Disclaimer – I own NONE of Rick Riordan's work, and NONE of Yagi's work, either.
No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy ~ Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
Third Person POV:
Boredom was painful.
That was a realization that dawned on Percy for, what was perhaps the fiftieth time in that day, as he slowly crept through the shrubbery, following the Claymore by sensing her faint Yoki close up ahead.
Right now, as it were, he'd been moving through seemingly endless forestry for hours. Night had long since fallen, and yet, the Claymore hadn't set up camp. Not that Percy really minded the exercise; no, walking for miles was good that way; but he really could have done with some something – anything else – to do WHILE walking.
For one thing, he couldn't do anything to stave off his boredom and his hunger, because he couldn't afford to make any noise, lest he should alert the Claymore to his presence – although he had a sinking suspicion that she knew something was wrong, based off how she would stop, every once in a while, and presumably check her surroundings. Presumably, because Percy couldn't actually see the girl. He would only come to know that she'd stopped by sensing her Yoki and realizing that it wasn't getting any further away.
For another, the scenery was horrible. It had been horrible when it was day, and when the sun had been shining overhead, causing sunlight to filter in through the leaves and branches of the canopy above, and it was even worse now, with all that sunlight gone. An endless expanse of green was bad enough to deal with – and what was with that, anyway?
Seriously, everything had been green. EVERYTHING! From the ground up, all the scenery Percy could get was green grass, stones covered in green moss, green shrubbery that was so thick that it prevented him from seeing the green moss-covered bark of the trees, green vines, green leaves, and then some massive green canopy overhead. The only escape from the color that he'd been able to get was the warm yellow caused by the light filtering in through the leaves… but now, in the dark? Yeah, even that was long gone.
After seeing this forest and walking through it for hours on end, his respect for Demeter was at an all-time low. Her entire element was so… boring. Useful in its own rights, for sure, but so lackluster all the same! Why couldn't she have picked a different color! Why not blue? Or red? Those were good colors. Great colors, in fact! Blue pancakes, blue cookies, blue seas, blue skies, red blood, red guts, red wine – all amazing things! So, why would anyone make their entire domain green?
And if the greenness of the greenery wasn't bad enough, the silence of his surroundings put the icing on the cake. There was not even a single sound. No birds chirping… but then again, one could not expect them to, this late at night. Still, the point remained. There were no owls hooting, no bugs buzzing, no frogs croaking, no noise of any crickets; there was absolutely nothing.
Maybe it was the literal tons of suppressed Yoki around them… maybe they'd fled on feeling the ever-present danger. Or maybe it was the noise being made by the people up ahead that had scared them away.
'Wait…. There's people up ahead…'
A small, slow grin spread across his face. And to think he'd just been lamenting about his boredom and hunger. Lady luck had given him the method to cure both his ailments.
Searching for the Yoki presence of the Claymore he'd been following, he found her a good hundred feet away. She'd promptly stuck to the main path all along, which had made it impossible for Percy to get the jump on her. At least if she'd walked through the shrubbery, she would have been distracted trying to push her way through dense jungle, giving him some chances to get this whole ordeal over with as soon as possible.
On the other hand, though, her consistency in moving on the path was currently proving a blessing. She would be too far away to hear these people – they were talking in hushed whispers, after all, and they didn't have any Yoki that she would be able to sense. They were actually doing a pretty decent job at hiding, too. The only reason Percy had found them was because he'd been walking straight through where they'd been camping, and because he had a literal 3-dimensional map of his surroundings in his mind.
Even then, stumbling upon food had been more of a case of luck than anything else. He was only trying to map out his immediate surroundings to find ways to move through the forest while making as little noise as possible. As such, he was only keeping track of what lay ahead of him, to make it easier to wind around the vegetation without making much noise, and even then, he was only focusing on a distance of a few meters.
Still, he wasn't about to give up on the chance to have a refreshing meal by pondering over how lucky he was to have gotten one. The Claymore was still walking on ahead, and while that was bad since he wouldn't be able to track her if she went beyond 500 feet, he wasn't too bothered about it because he had his other powers to help him in finding her later. As such, her walking away was a good thing here, because it would allow him to kill them without catching her attention her.
Putting a smile onto his face, Percy calmly strode into the small clearing where some 40 odd armed men were talking in hushed tones. 6 feet tall, with tanned skin that was fairly unusual in the West, messy black hair and a distinctive pair of sea-green eyes. Those green-colored irises weren't a very common thing in this world. In fact, he'd never actually seen any other individual with that eye color, and due to that, he was more than willing to bet that his description couldn't be matched by anyone else in the world.
As the gathered men saw him, all conversation in the clearing came to a screeching halt. It was painfully evident that nobody here had expected someone to walk straight up to them. Their reactions, mixed with the sight of the assorted weaponry they were wielding – or, rather, the sight of the assorted weaponry they had all about their persons, confirmed Percy's thoughts.
