First chapter of 2005! I'd just like to thank all the reviewers of my story. Thank you!

And now, it's...

"SHOWTIME!"

Chapter Eighteen

Traveling Man

Athens, Greece. Daylight.

Upon reaching Athens, Siegfried, Ivy, Kilik, and Raphael had been greeted- not ungently- by three armed men with crossbows atop a tall brown wall that encircled the entire city. The guards had told them they had to turn in their weapons and, after a great deal of arguing from Raphael (who was very adamant about not turning in his weapon; Kilik had finally managed to persuade him to turn it in, but he did so reluctantly, with a great deal of worry and fervor over it), they finally had turned them in, with the explicit promise that they would be returned to them upon leaving the city. Though Raphael made some extremely cutting remarks about the guards and the worth of their "promises", Siegfried managed to smooth things over enough to let them pass without anything more than a precursory check. Siegfried still had a dagger secreted in his armor, and he assumed that Kilik, at least, would have an extra weapon. Ivy, he knew, had plenty of extra weapons in the Alchemy bottles she wore on her belt, and so he wasn't worried about her; Raphael, on the other hand, he was almost sure did not have any extra weapons on him, not just because the man did not seem like the kind to carry additional weapons, but also because of the way he had acted over losing his rapier at the entrance. Raphael had acted almost naked, like someone had asked him to remove his clothes and not just his sword, and that sparked the idea in Siegfried's mind that Raphael didn't have any other weapons on him. Raphael had remained quiet and surly ever since passing the town gates, which suited Siegfried just fine. The man struck him as both terribly moody and somewhat cold, and on the road in the two days they'd been traveling, Siegfried had thought that Kilik's companion was odd in both the way he talked and laughed. He didn't seem very natural at either, though sometimes he would become a fairly good conversationalist and interesting to listen to. Curiously, it was at these times he was also somewhat colder and more distant. His voice lost a lot of the emotion in it too- it was calmer, with none of the hilarity or cheerfulness Siegfried usually heard in his voice. Siegfried wasn't the greatest reader of people, but something about Raphael struck him as... odd.

The quartet entered Athens, and were suitably impressed. The town was built on a slight hill, and arching up and over the city was a massive temple, dedicated to one of the numerous Greek gods. Made of marble, it shone in the sun, and appeared over the town like some magnificent head, bowing over the city to look in on its inhabitants and giving the entire town a great, weighty air. Searching through the ordinary brick buildings of the town, the group soon found directions, and starting searching for the nearby temple that paid homage to some odd deity called Aescuhl. None of them had any idea what kid of deity this was, but Ivy theorized that it was a new deity- she had never heard of such a god before, and assumed that the Greeks had found some other religion's god and decided to steal it. It happened often enough, among pagans.

Siegfried had assumed Kilik and Raphael would split off once they reached Athens, but Kilik had said that he'd decided to come along with them and help them get the bounty. Siegfried, glad to have him around, merely said " Thank you" and turned to Kilik's companion. Raphael, who had stated that he'd done some work in this line of business, said he would rather... enjoy (strange emphasis on this word here; Raphael was odd, no doubt about that) the chance to help them catch their bounty.

" He's a good fighter," Kilik had said. " I would not mind taking him along."

Siegfried had shrugged. " The more the merrier," he had said. " Four's an army."

About an hour after that, the four companions found the temple to the god Aescuhl. A tiny, neat little building, it had no designs on the front and looked more like a storage shed then a temple. If the symbol of Aescuhl- a round orb slashed with a great, red gash- had not been painted on it, all four companions woudl have missed it looking for something prettier. As it was, they found it relatively soon, and, crossing himself before entering the pagan temple, Siegfried stepped inside first. A scent of incense and a whiff of burning wax candles passed Siegfried, as did something more familiar but unidentifiable. He thought it was iron, but it wasn't quite. He dismissed it from his mind and walked up the halls.

The temple was as small and featureless on the inside as it was on the outside. Beside a few marble pillars and a very tiny altar that was vaguely rectangular in shape, nothing was out of the ordinary. As they walked down the marble path, a tall, broad-shouldered man greeted them, a man who wore bright red robes (the apparent color of this particular deity).

" Welcome, to the temple of Aescuhl. What can we do for you?" he said, in tones that were flat but relatively pleasant for all that.

" We've come for the bounty on Cassandra-" Siegfried began, but was stopped when the big man let out a joyous clap of his hands and clasped both of Siegfried's in front of him. Pulling back, Siegfried watched as a veritable flood of speech poured out of the man's mouth.

