Disclaimer – I don't own PJO, or Claymore, or their characters, or their off-branching multimedia stuffs.
You are free to make choices, but bound to the consequences of the choices you make. ~ Anonymous
Third Person POV:
Percy was distracted.
Extremely distracted.
That was not a good thing to be. Especially not during a fight with… this.
Percy was painfully reminded of that as he was forced to bend back at an unnatural angle to avoid the Claymore headed at his face. Ignoring the sharp protests of his vertebral column, Percy up righted himself the second the sword had passed and brought his Claymore down on the Claymore, who blocked it with her Claymore.
Another distracted part of his mind reminded him that he was fighting the Claymore on the island of Claymore. Lots of Claymores.
The warrior brought up her Claymore to block his, and he took the opportunity to knee her in the gut, before leaping back to try and make some space.
The fight shouldn't be so hard. It couldn't have been so hard… and it wouldn't be, if not for his stupid wandering mind.
The girl had an unorthodox fighting style, that much was for sure, but it shouldn't have been enough. It was exactly like the archives had described it. She would start off fighting as a normal Claymore, letting you get the upper hand, forcing you into a lulled state of mind, before flipping the tables on you.
It had nearly happened to him, too, even though he should have been expecting it after hours and hours of extensive research. At first, she'd been fighting sloppily and leaving multiple openings in her stance, allowing herself to take several blows and cuts.
Three seconds later, when he stepped into one of those openings in her guard and punched her across the face, she'd used the momentum the punch gave her to smash her face down into the dirt and come back like some sort of an inverted grandfather clock pendulum, with her sword angled precisely at his neck from a steep 60 degrees.
With his momentum still forcing him forwards and his sword still held out to his right, he'd been forced to raise a left hand and tank the blow with his Yoki.
Since then, she'd been a constant pain in the ass. He couldn't get in close without risking a massive blow to his Yoki, and possible decapitation, and he couldn't run away because…. Well, because he'd been the one to call her here… it wouldn't be right to run away from a fight that he'd started. Apart from that, he doubted she would just let him leave like that…
On top of all that, he wasn't getting any time to think between the troubled mind status and the constantly attacking armored pest. Ever since he'd got the mental letter 30 minutes ago, he couldn't stop thinking about it. At least until another close call forced his conscious back to the real world, and even then, it would only be a few moments before his mind went on another great roller coaster ride featuring the Fates and Chaos.
Fighting Chaos… siding with Olympus – that was a subject he had avoided thinking about for nearly 20 years now. Maybe 30… time seemed to fly when you had such a packed schedule. He could, for the first time, see how the Olympians had managed to survive four thousand years of life. Not with godly patience or by a will over time, but by following a comically mundane routine.
Regardless, fighting Chaos was like one of those New Year's resolutions that the mortals kept making each year. You would make one seemingly full of promise, with the full intention of carrying it out, and then, as soon as the day was passed, you would forget about it entirely until someone reminded you of it… at which point you would be too lazy to do it anyway.
The analogy worked, except for one small detail. It wasn't laziness, but practicality. "Fighting the Creator of the universe… it was a child's dream," he muttered to himself, while leaping back to avoid another diagonal cut, just about as soon as he saw it coming.
Eyes widening from the shock of being ambushed while so deep in thought, Percy watched the blade pass just millimeters away from his neck. He couldn't avoid it entirely though, he realized as he felt the blade shave an angry cut into the left side of his beard and take a slice at the skin underneath.
His Yoki wasn't working properly. Neither were his godly powers. Everything required concentration. Concentration that he didn't have. The only one way to get it? Closure. Concentration required closure. Closure… that he couldn't get either.
To get closure, he'd have to fight Chaos. But that… it was designed to be impossible. Chaos had made everything in existence. There was nothing at all that he WOULDN'T expect… Even if there was, it would hardly be a fight. Percy could be better, stronger, faster and more athletic than Chaos was, and he'd still win without breaking a sweat. Literally… all he'd need to do was THINK, and Percy would be gone. Poof. Done and dusted. Lost from time and existence entirely.
If Tartarus had been able to do that – and to a Titan and a Giant, no less, there was no way Chaos wouldn't be able to do it to him. Of course, there was always a way around everything. But the problem was: Was it necessary? His only motivation was duty. Duty of vengeance to his dead comrades and girlfriend, but that was about it, wasn't it? Was that worth the price…. Was it worth the needless, fruitless pain?