In a cheery, yet quiet voice, Percy called out, "Bandits, eh? I've gotta say; it's quite the unusual sight to see your lot around here! Can't imagine business would be doing good on such a lonely path between two backwater villages." Quiet as his voice may have been, it still carried quite easily over the dead-silent clearing. But that was relativity for you… In the absence of loud, external noises, even the sound made by a hairpin dropping on a marble floor could be deafening.
As such, he wasn't shocked to see that his words had had a great impact. It was like a ripple in a stagnant pool. The still, stiff bodies of every bandit in the clearing, moved in miniature waves, with their hands going down to their belts – or up, above their shoulders – to reach for their weapons.
Percy only chuckled a bit, before adding on, "Careful now… donno if you've noticed yet, but there's a Claymore right there – 100 or so feet behind me. Wouldn't want to draw her ire unnecessarily, now would we?"
And then, he got his first response from the crowd. From the back of the crowd, a man stepped forth. The guy was simple enough, as it was… he wore some light form of armor over a red tunic and black pants, and he had some sword strapped to his back. The guy was a considerably tall man, and with the arrogant way in which he walked, it was pretty clear he was the boss. He had that usual gang leader-type air around him. His hair was neatly parted into two curtains that fell down to his shoulders on both sides of his head, which framed his face, and given that he wore barbell jewelry on the right side of his forehead, it was a rather cruel look.
The boss walked up with the high-and-mighty attitude, coming closer to Perseus to see what the man had brought to them that they could take, before stopping a few feet away. With a cruel smirk playing on his lips, the man said, in a decently loud voice, "Look, boys, today's a lucky day! We've got not just one, but two targets!"
His voice was loud, but not loud enough to draw the Claymore. That was good. The best-case scenario here would be one where Percy could kill all of them without alerting the Claymore at all. She'd stopped moving now and was probably distracted in setting up her camp.
It was the perfect time to eat!
He was broken out of his thoughts, however, when the bandit pointed a crooked hand at Percy's chest, and when, with that annoying smirk on his face, he leaned in and said, "Give up all you've got, kid. We're 40 armed men against one of you, and that Claymore ain't coming to rescue you. They can't be seen killing us humans, you see… It's an iron-clad law for them. If they don't obey it, their fellows will come to kill them!"
Percy cocked his head to the right and stared at the man. He kept smirking. Percy continued staring. The man kept smirking. Percy stared. He smirked. The silence went on for a whole minute in that fashion, until Percy broke it when he burst out laughing, causing the bandit's smirk to falter.
Even though he wasn't laughing loudly – so as to avoid making too much noise, Percy's laughter drowned out the cries and hisses of 'how dare you' coming from the bandits all around him. It was only when he heard the distinctive rasp of metal that he calmed down, and even then; he didn't stop entirely. It wasn't until he felt a sharp pang of Yoki from behind him that he came back to his senses, and, more out of instinctual habit than anything else, he dived to the right, to avoid a blade that wasn't coming.
There was no one standing where he'd been a second ago. The bandits were still all arrayed out in front of him, albeit with dumbfounded expressions on their faces and weapons in their hands, and the shrubbery behind him was still as green as it had been moments before. The only difference was the Yoki aura he'd been trailing had moved thirty more feet away.
That brought a grin to his face. Not only had the Claymore failed to spot him, but she had now also given him the opportunity to use his Yoki – even if it was just a minimal amount – and make some noise by moving away. He wasn't going to let it go.
He looked up at the boss' face and grinned while the color slowly drained away from his body, leaving his skin a pale shade of white. The effect was replicated on his eyes and his hair too, as the melanin slowly bleached away due to the small amounts of Yoki that were now pulsing through his systems. The bandits watched on in shock as the boy's complexion drained from a perfect tan to a pale white. His eyes changed from a sea green to a deep blue to an angry red and then, finally, to a shining steel-like silver, while his hair underwent bleaching in mere seconds.
The now-pale boy reached behind his back and pulled out a massive broadsword whose color matched the silver of the blonde's eyes.
One of the bandits at the back of the assembled crowd – one of the younger, newer ones – whispered out in fear, "Y-yoma…"
Percy just laughed and replied, "Not a Yoma, no…. We're called Claymores!"
And with that, the nearest bandit – some kid to his left – fell silently, choking on his own blood, as the blade was wrenched out from his back. The spray of blood that followed as the blade was pulled out of the man's corpse finally shocked the other bandits into moving.
The first man that got in Percy's way was promptly beheaded before he could scream or shout, the second guy was bisected down the middle, and the third one fell as his throat was slashed open.
'So far, so good,' Percy thought, as he murdered three more bandits silently. 'No loud sounds yet…. That's good…'
And then, a sword came flying at his neck. He flicked his own blade back and knocked it away, without anything more than a glance behind himself to check whether it belonged to the Claymore or a bandit. The glance let him see that there was no one there.
He turned back to what was going on in front and ducked below an axe that was swinging for his neck. While straightening up, he moved forward to avoid another blade coming down from behind him. As he pushed ahead, he moved his own Claymore in an upward arc, cutting straight through the axe-wielder's arm. Seeing that no one else was close enough to be a threat at the moment, Percy twisted his momentum around into a spin, turning on his right foot.