" Oh! Good sirs, good madam, it is very good to see you! Bounty hunters! Oh, we have waited so long for someone like you." The big man smiled and clapped his hands together again. Siegfried rubbed his own where the man had grabbed them. Apparently, this was a temple which preferred big, expansive displays of affection. Siegfried did, too- but the man's apparently very strong hands had nearly smashed Siegfried's own hands into nerveless mush. Rubbing them to remove the annoying feeling of pins and needles that rapid blood loss had sparked up in them, Siegfried wryly mused that this was apparently not a deity who was averse to a little hard physical labor every now and then. The man's hands had been calloused, tough, and the hands of a farmer, not your average, scholarly priest. They had been (as Siegfried noted again) damnably strong, too.

Still, Siegfried guessed that he might as well use the man's apparent fondness for him to his own advantage. " What has this woman done to your establishment?" Siegfried said, in tones of deepest sorrow for the supposed hurt of the temple (rule number one of mercenary life: pretend to be compassionate, they pay you more), rubbing his hands again. The man smiled at them again, and Siegfried couldn't help but notice that his big, cheerful personality contrasted very oddly with his flat, almost monotone voice. Still, the man's eyes sparkled with joy, and Siegfried was pretty sure that the man wasn't just putting on an act or mocking them in some hideously well-informed way- the man really was just happy to see them. And his voice just happened to be flat.

" Oh! She slew a few of my brethren, in the temple itself, using her foul sword to slice open their poor innocent bellies! Oh," the priest said, his words and actions sorrowful (he was bending his head and ringing his hands as he spoke, apparently quite impassioned as he remembered the deaths of his brothers), though his tone had not changed- it was still totally, completely flat. " And worse yet, she stole a most sacred artifact from us," the big man said. (In his own head, Raphael privately snickered that it was probably some random piece of wood that an old "sage" had dug up in the woods around town).

The big man, who had raised his head to look at them when he mentioned the stolen artifact, lowered it again. His voice, however, still did not change, and the idea of mockery grew stronger in Siegfried's mind- he dismissed it again, though he had to put more force into doing so this time around. Siegfried cleared his mind enough to hear the priest say, " We do not know where she has gone, I'm afraid. But oh, we want this artifact back so badly..." The big man shook his head. " We are willing to pay a great deal of money for it. However..." the man looked up, and his eyes twinkled. " You seem to be a man who sympathizes with our suffering..."

" Yes," Siegfried said, recognizing a glint he'd seen a million times over and was still never quite comfortable with. It was the unmistakable, easily known glint of greed- regardless of whether it was gold or services (the latter being the case here), the eyes of men always gleam when greed gets inside them. " I am."

" Well," the big man said, lowering his tone, even though it was quite clear that no one else was inside the temple, " we here who worship Aescuhl have a great respect for blood. We believe that blood can be used to... humor, the gods, and so we have a special request." The man's eyes sparkled in a most disturbing way. " If, that is, you are willing to take it?..."

A sudden touch of dread spilling into his heart, like a black drop of water on the cool, safe waters of his mind, Siegfried said, " What?" Siegfried had managed to avoid letting his sudden inner dread affect his outer appearance, but he thought his voice shook slightly when he spoke.

" We want you to bring her alive," the priest said suddenly. " Bring her alive, and we will pay you double the recorded amount. Do we have a deal?"

Siegfried, mind suddenly filled with images of all the things Inferno had done to others- many involving blood and living bodies- knew, absolutely knew, that he was going to refuse whatever the man said. Yet he shocked himself by saying " Yes," and when he found out what he'd said, he'd immediately tried to retract that statement... but his voice faltered, and he merely sounded like he was coughing for a moment after saying yes. A fear gripping his heart (he didn't like this feeling, like someone else was in control; for too much of his life, someone else had been in control of his life, Inferno, filthy black heart Inferno, and the memory of that age when he'd spent his life in fire and chain was too fresh in his mind for even this minor altercation to not strike him with dread in his heart).

" Excellent!" the priest said somewhat louder, clapping his hands and resuming his happy face again. " Then, you better start now. Check the local taverns. You may find some information there. Remember," he said, eyes glittering again, " there are others out there. Do try, won't you?" he said, and with that, he turned around and left through a small wooden door Siegfried had not noticed before in the side of the altar.

Turning about, Siegfried saw Ivy about to speak, her eyes slightly wider with horror, but he shook his head and said, " Come on, outside." The look he gave each of them said he'd explain it later, and he planned on it. The quartet headed out into the sunlight.