He stopped to mull over the thought, and it cost him. The Claymore slammed her face into the dirt on his left once more, and came up again, sword pointed at his neck. He turned his Claymore to block it, but the unnatural angle and excessive force on the Claymore's part, mixed with the shock and surprise on his, sent the sword flying out of reach.
She didn't stop swinging, however. She slammed into the dirt on his right, and came up again, with the sword's tip pointed at the exact same spot on the other side of his neck.
He lifted his right hand to slow the blade as he leapt back again, and while it allowed him to put enough distance between them both, it also severed off his hand halfway between the wrist and the elbow. Howling, more from the shock of the situation than the pain, he scrambled backwards, creating distance between the psycho girl – who had FINALLY stopped feasting on the dirt – and himself.
"So, you are Perseus," she proclaimed, shocking him into silence. "I'll be honest, I expected a lot more from the stories they told me."
Key information was leaked in that statement, as Percy came to realize, in a rather rare moment of focus. One important thing was that the Organization had now started to actively search for him. That was a change – but a rather unwelcome one. He would've paid to avoid it… the ignorance had almost been… blissful.
The other information of significant importance to be gleaned was that they weren't doing the searches indirectly anymore. They'd sent a Claymore after him.
He'd normally have argued that it wouldn't be effective in any way or form, but he'd… felt the results himself. Plenty effective – even if it were solely because he'd been too distracted by the "purpose of my life" question floating around in his mind.
On a side note, the fact that she believed he was down and out forever spoke of some arrogance on her part, but it wasn't as if he couldn't blame her for it – both because it wasn't particularly in the wrong, and One did not become top of their class without being the best, and she had indeed managed to defeat him in round one.
Arrogance, though, could easily be exploited. It made you sneer down in contempt at anyone and everyone you saw, instantly lulling your mind into a false state of security around them. When you thought yourself leagues above them all, you were destined to fail whenever someone with the capability to surprise you came along.
Here and now, Percy was quite confident he could be that 'someone.' He definitely had more than enough power to do so.
As the Claymore warily stepped in closer towards him, in an attempt to take his life, Percy steadied his nerves. Gripping the blade with two hands, she sliced in a downward arc, from his left shoulder to the right part of his hip, with an aggressive stance.
The way she'd placed her feet made it clear that he had no way of successful escape there. Instead, he jumped off to the side, rolling himself to a stop, while darting his eyes around to find a way back to his hand… and his Claymore.
The opportunity to get them back didn't look like it would come soon, however. For all the arrogance that the Claymores had, this girl seemed determined to not let him get back on even footing with her. She was prepared for his attempts to get around her with a wide stance, and was actively blocking his path with her sword.
Percy, though, didn't see this as a problem. He saw it as opportunity. Right now, her biggest advantage lay in the fact that he didn't have a sword, and that he couldn't use his other weapons effectively without his right hand – something that he'd have to work on. And they were both behind her.
Which defined his sole objective here pretty clearly – it was to get around her, to the hand and reattach it to the stub on his hand. Luckily enough, his lack of ability to concentrate at first had let his Yoki run wild, and not allowed him to heal the stub. He wasn't sure how he would've reattached it if the healing process had been complete, and the arm's wound had sealed itself…
Regardless, the main objective was the hand. Even getting the sword wasn't all that important. He had a fire spear that he could pull out of thin air and a knife stained with the blood of hundreds of Claymores, after all. An objective that wouldn't be easy to accomplish.
He ducked under another swing, but was forced to shrink back once more when he saw that Cassandra had a leg out to trip him if he tried going through. Using a burst of Yoki, he burst off to the side, trying to make the distance effective in getting closer to his target, but she had been prepared, evidently, and she had a shorter distance to cover anyway.
They repeated this cycle of strike, dodge, run and block once more. Then twice. Then thrice. By the fifth time, Percy was starting to get antsy. He could only stop the blood flow to one arm for SO long before that arm died entirely. It would have been a worst-case scenario if his arm had died from lack of blood flow because he was trying to prevent it from bleeding or healing.
Luckily, he had other options, even without the use of his dominant arm. His concentration was still fussy, and his thoughts were still straying back to how flawed and childish his own personality and perspective was – at a younger age – but he at least had enough by now to work some basic forms of power.