Releasing his left hand's grip on his Claymore, he allowed the Claymore's own momentum to turn it, allowing him to shift his grip and hold the claymore in an icepick grip. As his twirl completed, his broad-sword went straight through the man's neck, cutting straight through his windpipe, silencing him forever. He wrenched the blade out and slashed downwards at the next bandit's legs, allowing the momentum of the blade to turn it around in his hand once again, until he was holding it normally.
Before the newly handicapped man could even fall down, Percy pulled his sword in an arc straight through the man's neck. Then, he jumped to the next guy and put his Claymore straight through the bandit's eye. Instant death.
As he was about to pull his sword back, however, he felt another sword racing for his neck. Eyes widening, he leapt to the side, leaving his Claymore stuck in the man's head.
The sword cleaved straight through where he'd been standing, and then sliced through three more bandits on the way back. Percy's eyes couldn't get a good look at the blade itself, but he was able to track it back to its owner nonetheless, which brought his eyes back to the gang's boss
The man was standing a good ten feet back, lips peeled and a half-angry and half-confused expression on his face, as he stared down at his blade. "Impossible," he muttered, "the Falcon sword never misses its target." Then, he looked back up to Percy and snarled. In that moment, he looked so much like an animal that the comparison was nothing short of stellar.
His sword came crashing forward for Percy's neck again, and this time, Percy got a good, long look at it before he had to dive to the right to avoid the blade. It was weird, the way it moved. It almost looked like it flowed through the air, in a manner not unlike a sword made of water, or any other non-viscous fluid. Any normal person watching the scene would have said that the sword had grown in length to cover the distance, but Percy was no normal person.
Percy was a man with more than a hundred years of experience in fighting, and all that time not spent ageing had only aided him by sharpening his eyes, hardening his heart and honing his senses. He'd been fighting since he was 12 in his first life, and he'd died at eighteen. This time around, he'd been forced to pick up a blade at the age of 6. SIX, that was. Instead of doing kindergarten at the age, he'd been learning to fight and kill bandits. All because his parents had died to fuckers like this one.
Even now, at the age of… how old was he? 106? 108? Somewhere around that mark. Regardless, the point was that even at his age, he was still having to fight bandits. The thought angered him. His parents had been killed by cocky fools like this one, who had no real fighting experience and no real skill. Absolutely worthless assholes who were nothing without their 'special' weapons. Percy was willing to bet that, without his sword – which was probably some family heirloom dating back to a time before Gods and Monsters, this man would die as easily as the rest of his men.
The thoughts fired like bullets through his mind as he watched the segmented sword rip through a bandit's neck and collapse in on itself, segment by segment, until it had retracted to the form of a bland-looking, unassuming steel blade. Percy pulled out his knife, and, holding it in a reverse grip, he stabbed it behind him, without even sparing a glance. It bore its way straight through some foolish bandit's chest, with its prongs poking holes through his heart and his lungs.
He ripped it out with a savage ferocity that showed on his face, before turning around and stabbing another axe-wielder in the face. He pulled it out from the man's skull, and dived to the left as the boss' sword came down where he'd been standing less than a minute ago.
Leaping from left to right, Percy used the third prong of his tripod-like knife to slice the throats of three bandits who were standing close to him. Looking around, he realized that there were only two bandits left, one of which was the boss.
The man to his far right died quickly enough when Percy covered the distance in a leap to avoid the other bandit's blade, while holding his blade out at neck-height. The shaking and whimpering bandit fell down dead, as blood leaked out of his throat.
"Down to one." Percy said, looking the other man straight in the eye. He hadn't moved an inch from where he'd been standing at the start of their debacle, and instead, he'd stood right there and attempted to use his sword to cover the distance. It was clear proof that the man was horrible at close combat. Even he knew it, and thus, he'd stood far away.
The sword rushed in once again, aiming for his heart this time, and Percy casually knocked it away with his knife, walking towards his sword as if he had all the time in the world. Every time the blade came near, it either missed Percy entirely, or hit his knife and got deflected.
And yet, they kept coming. It was necessary to give credit where it was due, and Percy had to give the guy a little credit for not giving up. At the very least, the guy's attacks kept on coming until they were stopped with a shocked cry of pain as Percy's Claymore slammed into the bandit's stomach.
And then, a crazy, wide smile lit up Percy's face as he leapt to the nearest body and started ripping it to shreds.
-Line break-
Teresa raised her Claymore, prepared to swing it down. This girl had been following her for a whole day now, and honestly, it was getting quite tiring.
She was pulled from her thoughts as she heard a noise coming from the forest. In an instant, she had her Claymore out, and was standing to face the source of the noise in a defensive manner.
Under her breath, she whispered out to the girl behind her, "Did you hear that?" The girl shook her head sideways, indicating that she hadn't. Then again, she was a human child; she didn't have the kind of sensory perception that Teresa did.
Her Claymore raised to allow her to defend herself from any potential threats, and eyes locked on to the area where the noise came from, Teresa ordered the girl to stay before she walked straight into the trees.