Behind them, the big shouldered priest suddenly leered at the entrance, and scratched his stomach in a manner almost obscene, though there was, somehow, nothing about it all that improper- maybe it was just the hint of a slouch in his actions. Somehow, the man seemed terribly, terribly monstrous right there, in the torchlight from the walls.

-

Outside the temple of Aescuhl, Athens, Greece, a minute later.

Kilik whirled in the dusty streets outside the temple and said, in a voice quiet but clear, " What are you planning on doing? I have seen and sensed much evil in my life, but-"

" I'm not planning on anything," Siegfried said, cutting off the Chinese monk's polite but angry speech. " I don't know why I said yes to that great big bastard in there, but I'm not planning on taking that girl in dead or alive. I'm going to warn her."

" Warn her?" Raphael said, his eyes glittering in the sun. " What do you mean?"

The four had pulled into a small circle in the middle of Athen's dusty streets. Turning to each of his companions in turn, Siegfried said, " Guys, I don't know what's going on in there. I don't know why I said yes. But I'm going to go find this girl, and I'm going to warn her. I can't take the bounty out on her. Not know. I don't care what she's done in her life- something is wrong with that monk. Something is wrong with this entire temple. I won't drag anyone- even a murderer- back to this place, alive or dead. I don't know what sacred artifact she took, but..."

In that moment, Kilik had a flash of the inspiration that had sometimes flowed to him during his days on the Journey, one of the flashes that told him things in words he could not remember later. All Kilik ever remembered later was something like a lightning bolt, striking once, illuminating some great and alien landscape over which flowed the faces and thoughts of an entire world. It was in these moments that Kilik felt himself being drawn in two, as if there was simply too much power out there, too much knowledge, and he would drown in it if he stayed too long- but whatever merciful being brought him to these heights of knowledge and insight always kindly brought him back before that moment came, and Kilik was always just left with a bit of the knowledge of the future.

" It's a shard of the Soul Edge," Kilik said, stunning his companions to silence. " That's what Cassandra's taken. That's why the priest struck us all as odd. This temple was newly created, just for the purpose of a cover-up. There are no temples to this deity anywhere else in Greece, or the world. It's not a deity that the Greeks stole, it's a deity that never existed at all. This is a cover-up. Someone is putting on a show for someone. We are just caught in the middle."

" What?" Siegfried said, completely stunned- and also amazed at how well it made it all fit together. Somehow, in the back of his mind, he'd been thinking along those very same lines, and Kilik's pronouncement made his mind leap to the next barrier of logic- and right past it.

" Cestemus," he said. " Fygul Cestemus. They're the ones doing this. They're after the Soul Edge. Cassandra...," Sudden knowledge striking him again for the second time in almost a minute, he nearly shouted, " Damn it, Ivy, hand me that paper!" When she merely looked at him, he said, " The bounty paper! The one with her name on it!"

Not knowing what he was up to but deciding to trust him anyway, Ivy handed the paper to him, and then Siegfried, cursing, handed it back.

" Tell me what her name is," he said wearily. " The only part I can read is ' Wanted for robbery and the deaths of two men'."

Ivy, looking over it, said, " Cassandra Alexandra..." Her eyes suddenly widening as she realized exactly what this portended, she said, " Did Sophitia have a sister?"

Raphael, who had not been involved in the first set of battles for the Soul Edge, merely said, " What?"

" Sophitia," Ivy groaned, her mind nearly shaking wih the implications of this new knowledge. " Sophitia. Why didn't I see it before? And we even met on the road!"

Fool you! the voice inside her head (the one that had taken up residence since her discovery in the Mansion of the Lions, her father's house, Cervantes' house) shouted at her. Fool you! You think you're going to take on Fygul Cestemus, girl? Well, think again! You didn't even notice her last name! How are you going to defeat a crazed religious group that is entirely beyond both boundaries and countries if you can't even keep tabs on the few people around you?

Shut up, she told the voice in her head bitterly, and with its sad-soft laughter ringing in her ears, Ivy said, " Sophitia busted one of the Soul Edges. After breaking it, she comes home. Little sister hears all about her big sister's adventures and goes off to have one of her own. She gets mixed up in a weird, quasi-temple that really serves as a front for Fygul Cestemus, finds out that they've got a shard of the Soul Edge, and manages to run in and steal it. Now, she's out there, alone, probably wounded, struggling to stay alive, with half of Europe after her. And she's the sister of the woman who destroyed the first Soul Edge. Inferno is probably tap-dancing in his grave right now. Oh, I should have seen this coming!" she shouted, though the noise was thankfully covered by the general noise of the busy port city.