The elemental powers, he was sure he'd be able to use. He'd practiced enough with them. More complicated domains like mind-reading, the spells of Hecate and subtler things like light and darkness? They took way too much concentration, which was not in ready supply due to a severely stressed out mind, coupled with frequent pangs of immense pain.
'So, I have a list of what elemental powers I can control… I just have to narrow it down to what I can use right now,' He realized, as he was forced back another step by a wilder horizontal slash. The winds? Not very useful when your opponent had Yoki. Water? Nowhere to be seen. Earth? Nothing useful there. Plants-
'No, wait a minute. We're walking on the ground. If I use my powers to trip her with Earth… I could get around her and snatch the stub…'
After pondering over it half-mindedly for a minute, he decided to give it a shot with all his worth. No more second thoughts over it, he practically SHOVED every last ounce of Yoki into his legs before shooting off to the far right, making a curve towards the hand.
The Claymore followed just milliseconds behind, leaving Percy free to do his thing. He let his body take control of his forward motion, and, closing his eyes he poured all the concentration into one spot between him and her. One spot of rock. It was exactly in the middle of them both, and yet was 50 meters away from 'Cassandra.'
Though, at the speed they were going, that would be covered in nothing. Creating loud sounds of sonic booms with each step, Percy moved forward as fast as he could, and created a small rise in the ground area in between them. Then, he pushed some more power into it and forced plant life to grow all over it, causing grass, slippery moss, and curled-up vines to appear, all with the purpose of stalling the Claymore.
He succeeded, if only just by the smallest of margins. He reached his hand down low, and grabbed the stub while rushing forward at top speed, trying his best to slow down. It didn't work, however. He got the hand, but missed the sword entirely due to his trajectory, and his speed then caused him to keep going till he hit the edge of the forest another 100 meters away. The first two trees snapped easily under the force and the third one gave way as well, albeit with slightly more resistance. The fourth one, however, was a massive 78-year old pine, with a trunk thicker than Percy's body was.
It didn't give way to anything, causing him to come to a full halt by face-slamming painfully into it. Well, at least he had the hand.
Extracting himself from the newly made depression on the tree trunk, he fixed his nose with a pulse of Yoki, and turned around to see behind him. The Claymore was on the floor about half a mile away from him. She'd tripped over the new rock formations, and had, evidently, taken a painful fall. She was starting to get up, though, even through the pain that the nasty jagged scar – that now ran down her face as a result of her cuddles with the rocks – must have been giving her.
So, he had time. Maybe not enough to completely reattach the hand, but probably enough to get most of the nerves and blood vessels in place. That was more than enough, he decided. The bone, muscle and skin would reattach themselves soon enough with Yoki-saturated blood pumping through his arteries.
Making sure to keep a track on the Claymore's progress – she seemed to be in a dizzy state of shock, as one would be after impacting jagged rock at twice the speed of sound, after tripping over an impediment that hadn't even existed in the way until the time of impact – Percy started to pump the Yoki into his forearm, after quickly but carefully positioning his arm to line up correctly at the point where the Claymore had torn through.
Then, along with the Yoki, he sent the blood rushing back to the place. At first, it caused the blood to spurt out of the wound violently, but with some minor adjustments and some basic form of fluid control that left him way more drained than it should have, the blood started to flow into the now-white corpse of a lower arm again. Then, as each nerve cell repaired itself, the pain came back in leaps and spurts, this time doing the vice versa of what it had recently helped him in. With every spurt of pain came a small blackout in concentration, slowing the whole process down.
The Claymore was up already, and looking around in confusion for her sword. The arm, on the other hand, was yet to be useful. He couldn't even move it, much less feel the sensation of touch. It was taking time. 'Too much time,' he thought to himself, 'Maybe I should start training with my left hand as primary too… make myself ambidextrous so something like this doesn't get repeated.'
And then she was upon him again. This time with a bit more fury – probably a result of having her 'pretty perfect' visage cracked. To avoid her constant blows, he was forced to leave the hand in a half-attached state. Probably not a good thing, but, well, he didn't have any choice.