'This is weird,' she thought, 'I didn't feel any Yoki coming from anywhere here… but there was definitely a noise that came from here.'
Anticipating the worst, she continued walking forwards, through the jungle, towards where she thought she had heard the noise come from.
It was completely silent now. There was no sound at all coming from anywhere. No birds, no crickets, no owls. The entire forest was eerily still, for some reason. A minute and a half on her way in, she started to doubt herself. There was no noise, and the silence implied that nothing lay ahea-
"Glug."
The noise had come from up ahead… in the exact same direction as the first one.
-Line break-
Percy was feeling satisfied. Not full, no…. he hadn't eaten enough to be full, but he was feeling satisfied. There was just some charm that nothing, short of a good, tasty meal could bring to a man, and as Percy gulped down the last of this bandit's guts, he couldn't help but feel all calm and relaxed.
That is, until a pulse of Yoki no more than 20 feet behind him woke him out of his stupor. "Oh fuck…"
As he whispered out curses to the wind, his eyes scanned the tree-line ahead, and he shot off as silently as he could towards the nearest part of the jungle.
His only warning was a massive burst of Yoki behind him, and then, he was forced to break his run and roll to the side as a Claymore cleaved through where he'd been standing.
He rolled to a stop and looked up at the girl who'd tried to kill him. She had long, wavy, blonde hair, and a pair of piercing silver eyes on a doll-like face. With a high forehead, prominent double-lidded eyes, and a figure like that, any innocent bystander would have called the girl beautiful in a frail way. Percy, however, knew better. This was a Claymore. As vicious as a Yoma, and as determined as a human, their kind – or rather, his kind – was the amalgamation of the best qualities of both factions. It made them ridiculously strong warriors.
Percy dived to the left again, finding cover in the trees as the Claymore clanged down on the rock he'd been standing on. With all hope for a silent escape gone, Percy drew his Claymore out of the sheath once more, causing a loud rasp of steel to sound throughout the mostly silent forest.
He flicked his blade back, stopping the girl's sword before it could claim his neck, and then shifted his foot back to save it from being severed from his body. The girl hopped back and came at him again, her sword held out to spear him through the head, and Percy knocked the attack aside with his own Claymore. The girl used the sideways momentum from his deflection to spin on her foot and slam the blade into his neck, but Percy was already gone from the spot.
Having lost her balance when her spin wasn't stopped by a blade, the girl slammed into a tree ahead of her. Capitalizing on the chance provided, Percy slashed down at the girl's neck, but she used her Yoma energy to dash away in the only direction she could. Unfortunately, that path led her straight through Percy, and he went flying back, having been caught off guard by the sudden move.
He found his footing soon enough, and looked around, only to find himself back at the clearing where he'd killed all the bandits. He sneered down at the leader of the bandits, realizing, in a sudden moment of clarity, that it was the man's dying scream that alerted the Claymore. 'If only I'd killed him like all the others,' Percy thought angrily… Hindsight truly was a perfect 20-20. However, as his gaze fell over the man, his eyes flicked past the blood-covered blade lying next to him.
With a cruel smirk set on his face, Percy bent down and picked up the blade. "Well, bandit… looks like you were good for something, after all…"
Sensing the next attack coming from behind, he spun the blade around in a circle, replicating the actions of the bandit. The sword clanged into the Claymore's claymore from below, looking for all purposes like a proper block of metal, and then, with the momentum gained from the spin and the clash, it stretched to extend beyond that, sailing upwards in a curve towards the girl's face. He heard a cry of shock and turned around to see that he'd scored a cut on the girl's left cheek.
Percy turned and whirled the sword back, aiming to hit her neck from the right side as the sword's segments started to collapse into the sword, and as soon as she went to block with her Claymore, Percy burst forward using his Yoma energy, holding his own Claymore out in his left hand, aimed straight for her neck.
Teresa's eyes widened as she saw his approach, and she dived to the left to avoid, pulling her sword along with her. Bad choice. The 'Falcon sword' continued on its path, reforming as a full steel blade and slamming into the girl's shin as she moved out of the way of the Claymore, shredding through her metallic boots.
Percy chuckled calmly as he watched his downed opponent go flying into a tree. A part of him was telling him to go in for the kill right now. He had two swords and a full 100 percent of his Yoki, and she was struggling to get up because of the way her boot had been shredded and twisted upon colliding with the bandit sword. But he didn't.
For some, strange reason, he didn't. There was another part of him – a greater part, perhaps, that was telling him not to kill her, and try as he might, he couldn't figure out why. Maybe it was pity. Maybe it was because when he looked at that girl, Teresa…. He saw a certain something that resembled his own fate.
Her parents were dead – killed by a foe she had been too weak to fight off. That story was quite familiar to him – it resembled, in a rather clear fashion, the start of his own. His loved ones, too, had been killed by Chaos – a monster that NO ONE could hope to beat. The people she'd relied upon and trusted – they'd sent her away; far away to a place where she could do naught but suffer. Like what the Fates had done to him. No questions asked, no choice given, and Percy had been ripped away from the clutches of death – away from any hope of seeing Annabeth again – and then, he'd been sent off to another world. A crueler world. He'd then lost his parents to bandits at the meagre age of four, and every day since, he'd had to suffer. Both mentally and physically.
