The hairs on the back of her neck stood up, albeit too late to do much that was actually useful. She turned around slowly and was dumbstruck by the figure she half saw in the dim starlight. Faintly glowing slits that appeared to be eyes regarded her in an unreadable fashion from a massive dark and inhuman body covered in spikes. (3) It was the very image of a demon only lacking a aura of flame and a constant accompaniment of the cries of the damned to be the epitome of the image of what a demon should be. She personally would rather been faced with that instead of the creepy skin this thing had which never seemed to stop moving or twisting in a disturbing fashion.
So it was perfectly understandable that when, suddenly and completely unexpectedly, confronted with a demon she momentarily lost the concentration necessary to maintain the spell keeping her adhered to the stone exterior of the central spire. Gravity was not forgiving of her momentary error and as she began to fall away she realized she wouldn't get a second chance. She who had once been Matilda the Noble was going to finally meet her end in a pointless manner that seemed oddly appropriate given how her life had proceeded up till now.
It occurred to her, as she continued her reminiscing, that she should have already have hit the ground. Actually looking around she found that she was somehow being held in midair at most 5 meters from where she'd fallen. The demon was still there regarding her as if to ask whether she thought its time so cheap as to waste on someone it'd let die.
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1) This is more a statement on Louise's lack of skill at maneuver then Agito's skill actually.
2) While it's never outright stated it effectively exists in the form of significant increases in coordination, situational awareness, and some extra sensory perception capabilities in addition to tending to have better conditioning then they would otherwise. While none of it is overtly superhuman, the net effect is in many respects.
3) Agito is Gigantic Dark in this particular instance, if there was an ambiguity.
Author's Notes:
The classic rule is that you cut these things clean after the initial snippet shows it is viable. I'm breaking this rule, although I don't get the impression people will complain too much about that.