He dived to the side when she cleaved down, and then continued the roll, painfully as it was, by crushing his right hand, to avoid the follow-up hit. Being completely incapable to move his hand or his fingers, he ended up crushing the digits when he had to put pressure on them. Without muscle strength or Yoki power in them – the Yoki having been transferred to cover his body to protect against the fatal edge of the Dust-Eater's Claymore – they bent backwards and cracked.
Thanking the gods he hadn't healed all the nerves in his hand, he danced away from the 'Dust-Eater' and started to rely on his fall-through measures. 'Now, let's see… there's the knife that I can't use with my left hand, the spear that I also can't use without my right hand, and the godly powers.'
"All good options, huh…" he muttered under his breath, reverting back to his usual sardonic personality due to the… unique and stressful situation. He glanced at his opponent, who had taken to just swinging the big blade till it hit, before realizing how far deep in he was now.
None of his godly powers would work here. He hadn't learned much about the powers over light, and here, in broad sunlight, his domains over the dark were useless. There wasn't any water for miles, and he had a feeling that the wind wouldn't particularly bother this girl… not unless he could summon a whole hurricane.
And the powers over the grass and the Earth – or the underground – would be too taxing to keep up for long, and too useless in short bursts to even try. His only reliable power here would be the power over metals, but that wouldn't work properly against non-precious metals. It could just as easily end up getting him killed as it could her. It was too unsure a plan… no, it wasn't an unsure plan – he'd have gone through with it if he was merely unsure of the outcome.
He was far too desperate to not grasp at those short straws. The problem was he was about 80 percent sure the metal control wouldn't work properly, and then, instead of looking like magneto from an X-men issue, he'd become a skewered kebab.
The only logical solution now involved severe risk. Actually, it involved him getting hurt for… pretty much for sure. Taking that as fact, he shrunk back from the Dust-Eater's violence, waiting for the optimal time. Then, as soon as she lunged forward for her next blow, he jumped into it, catching her entirely by surprise.
The surprise didn't stop the sword aimed at him though, and neither was it meant to.
All it did was distract the warrior from noticing what Percy was now holding in his left hand.
Allowing himself to be run through by a Claymore, Percy pulled out a triple-bladed knife from thin air, and swung his left hand in the widest arc he could manage, keeping its contents out of sight for the Claymore till the last second.
And with that, a 30-minute-long dance with death came to an end. Too much pain, though. There was too much pain. Just one time he got distracted, and then he nearly died to a simple CLAYMORE. And since the only thing on his mind now was Chaos, his thoughts naturally linked there.
If he couldn't even kill Claymores, what hope did he stand against the Creator? It was too much to ask, even for family, wasn't it? They HAD to know he couldn't win… they would forgive him…. Right? With shock, pain and doubt coursing through his veins, Percy pulled the blade out of his stomach and started to heal his wounds.
His eyes were wide and frantic as he collapsed down, his legs finally giving way due to excessive blood loss and exhaustion. 30 minutes and he was down. There was no way he was fighting Chaos. For sure, he still wanted to, and the Fates were doing a pretty good job at guilt tripping him, but this fight had shown him. He was too weak. Far too weak. He couldn't fight a CLAYMORE, much less Chaos.
'Maybe… maybe I should think about this…. Another time.' Procrastination might have been a healthy habit, but this one time, it was saving him from mental destruction.
Then, he collapsed pretty much as soon as his injuries were done healing, without checking anything in the surroundings. The pain and the strain – both mental and physical, on his Yoki, had taken far too much out of him; so much that he couldn't even keep his eyes open for a minute after his legs had given way. In the collapsed state, he saw neither the Claymore standing behind the tree-line, nor the scarring of the tissue on his left hand.
Fortunately for him, however, Roxanne was not a selfless person. Neither was she big on revenge for people she didn't know and didn't care about. Smirking at the fall of the current age's number 1, she turned about on her heel and started to walk back to the rendezvous site for her and her handler.
She couldn't be bothered to kill the Yoma… that was, if he wasn't dead already. All the Yoki had drained out of him and who really knew what happened to Yoma when they didn't have their powers? Besides, she owed the thing for clearing her path to the spot.
-Line break-
12 years later-
As soon as they saw the cloak, the townsfolk moved away instinctively.
A black cloak with the hood up like this was a sign that the person donning it was hiding something… And in such a time and age, secrets were almost always deadly. Only a Yoma would feel the need to hide his skin from everyone else. Either that or a fugitive. Neither was a good thing – or person – to get involved with.