And then, if that wasn't enough, he'd been tortured with the memories of his old life the day he turned eighteen, and then manipulated further by the Fates to go and find more power. And then, when he'd been given that power? Well, then what! Then, he, just like this girl, had been ridiculed and called a monster for having that power.
Maybe it was that. The similarities. It had to be that, because for the life of him, Percy couldn't find any other reason to spare her life. He thought on it, long and hard, fighting off the girl through the power of honed instinct and reflexes, and yet, he couldn't come up with anything else.
A fool would have suggested something asinine, like love, but Percy knew himself better than to suggest that. Love was an emotion born out of care, and if Percy was sure of any one thing, it was that Percy didn't care about anything or anyone. Every time he'd brought himself to do so; it had ended with disaster. Each and every. Single. Time. Annabeth Chase? DEAD. Jason Grace? DEAD. Nico Di Angelo? DEAD. Thalia? DEAD. Piper, Leo, Frank, Hazel, Dakota, Chiron, Mrs. O'Leary, Will, Zoe, Luke, Bianca, Ethan, Charlie, Silena, Damasen, Iapet- no, it was Bob…. ALL of them were DEAD. Even his mother – Sally Jackson, would be dead by now. It had been well over a hundred years since he'd last met her. No mere mortal could live that long.
There was no way he was bringing himself to care again. That would have been utter stupidity. Pity or no pity, he was going to kill this girl. That was a sure fact.
The rage he was feeling in his mind must have shown through his actions, because the clang of metal against metal had started to grow louder. His attention returned to the ongoing fight, just in time to see the Claymore's blade catch on the wire connecting the segments of the Falcon sword.
Eyes widening, Percy threw his other hand in the way, violently pulling his Claymore between his body and the sword in his right hand, as his opponent's Claymore went straight through the thin, metallic wire between the handle and the first segment, shearing it almost instantly.
Meanwhile, Teresa was having a very bad day. She'd not got an ounce of money because there hadn't been any Yoma at Teo. Then, she hadn't got a shred of sleep at the local inn either, because the bed brought back too many memories. Then, a stupid, idealistic girl had gotten stuck to her, and she'd been followed through the wilderness for HOURS on end. And then, just when she was about to cut her losses and kill the damn child, this got in her way.
This thing. It was clearly a Yoma, from the fact that she could sense its Yoki, but it fought with a Claymore. Well, a Claymore and some sort of fanciful flying sword contraption. So, she'd assumed it was a regular Awakened Being, and set off to kill it. Then, the thing had pulled out that annoyance of a sword that kept growing and shrinking like a spring on steroids. And so, she'd pushed her Yoki. 10 percent. Then 20. Then 40.
She was using SIXTY percent of her Yoki now, and with no result. The swordplay had gotten faster, sure, but she still hadn't got a single nick on the Yoma. And of course, that wasn't the worst of it. The worst part was the casual expression he'd been wearing on his face that said he wasn't even paying attention to her or the fight. He wasn't attacking her at all – as she soon found out by tracing his Yoki, and rather, he was just deflecting all her attacks and his sword was cutting up her body in the process. Every time he would knock her sword aside, she had to jump back to avoid the blade as it extended in her direction, and then, she'd be losing ground even though the Yoma wasn't attacking. The saddest part about it all was that he didn't particularly seem to care about angling the sword's movement in her direction, which meant that she was getting hit by accident, and she couldn't even track it by using her Yoki sensing, because the sword had no Yoki in it. *
It infuriated her. It had absolutely infuriated her. So much so that she missed the slightly confused expression on his face entirely, and instead, focused her hardest on wrenching the swords out of his grasp. Any sword would do. His advantage was only in the fact that he could dual-wield his weapons. The moment the Claymore was gone, she would be able to get around the much thinner segment-sword with ease, and if, instead of the Claymore, she managed to wrench the thinner blade out of his grasp, then it would be regular one-on-one combat with their Claymores, and that would be so much easier, if only because she would be able to trace where the next attack came from. Right now, she was being overwhelmed by a blade that, from her perspective, was flying in every direction possible.
And so, when the opportunity came, she grasped it with both hands… and a massive broadsword. The metallic wire connecting the segments of the sword together made a satisfying ripping sound as Teresa's Claymore cleaved its way through the black thing. The sound brought a smug expression to her face, and as she looked back up to her opponent to check for his other blade, she managed to catch her opponent's fearful expression.
Now, Teresa was a woman who had lost her sense of naïveté a long time ago. Specifically, around the time her parents had died, and she'd been sold off like a bag of goods. As such, she wasn't very prone to naïve thoughts, and in any normal situation, she would not have misunderstood the reason behind her opponent's fear. This, however, was not a normal situation. In the heat of battle, Teresa had let her emotions grasp the reins. Her anger, at the sad situation she called a life, had clogged out everything else.
