Axel stands with his arms splayed outwards, chackrams summoned. Every bit of him seems just that hostile: his spiked red hair, his furrowed eyebrows, his sharp angular cheekbones.
Larxene watches in total fearlessness as he readies himself, sharpening her knives. There's an excitement about the prospect of a fight to the death that overrides any of her previous convictions- ignoring Marluxia and not fighting, fighting but going easy, sneaking up on him and killing him without the hassle.
Oh, but he came prepared. It's something that Larxene would respect in other circumstances, were Axel not a lying, traitorous nobody.
"Ready to die?" She screams at him, lunging. He quickly teleports out of the way, but it's something Larxene pre-empted. She murmurs the incantation and bolts of fork lighting strike from the ceiling at random, barely missing the teleported nobody.
"No tricks," He concedes, running a hand through his hair. It's a second later that a burning chackram is spun her way, and that Larxene has to pres herself against a castle wall to avoid it. It hasn't entirely missed the younger nobody; a clean slice across her middle tears her cloak's leather, scratching her stomach.
They lunge towards the other simultaneously. Axel, apparently, can also fight hand to hand with his pointy Frisbees; Larxene quickly takes her two knives from her sides up to parry and block. Axel is more experienced, but his unwieldy weapons of choice leave him open to quick attacks.
She sees an opening, and catches him in the shoulder. She feels the knife tear through his skin, like cutting bread. He screams and steps back as another is plunged into his forearm, then grits his teeth.
Larxene quickly moves to take her hidden knives and finish the job, but amazingly he tears the knives from his forearms and heals in fast, jerky movements.
"You seriously didn't expect me to fight fair, did you?" Larxene goads him. "Eight knives in member VIII. What a fitting death."
"One I refuse to meet." Axel spins the knives in his hands, getting a taste for them as his blood drips to the floor. "Unfair fights are often regretted. Why don't you give me your other two knives so it's equal each?"
"You want them so badly?" Seeing Larxene's arm snap back to throw both at him Axel quickly teleports out of the way, retrieving both after they'd clattered to the floor. Again, he manages to doge Larxene's ever-respondent lightning that scorches the white ground in its furiousness.
They lunge at each other again.
n.o.i.t.a.i.v.i.l.b.O
Sora takes the first card in his deck and presses it against the door's hard wood surface, allowing himself a contented grin when it dematerializes into a portal to the next room.
It had taken him many, many heartless fights to get a map card with the value of nine, which appeared to be all this door wanted to take. Now, as he walks through the portal and to the other side, Donald and Goofy suddenly in tow, he gets a sense of the card's worth- something is about to happen.
And indeed it does. It's not a new castle level or material item type reward, the hard boss enemy Sora was expecting. Sora finds a surprise reunion with friends, from Traverse, as he'd been promised.
But they don't remember him.
O.b.l.i.v.i.a.t.i.o.n
Larxene is so, so tired. All the training in the morning (was it morning? Time is so hard to tell in Oblivion Castle) had drained her enough, and then she just had to go along and fight Axel to the death.
Not that she had succeeded.
The knowledge of that misguided loss still irks her, the boiling rage pumping through her veins at the time of realization converted to a frustrated simmer.
Who did that bastard Axel think he was, refusing to kill her? She had lost, fare and square. Her own burning knives had wavered at her neck, too ready, too able. Like he.
Though he in perfect seriousness went and told her, cold bloodedly, "Collect your staff and don't bother me again. Obeying Marluxia's crazed commands hardly warrants a premature death."
He was weak. He was weaker then her, he was a fool. He should have done it. Larxene had screamed at him to do it, she had told him he was a coward, he was crazed, he was beyond selfish, she saw the words shake him to his core.
Yet he, infuriatingly, refrained. Purposelly. When he knew that Larxene wouldn't have hesitated to finish it, given the opportunity. He was just fucking with her now, teasing her with the concept of life debt seeing her perseverance to never get too close, to protect herself, to gain with an awful, awful sadism. He's stripped her of her integrity and she loathes him for it.
Larxene's warped to a random level and collapsed to the ground in sheer exhaustion. At the moment she couldn't care less if the big boss himself walked in and spied her, but looking across she only finds a bereft white hall.
Or not so bereft. At her feet lies the scraps of paper Larxene recognises as a drawing of Namine's. Marluxia must've taken her up a floor again.
She pieces the scraps of paper back together on the floor's surface:
The picture is of a young girl with blonde hair and white clothes. The blue is her eyes, gazing up at the viewer with unspoken intent.
A jagged blue line runs off from the girl's iris, like a confused tear.
n.o.i.t.a.i.v.i.l.b.O
Axel's second fight that day is Sora. Sora plays by the book, with the cards. Though he has a knack for their use and is perfectly apt with their control, it's an emulation of his lack of resourcefulness. He, amazingly, hasn't yet realized that you don't need to whip out a rank eight power card to damage the opponent well and hard. Fighting this way might be easier, but Axel knows only too well weaknesses like dependence can be easily exploited- he remembers his initial defensive magic training with the Organisation's water-oriented Demyx shuddering. Sora's massive deck of cards could be blown only too easily away by a well placed wind, or rendered useless by earth or fire attacks.
It's not Axel's lesson to teach.
He reaches for his own singed deck of cards, thinking of Na-mi-ne.