Hiding his arms and face under the familiar black fabric, the boy turned a corner and disappeared down one of the alleys.
Sneering back in the direction of the people, he pulled back the hood, and jumped off the ground. Taking a leap off the wall to his right, he continued his momentum and hopped off the wall to the left to give himself the required angle and momentum to get on top of the house.
Landing after a short flip in the air, he crouched on the tiled roof of the building, before shooting off over the rooftops with Yoki to boost the power.
A few seconds later, and he'd found what he was looking for: an abandoned mansion near the outskirts of the town; one that looked like it hadn't been touched for two decades. To him, it was odd to see that the old building, since he'd fully expected it to be destroyed or replaced or such within a year or two, but he didn't have time to ponder. He was using Yoki far too close to the Organization's headquarters to dilly dally.
Seeing nobody else in the alley behind the house, he jumped off the roof and landed on the tarmac, before wheeling around and kicking the back door open, with just the right amount of force to break the cheap iron lock, which would have rusted by now, no doubt about it.
Practically noiselessly, the lock broke open, and the door wheeled back inwards on its hinges, creaking and groaning itself to a halt. 'Well, almost noiselessly, then…' he thought to himself, making light of the situation to calm his nerves down.
For almost twelve years now, the Organization had been hunting for Percy viciously. Something that was directly his own fault.
Before the Cassandra incident all those years ago, the Organization had been at a sort of peace – or ignorance, rather – with matters pertaining to him. They'd let him leave, been content to watch him wreck village after village, and even feigned ignorance when their most precious 'number 1' Claymores went down without explanation.
At first, he'd thought it was because they just didn't care, but as he'd later found out, it was simply because they were unsure of what had happened to him and whether he was still alive. It wouldn't have made sense to launch an all-out attack/siege on a guy who was long since dead.
But then, the fight with the pendulum girl had happened, and he'd been spotted by one of their warriors. Some bitch named Roxanne – who he'd made sure to PERSONALLY deal with; she'd gone and informed headquarters about a Yoma who had killed 'the great' Cassandra, and then, all the suspicions the Organization had had about his interference in their matters had been proven true.
Cassandra was apparently a Claymore with unparalleled ability for her time; she could have, it had been assumed, in her Awakened form, taken down both Riful and Isley in combat. Which, while it didn't seem all that great to him, was an amazing feat. The Empress of the East had an uncanny ability to store her real body behind several thousands of layers of Yoki – both fake and real, while the Silver King of the North had a power to change his body at will. His arms were especially manipulatable, turning into every form of weapon from a bow to a Claymore to even a shield and spear combo.
Percy had witnessed both powers firsthand, while 'running into' the two – on separate occasions, of course. Isley had tried to ambush Percy with his army when Percy had shown up one day in one of the sister towns of Pieta to munch on some food. It had been an absolute wreck, though, with Percy breaking every bone in every Yoma's body and drinking the Yoki out of them. He'd still left them to live out of pity, but the incident had only happened around 6 years ago, though, so he doubted they would be foolish enough to try again.
His encounter with Riful, on the other hand, had been completely accidental. On a visit to his first hometown, he'd passed through the pass on Mount Shire – by sheer force of habit from the olden days – and had ended up running into a young 8-year-old child and an 18-year-old boy. They'd then fought till Dauf was unable to generate more metal and Riful's last layer of Yoki had been spent. That had been close to 40 years ago… and he'd only let them live because their deaths would have alerted the Organization like a red beacon.
Anyway, after the Cassandra incident, the Organization had started trying to capture him. Their plan was to knock him out and drop him on the mainland, as he'd gleaned from some insignificant man in black. Apparently, with their condition in the war becoming progressively worse, the higher-ups had started demanding results.
So they'd started off with shipping them Yoma, sending thousands of parasites at a time, but that plan had crumbled easily, seeing that Yoma needed human hosts, and were more likely to turn on the human factions in the war than fight the Asarakam.
So, they now sent shipments of Claymores. Mediocre ones only, of course, since they wanted to keep experimenting with the stronger ones, pushing them to test out their limits, and since the weaker ones were too ineffective to be considered as results.
However, Percy knew from experience that such a high demand would be thwarted by the Organization. It would be costing Dae his research and would be a waste of time in Rimuto's opinion, meaning that they would try and find other ways out of the mess.