For a moment there, the world had been nothing but her and the Yoma, locked in an endless struggle for survival. In that moment, that Yoma had become the face of all her enemies. For that second, he was the reason behind all her anger… for that second, his face represented everything she had come to hate – the Organization, the people who had sold her to them, the Yoma, even that small, little girl who had nothing better to do than follow her through wildlands for hours. For a glorious moment there, her entire life had been nothing but a struggle to gain a victory against one opponent – an amalgamation of all the problems in her life, and if she had won that fight, then, in her mind, she would have been free from the life of pain she had lived until now. So, when the chance to gain even a small, momentary victory had been given to her, she had been more than ready to leap at the sun to take it.
For those few moments, she lost herself to her new naïve creation of a world; a world where nothing mattered more than killing what was in front of her; a world where she had nothing to lose and everything to gain – a world where all her pain and suffering would come to an end on the occasion of this man's death.
And in such a world, a sign of fear from her opponent meant little more than a sign of another victory on her part.
But at the end of the day, the real world was different than the pitiful creation of Teresa's anger-fueled mind, and she was painfully reminded of that as a heavy chunk of pointed metal impacted her stomach, punching straight through the right side of her abdomen. Another piece of metal went flying upward, making a shallow cut on her left cheek. A third went downwards and made a cut just above her right heel.
As the segments of the blade went flying due to torque, Teresa's back hit a tree that was behind her, and she slumped down it, unable to move further from shock and pain.
-Line break-
Percy grunted silently as he stood up from where he'd fallen. The back of his head had hit a rock after he'd tripped and lost his balance, and now, he felt the pain coming on. A burst of Yoki to heal the area soothed that quickly enough, and as Percy rubbed his head, he looked around to survey the damage.
When Teresa's claymore had come in contact with the Falcon sword, Percy had been mid-twirl, with the blade swinging upwards in an arc that would have sliced a path through the girl's body starting at her right foot, moving through her abdomen and then slicing out of her left shoulder. And true to physics, the damage had been done in that exact arc.
When the wire had been cut, each individual piece had been let free, allowed to move in whichever direction they wished to, and then, with no external force acting on them, they had all moved in the directions they'd already been moving in.
Two of the segments were impaled in the grass, three had gone in Teresa's direction, one had gone straight up, and the other four had seemingly moved in random directions. Percy could see one segment lodged in a tree off to his far right, and another lodged in a tree that was behind him. From the dried blood visible on his lower leg, he knew that one of the segments would have torn through his skin and muscle at that point. The last segment was nowhere to be seen.
Idly, Percy wondered whether it would be worth the effort to gather all the pieces back together and try to fix the broken sword. One part of him reckoned that he could, and probably even should, since the weapon had been so useful, but another, more realistic part told him that if it had broken once, it was prone to breaking again. And the potential for collateral damage that this weapon had was SCARY. 'Maybe its best to leave the thing be.' Percy thought, dropping the now-useless handle.
Sighing, he turned to his downed opponent and took in her state. She was bleeding out slowly, but there was no fatal damage done. All she would have to do was concentrate her Yoki there for some time, pushing it up to the top, and the hole in her liver would be fixed. Besides, Claymores didn't need a liver anyway, because the Yoki they had in their blood would actively destroy and detoxify anything that went into their bodies. That was the reason why Percy hadn't died to infection or disease yet, even though his main diet only included alcohol and blood.
So, the girl would be fine, if given the time. But the question was, why did Percy want to? Up until now, he'd been resolving himself to hold off on their fight until a time where she would be at her weakest…
And now? Now, when the girl was at her weakest – So weak that Percy was a hundred percent sure that he would never get a better opportunity to kill her – Now, Percy didn't want to kill her.
No, that was an incorrect way of expressing what he felt. All he WANTED to do was kill her. The girl was immensely strong. And he meant it. She would no doubt be a threat if she had any form of back-up. In fact, the only real reason she'd lost to him was because she'd gotten pissed at him. Percy knew that. He wasn't egoistical enough to brush off his victory as a sign of her inferiority. No, he realized just how dangerous she was.
They'd only fought for a minute in their mini one-versus-one, and he had felt the power of her strikes. Had he only had a Claymore for the fight, Percy was unsure as to who would win. Within the first fifteen seconds of their fight, she'd managed to knock him over like a bowling pin, and it was only the surrounding forestry that had saved him by stopping her from capitalizing on her advantage. After that, it had been the effect of Percy's swordsmanship skill combined with the frankly bullshit weapon that was the Falcon sword that had beat her back.
He knew that. And yet, he couldn't bring himself to bring the claymore down on her neck, for some inexplicable reason. He knew what kind of threat she posed, what foolishness it would be to leave her alive and how much stronger he would be if he consumed her Yoki, but even though he knew, his hands stilled a few inches above her head each time.
He would swing down, making up the thought to kill her, and then, something would stop him. Every time the blade came down, his heart felt COLD, and then his hands would freeze. It was probably pity. It couldn't be anything else.
A low groan brought him back to reality. Teresa – the Claymore – had woken up, and was staring at him in confusion. A second later, however, something seemed to click in her mind, and her eyes sharpened as she looked up at him. They turned to see the sword looming less than a foot over her head, and then her head fell down.