" Relax, my friend," Kilik said. " It's all right. No one could possibly have seen this coming, much less you. You've had other things to worry about." Kilik had, momentarily, forgotten that Raphael was not in on the one big secret Ivy possessed. Raphael, who had fallen to the wayside during the discussion and had listened intently, said nothign to remind him of this fact and filed this information away for later. Right now, he wished ot know more about the Soul Edge, and this group of adventurers knew more than their fair share about it. He'd been right to track them from Valencia, Spain, and see where they were going. This little side-track would do even more to gain him knowledge about the Soul Edge, first hand knowledge he could use to find it- and control it. He turned his mouth off and set his ears to "on".

" Yeah," Siegfried said, slowly moving his hand through his long blond hair, " tell me about it." He chuckled- bitterly, and without humor- and continued. " Anyway, now that we know..."

" Do we?" Ivy asked. " It may be an accident of names. It could be a cousin or a distant relative or a... oh, damn it, I don't know! But are we sure?"

Siegfried looked at Ivy, then looked at Kilik. When Kilik nodded, Siegfried looked back at Ivy.

" Ivy," he said quietly, " I don't know for sure, but I know where it counts. Our friend's sister is out there somewhere. We've got to find her. We've got to warn her..."

" And maybe get the shard of the Soul Edge away from her," Kilik said. " It will continue to draw evil to her as long as she bears it."

Siegfried nodded. " Yeah." Looking about, he acted as if he suddenly noticed Raphael, and he said, " Hey, Raphael."

" Hmm?" Raphael said, annoyed that he'd been noticed but intending to do as little as possible so as not to "break the mood", so to speak.

" Look," Siegfried said, running his hand through his hair again, this time rather quickly and almost as if he had been harassed into doing so, " we're about to get into a lot of trouble. Kilik probably never told you this, but me and Ivy have a kind of... personal vendetta against Fygul Cestemus. I don't know if you know who they are, but-"

" A massive, ideologically crazed group of religious fanatics bent on bringing the world to its knees," Raphael stated flatly. " Go on."

Siegfried, glad he didn't have to explain all that (it sounded rather dumb, when one thought about it; but, hey, Fygul Cestemus was real, and the evil bastards who ran it knew all too well how crazy their very existence sounded; it was one reason they still existed in today's world, full of knights and heroes), said, " Well, but that's not my point. We are going to get into a lot of trouble from here on out, and more than likely one of us is going to get killed. We can't drag you into this, not without your consent. It's not going to be one of the pretty adventures you hear about in poems- it's going to be long, brutal, and probably anti-climatic. We won't bring down Fygul Cestemus by ourselves, nor will we kill the "big man" responsible for all this trouble. In the end, we probably won't even do all that much good for the world anyway. We're going to do this for our own reasons- but you don't have those reasons, and we can't really even tell you what those reasons are. Are you still willing to go with us?"

Unknowingly, Raphael was also being held up to a litmus test here, at least from Siegfried's point of view. If he said "yes", Siegfried would know something was up- he would watch Raphael carefully from now on. If he said "no", he was probably a perfectly ordinary man, and Siegfried would dismiss him from his mind. Siegfried was going to have a lot to worry about in the coming days, and he didn't want to have to waste time concentrating on a man who might turn out to be perfectly normal in the end. Siegfried had thought that he and Ivy would have time to rest before beginning their two-person war against Fygul Cestemus, but now it looked like he would have to launch himself into it sooner. He didn't know if he'd make it out the other end of this long, dark tunnel alive- but he'd be damned if he wouldn't go in and carve his name on the walls. They'd remember him, if nothing else. For Ivy's sake, they'd remember him.

Raphael, in the next second, and dragging himself without his own knowledge into the second and last battles for Soul Calibur that would rage in the world, said " Yes."

Siegfried had nodded and said, " Four's an army, then. Let's find a tavern. We need information, and it looks like things are going to get very bad for all of us..."

The quartet broke up and began walking off. They never noticed it, but in the shining light of the burning sun, their shadows stood up and stood straighter than they themselves ever would. And as they walked, their shadows became giants.

- Hope you guys like this! See you soon!

P.S. JUST ADDED! I RECEIVED A FULL PAID SCHOLARSHIP TO MY FAVORITE UNIVERSITY! COLLEGE, HERE I COME! AND I'M GOING TO KICK YOUR ASS, BABY! YAHOO!