One such way was capturing him and dumping him on a continent where he'd be forced to fight off the Asarakam assailants to death. A stupid plan, in all honesty, but it would have worked for anyone in a desperate need. The only problem was that they couldn't do this with any other powerful Claymore because they'd all either surrounded themselves with armies – like in the case of Isley – or found ways to hide from the Organization – like Riful and Luciela.
And that was the main reason he'd come back here after all these years. He needed an information check on what the Organization was doing, especially after that last encounter. He'd be speaking from experience if he said that Claymores with guns was not a pretty thing to handle… there'd been so much destruction and death because the foolish girl couldn't handle the barrel properly and kept shooting civilians instead of him. It had completely ruined his meal. Feasting on a long-dead body was no fun at all; that, combined with the fact that most of the blood had dried up soon enough after the humans had been shot, was the reason he'd been salty for the past 2 months now.
So, he'd felt obliged to drop by his old home and pick up his phone. He'd left it on the kitchen counter before walking out of the house under the guise of an elderly male – which, he supposed, he was. Nobody at his age could really be considered young, after all. Well, unless the perspective used was that of an immortal god who could live for well over four thousand years…
The average lifespan was 40, here; he was older than that. Back on his home planet, the average lifespan had been 75; he was older than that too. It should've been some sort of milestone, but he was too busy with other things to care.
He had too many other jobs to bother with age and birthdays. He ha to train, fight Claymores, hone his fighting skills and godly powers, avoid the Organization's men in black and kill the spies and Claymores sent after him. That he'd found time to get here to access file logs was no small feat on its own.
Speaking of which, Percy needed those file logs. According to one of the wimpier Claymores he'd fought recently – some girl named Rosemary who couldn't shut up how unfair the world was, and how it was all the Yoma's fault for making it this way – there was a new number one on the scene. She'd apparently crossed the previous number one – who happened to be Rosemary – with less than a year – no, less than even 5 months – of experience under her belt.
"Teresa, she said…" he thought out loud, "Teresa of the Faint Smile."
Bisho no Teresa… apparently the girl had once even helped the whiny bitch in killing a former number 1… 'Hysteria the elegant.' A true feat, that one was, considering Hysteria's power... The girl had gone down taking down almost all of her fellows, because she'd been just THAT strong. It had been such a devastating occasion for the Organization that they'd even named it… they called it the 'Rockwell Hill Massacre.'
Before she'd deviated from the Organization, she'd stumbled across him one time – Hysteria, that is. She'd known who he was, of course, and had been prepped to fight, but he'd just had a lovely meal, and had wanted nothing more than a little rest, so he'd let her off with a few revolutionary ideas and quite some food for thought. You know, fight back against your bosses, fight for equal rights, try to kill all your fellows before they kill you. Those and the like.
Lost in thought, Percy absentmindedly wandered over to the dusty mess that was a kitchen and picked up a phone that had been left untouched for 20 years. Sending a zap of electricity through the dust-covered body of the metallic object, he turned it on by using himself as a power source.
The screen lit up slowly but surely, although in a more pixelated format than he was used to. Turns out that years of accumulating dust and moisture could ruin an electronic device. Who knew, right? Regardless, so long as the phone was working, and he could get the few files he wanted, he was ok.
No need to waste more time by standing and trying to fix something so far outdated. His house had long since been programmed to catch every bar of wi-fi that it could, and this, Percy was on the net, surfing through the online cloud-storage for the terms, "current," or "number 1," or "Teresa."
It had been way too long since he used this… he was losing the touch he'd once had. At the first go, he couldn't even type Teresa correctly, and the search bar gave him an error instead.
Putting the letters more carefully this time, he found one of the files he needed. It was an image of the book of Claymore records, of the specific page with Teresa's statistics written on it. The Organization's Databook, of sorts.
And it provided him with some interesting data. Some very interesting data. The girl had an S in Yoki, an A in agility, muscular strength and spirit, an S in perception and a B in leadership. When he'd started out all those years ago, he'd been an A in everything.