"Do it."
The sound came out as a whisper from her lips, silent and choked, showing that she'd already accepted her death.
Even she'd accepted it… It shouldn't even have been a decision to make. And yet, Percy just stood there. He wanted to, but he couldn't.
The stillness of their environment was broken as a young girl – a small brunette, no more than eight, maybe nine years of age – rushed at him, waving a stick, crunching leaves on her way.
The Claymore lying on the ground choked out a response to the girl, "N-no, y-you stupid child. G-get away. Run. I'm not your savior."
The girl didn't listen. She kept running. She was clearly unused to the action, though, as Percy realized while watching her feet. The way they dragged over the floor showed signs of tiredness, as one would have expected of a child who had just walked twenty miles. Her legs caught on a branch lying on the ground, and she tripped over it and crashed face-first into the mud. She shuddered once, and then pushed herself up again, rising to her feet more through the power of sheer determination, rather than any form of muscular strength. Face covered in mud, legs covered in bruises from falling repeatedly, and her clothes in tatters from all the struggle she had endured, the child rushed at him again, a tiny wooden stick raised in hand.
In terms of speed, she wasn't fast. At all. If Percy wanted to, he could have beheaded them both and disappeared from the scene before the girl could have blinked an eye. And yet, he didn't. He just stood there in silence, no movement visible on his form as the young girl crashed into his legs, whacking him with a small wooden stick, over and over again, hoping it would achieve something.
He knew he could have killed them. Maybe he should have. But he didn't. He took in a deep breath and exhaled slowly, pushing his Yoki back into his body. The melanin showed through his skin again, darkening his features and coloring his hair the shade of jet. He looked up at Teresa once more, staring at her with those piercing sea green eyes, searching for something in her face that would tell him why he was about to do what he was about to do, but upon not finding an answer, he just turned around and walked away with a small sigh escaping his lips.
It was only after he'd escaped earshot of the two girls that his posture slumped. A sigh escaping his lips, he collapsed against a tree and slid down until he was sitting on the forest floor, with his back pressed against the trunk. It would probably have been wiser to leave the vicinity entirely, but today had been quite the weird day, and honestly, he needed the rest.
For the first time in generations… for what felt like the first time in FOREVER, the angel of death had left survivors. For the first time in more than a hundred years, Perseus 'Nex' had willingly spared people's lives. He had left two people alive just for the sake of it. Not because of any personal vendetta; Not because he couldn't; Not because of the consequences that would befall him if he did… He'd done it just because he could.
And while he'd already sworn to never do anything like it again, maybe… just maybe… he could admit to having felt good about it.
-Line break-
(Somewhere far, far above Lautrec)
"See, it's working!"
"It's not;" came the response, "You know it's not."
"They didn't kill each other… that's a good thing, Clare! It means my plan is working!"
Clare sighed and looked away from the sight below her, moving her eyes to focus on her sister. "Since when did not killing a person mean love, Teresa? If anything, this was proof that your plan was horrible."
"It's NOT horrible! What do you even want me to do, Clare!?"
"Nothing, Teresa. I've already told you this. If I were in your place, I would do nothing. I still stand by my words. Leave this be, Teresa. Let it go. Don't enforce this stupidity. The next time they meet, let the deathmatch ensue. Your namesake will die, that is a surety; but at least, he won't be able to hold us accountable for this madness."
"Is that why you hate this plan so much, Clare? Are you scared of what a meagre BOY can do?"
"He's defeated greater people than us in the past, Teresa. A titan of time and a primordial of the earth lay among his body count."
"That is different, Clare. Those were mere gods. We are CREATORS. Besides, the Earth goddess is still alive."
"Don't be mistaken, sister. We are twin goddesses of love. Fighting has never been – and will never be – our strongest suit. And even then, we are NOT creators. Nobody knows how this universe came into existence, and it is not wise of you to claim that you have the powers of creation."
"Does that really matter so much to you, Clare? This is what you're worried about? Your objection to my plan is not that it sounds insane, or that the chances of it working are slim! NO, That's not even it! You're only against my plan because you're afraid of the threat one chil-"
"YES, TERESA! I'm scared as hell of what he will do to this planet – this entire universe if he gets angry, Teresa! That THING that you keep calling a CHILD is quite literally the strongest thing IN THE UNIVERSE, TERESA! THAT-" Clare screamed, throwing a hand out in the demigod's direction, "IS the REINCARNATION OF FATE ITSELF, TERESA! THAT BOY holds power GREATER than that of a PRIMORDIAL GOD, Teresa! THIS PLANET is lucky that he doesn't seem to have realized the true extent of his power yet! If he figures out that he can snap his fingers and alter the fabric of our reality, Teresa, and you continue with this insane plan of yours, then you can mark my words when I say that 'WE. ARE. DOOMED.'"
There was a minute of silence in the hall as the two bickering sisters stood, glaring at each other. It was then broken as Teresa broke eye contact and turned away.