They'd marked the standards using his scores after all… A was 'average,' B meant 'below average,' S was for 'surpasses average,' D was for 'disappointing,' and such…
From those stats, it was clear to see that this girl was not just as good as, but BETTER than he was when he'd started. And, since he'd started off as a fully Awakened being, he had to say this girl was impressive. The only other scores to even come close would have been Cassandra the Dust-Eater – with whom he didn't have any pleasant memories – and Sistina the Oracle – with whom he didn't have any pleasant memories either…
Still, he felt an obligation to go and find this girl, even though he knew it would probably not turn out well. It was a festering need that he had developed… a desperate need to fight everyone and see WHERE he was on that power scale. It defined everything for him; it was his life's one purpose. And while the reasons behind that need might not have been… healthy, they still existed. He'd either be on top of the scale, and could live in peace knowing it, or he'd be somewhere in the middle, and he'd die disappointed, knowing that he'd let everyone down. But he'd still fight… because he had to know. He had to know how capable he was… and maybe, just maybe, if he was strong enough, then-
No, those weren't good thoughts. Too positive, too hopeful. There was no hope for the damned. That was a fight he couldn't win. It was best not to think about it at all, for in knowing that he was too weak, there was sadness, and in believing that he was strong, there lay a trap of foolishness. He was trapped in between the rock and the hard place, but there was no reason to move from where he stood. Nothing was pushing him anywhere.
But he'd fight. He'd still fight her. If not for anything else, then at least for the battle itself. Finding a good opponent was so hard these days, especially after he'd drained Isley's army of their Yoki. They'd probably all regenerated it by now, what with the constant 'eating and terrorizing humans' fiasco that they were involved in. Maybe he could visit them again… take more Yoki from them, wait for them to regen it, and then go and plunder it from them again. It would form a sort of beneficial cycle – well, for him, anyway.
How it affected them… that was their problem. He didn't really care. He was getting no benefit from letting a whole army of Awakened beings live, anyway, apart from using them as some sort of renewable energy source.
Searching his coat pockets, he found a pen inside one, and started to jot down notes. 'Good fighter, enhanced strength, incredible Yoki perception… preemptive sensing abilities, tons of latent potential, DANGEROUS.' Inscribing that on a spare piece of parchment that he'd brought along, he went back to reading the details on his phone.
Strongest Claymore to ever live… yadda yadda yadda…. No special abilities? That was a peculiarity. Most Claymores who rose through the ranks had some special form of fighting to go along with good strength and speed… Some had taught themselves to condense their Yokis in a specific way so that they could get in the hardest hits, or move their arms really fast, while others could condense the same Yoki into bars and bullets. Or arrows, in the case of a certain silver-eyed centaur. Some even had extreme numbness to pain due to their Yokis, allowing for extremely self-destructive forms of fighting like smashing your head into the ground multiple times a second.
Having no special abilities was quite a rare thing, for the matter. He knew of only two other ex-number ones who had had such a condition upon starting. Himself, and Rigaldo. Then again, he now had every ability out there, and Rigaldo could fight like a lion, so, that effectively cut down the list to a zero. Even Roxanne of Love and Hate – who was so often called out for being nothing more than a lying, cheating, unoriginal bitch – had demonstrated a stunning ability to temporarily copy the styles of other Claymores, just by watching them fight for a minute or two.
'As such, this no ability thing is rare,' Percy thought to himself, 'There must be a cat-' And he was cut off by a loud beep from his phone. It read, "Network tracking…"
"Identification not found."
"You are not authorized to access this device."
Percy's response was short, sweet and simple, "Well, fuck." And then he was off, running with his Yoki as fast as he could go, not minding that he was literally tearing up bricks and stone as he dashed past.
He went out the house, out the district and then out the city in the matter of a few seconds, creating a sonic boom that would DEFINITELY reach headquarters.
"AGH, DAMN IT! I didn't even get to check for numbers 2 and 3!" Screaming in frustration, he tore towards the North-West as quick as he could go, with the only objective being to distance himself from the Organization and to go as far as he could as quickly as he could.
It was only when he'd reached the coast on the other side – somewhere in between the Shire mount and Pieta, that he came to a stop.
It wasn't fear that drove him, to be honest, but rather, a necessity to remain free. As of right now, the Organization had some dangerous warriors out there, and he wasn't willing to bet he could take on them all.
-Line break-
(Somewhere else)
"So, that's happened."
"I know, Teresa, I can see."
"Mhm…. I think it's finally time to step in…. don't you?"
AN – Well, that's done now…
Also I cannot confirm abt the update schedule… and Im sorry for it