"The plan will work. It will have to, because we have no other options." With her two lines said, Teresa marched right back into their palace.
Clare was still recovering from her outburst, and didn't get the opportunity to remind her sister that they did, in fact, have an alternative, before she'd already walked away.
She turned around to look away from her sister's retreating back, and found a certain purple god staring back at her from his position near the balcony's corner. Face red from anger at her sister's frankly idiotic behavior, she shouted at that man too, "And what are YOU looking at!?"
The god just chuckled, and turned his attention to the beautiful scenery of Lautrec below them, focusing his eyes on the little spot of jungle where a battle had just occurred. "Oh, Clare, it's nothing… I just realized how powerful a piece this young man could be on my board."
Her anger gave way to confusion and surprise as she looked at the God of Darkness leaning on her balcony's railing. "Even after hearing all that, you still want to implement your plan? He's DANGEROUS, you understand that, at least, right? Don't tell me you're going to start behaving like Teresa now… I can't handle two of her – hell, I can't even handle ONE of her when she's like this…"
"I do realize that, Clare. It's why I want him on Remnant. He's probably the only individual who can kill an immortal."
"This is about that girl you told me about, isn't it? You do realize that you can always reverse the curse you put on her, right? Your problem would be solved instantly."
"Ah, I wish we could. But if it were THAT easy, then I wouldn't be going so far out of my way to try and solve it, now would I?" Upon seeing Clare shake her head, he continued, "When we left Remnant, we severed our ties to the planet entirely. That planet is lost to us, and the only way we would ever be able to find it again would be if humanity brought the four Relics together."
He chuckled a little, before adding on, "But of course, as the years have passed, my brother and I have gotten a little…. Bored. We created new planets, and made new forms of life, but nothing was as interesting as the original. Besides, we haven't heard a bit of news from the place in well over two thousand years! Clearly, the 'hero' that my brother left on the planet was incompetent. Now imagine how glorious it would feel if a hero of my own choosing did the job in the old one's place, even though the older one had 2 millennia of experience over him?"
Clare looked up at the man's ram-horned head and sighed. Under her breath, she muttered out, "Everyone I know is crazy…"
"Besides, I was under the impression that you would rather have this nuisance removed from your planet… why are you so concerned that I plan to take him away, then?"
Clare just shook her head and leaned on the ornate railing of her palace. "I am not concerned with your plans at all, god of Remnant; I am concerned for your life. Crazy as you and your brother might be, you two are still our most sane neighbors. It's a sad thought, really, but understandable, too, when you see that Chaos and the Moirai are our only other neighbors…. And there's also the fact that you know how it feels to have an annoying older sibling."
The God of Darkness just laughed at the simplicity of that answer and turned with a smile to face Clare, "I thought you were twins?"
"She popped into existence some 4 seconds before I did." A nostalgic smile crept up on Clare's face as she continued, "She likes to rub it in my face like all the time…" And the smile died away, "Well, she used to… before this whole fiasco happened."
AN – HA, and the plot thickens-
So, this chapter should give everyone an idea of what is going to happen in the next one (which will probably be the last for the Claymore part of the story…)
The RWBY arc that is going to follow will be a bit confusing at first, because while I've got the main idea down, I don't have all the specifics written in.
The biggest problem I'm having right now is deciding how Percy would fit in the world of Remnant. At first, I had an idea to make him a bandit and part of the Branwen tribe…. But then, I realized that my character's parents were killed by bandits, and he probably hates those guys, so that isn't the best of ideas… Now I'm undecided between teacher at Beacon or student at Beacon academy. If he's a student, then he'll probably replace Jaune on JNPR, because that is a combo that would work quite well, and if he's a teacher, I'm thinking he should either do some advanced course like politics and how it affects huntsmen – considering the bg I've given him in this fic and how he ran a city state for like forty years – or he should be a combat teacher (obvious enough).
The saddest part is that my friends are all anti-anime and they literally refuse to watch it, so I can't even ask them for proper advice :(
Meanwhile, Teresa the Goddess forces open Percy's merciful side, and Clare's fear of how Percy might retaliate is growing. But it's justified, isn't it…. this guy single-handedly caused an evacuation of a few hundred thousand people when he was 15… and that was before he was blessed by a pantheon full of gods and before he even became a Claymore…
*From what I've gathered, Teresa's combat style is heavily dependent on her Yoki sensing. Hence why she even struggles against Priscilla in the first place. When there was too much Yoki for her to trace the flow, she was practically blindsided by Priscilla. Its why she lost her head – she couldn't figure out that Priscilla was about to move in her direction and let her guard down to kill her. If she'd been able to sense that move, she wouldn't have died so easily.
That's not to say she's useless without the Yoki sensing, but she's definitely worse off without it. She didn't know the bandits had surrounded her until they ambushed her because she couldn't sense any Yoki from them; then, she couldn't judge Priscilla's movement properly and got a cut on her forehead… and then, lost her hands and her head in rapid succession after having failed to realize the threat Priscilla still posed, all because her Yoki sensing was rendered ineffective by the size of Priscilla's Yoma aura…
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