A/N: I've seen people throws Cloud Strife back in time and turn him into a WEAPON. But I don't see many people making him more WEAPON than human. This one is a bit of a weird fic, but I was exploring a concept more than anything, so... why not.
I.
He wakes up, blinking, snorting mako from his nose, and tries to remember why he's here. He thinks and thinks hard. It was the planet, he recalls. The planet sent him here.
He tries to remember why. Why he was sent here, and where 'here' is. And why it was him that was sent. But he cannot recall.
He had a name. He cannot quite remember it. Something soft, the first part of his name was. Soft... and then, pained. Something that promised horror, and regrets, and mourning and-!
Strife.
His name, he knows, was Strife.
And that, he thinks as he returns to sleep, is more than enough for him.
II.
Strife has a mission. He is here for a reason.
The reactors.
Sephiroth.
Deepground.
Jenova.
Destroy the reactors. Destroy Sephiroth. Destroy Deepground. Destroy Jenova.
He knows what they are, vaguely. They are things that will harm the planet. And seeing as he lives on the planet, he does not think he likes these things. Strife rustles and snorts, waking himself from the slumber that bore him to this realm and time. This is another thing he remembers. He is not of this time, but he is here to affect it. And he has been given the most timeless body the planet could think of, to accomplish this task set before him.
He slinks out of the mako pool, the sickly green ooze glistening ominously off his armoured hide. He inspects himself, to see what weapons he has to fulfill his mission.
His body is long and sleek, covered in silver-black hide and scales. His back holds thick, twisted, metallic spines the colour of First Tsurugi (a sword?), although they burnish to a pale gold around his head and the tip of his tail. Plates on his belly protect his vulnerable underside. Large black wings with spikes and curled claws. And in the center of his chest, a light blue orb, much like those in the bodies of the WEAPONs, glistens beautifully. The WEAPONs, guardian beasts of the planet... it is fitting he has such a gem for a heart. It glows the colour of the lifestream, green and flickering with lights, and he notices that his eyes match the blue colour and green glow of the rounded crystal. SOLDIER eyes. SOLDIER heart. It seems fitting, almost. SOLDIER. The enhanced humans whose eyes glowed, whose ranks he'd never managed to join properly back in his old life.
He snorts, and uncurls, and realizes that he is perhaps twenty feet long at most. This does not seem adequate. Or perhaps, it is more than enough.
SOLDIER. He has a feeling he will be fighting many of them.
But, not now.
Now, he test his body, practice his new limits. And after he does this, after he learns that his new claws shred through stone like mud, and his tail shatters ice like sugar-glass, and that his wings can carry him aloft in seconds, he tires. He returns to his mako pool, to rest. And to plot.
He plots destruction, hears the whispers of the planet fog his mind with schemes, and it makes him feel eager. A fell pride consumes him, about what he is about to do.
III.
Strife emerges from his pool, and realizes that he's grown, gained strength and size. An epiphany. Contact with mako makes him stronger. Sleeping in its depths increases his abilities. He is now a WEAPON, through and through.
Well. This is good news. This is also bad news. He barely manages to get out of the pool his first time awake. Next time, he has a feeling, he will not fit through at all. He'll need a bigger hole if he wants to slink in and out of Gaia's blood.
Fortunately, he knows exactly how to make such holes.
The Nibel reactor is the first to go. It's the closest to where he emerged, and isn't it fitting that his hometown is still Nibelheim, after all the twists and turns life has thrown at him? He almost feels a little bad for what he's doing here.
Almost.
He smashes his way into it at first. The mutated beings inside it, the makonoids, are torn to pieces by his tail and jaws. The steel stairs and catwalks bend and tear under his feet without him even trying. The door to Jenova's chambers? Laughable. He stares down her effigy, the tank containing her, and feels the rage of both himself and the planet fill his belly with fire.
He begins his attack.
She wakens with a blood curdling scream, but Strife persists. She fights at first, but his armoured hide holds. She tried to escape into the mako below, but he grabs her and wrestles her out of the reactor. She fights once more. A beast cornered.
She is desperate. But he is determined.
There aren't even any bits of her body left to scatter across the mountainside once he's finished. He would have loved to desecrate and defile her wretched body, insulting every last cell of her being by spreading it out for the skies to laugh at and the mold to rot it and the bugs and animals to eat it and shit it out into putrid soil. But this is Jenova. He cannot take the risk that her cells might survive that. Instead, he satisfies himself by burning every last speck of biological matter he can find. There is nothing but ash and dust once his rage has been sated. He burns half the mountainside too, just to be sure.
First, and most pressing order of business done, he turns his reptilian sights on the reactor.
Being a WEPAON has so many perks, Strife grins to himself as he blasts the thing to oblivion with a beam of pure energy. So many perks, and all of them ludicrously fun.
The Reactor explodes, shattering the other half of the mountainside with it. Nibelheim still stands, thanks to its distance, but houses crack and quake all the same. Seeing that the town has survived, and that people are starting to flee their homes to figure out what happened, Strife prides himself on a job well done and drops his wounded body into the new, gigantic hole he's created. Jenova did put up one hell of a fight, after all.
And even as he returns to slumber, as he ponders about who he'll have to kill to ensure that all of Jenova's cells are gone for good. (Hojo, you are so dead, Hojo! But, wait. Who was Hojo?) Anyways. He thinks, with amusement, that he may have just stolen the title of "Calamity from the skies". And then, he rests.
IV.
The next time he wakes and drags himself from his hole, there is snow on the mountain.
He takes stock of his surroundings, and finds himself a bit surprised to note that the small human town (Nibelheim...? was that Nibelheim...?) is dark. No people flit amongst the buildings, some of which have been left to collapse. Thickets and weeds grow rampant, the stone paths cracked with ice and dead plants.
He feels a bit worried for some reason, and so investigates.
As he swoops down the mountainside, he realizes that the town is abandoned. He chuffs, eyes scanning every nook and cranny for a sign of life, finding none. Not even a stray cat. Not one soul. It's eerie... but there's no smell of corpses either. The townsfolk must have fled.
Oh well, he thinks to himself, and turns to stomp up the path. If no one is around, then perhaps he'll torch Shinra manor. Nothing like a cheery bonfire to bring a spring to your step. Besides, destroying every shred of scientific paper and project he can find will be wonderfully therapeutic.
He blasts the upper floors to shreds, delighting in how fast his attacks set the place ablaze. But then he notices the stone foundations and, oh of course, the basement would be well protected against such fires, wouldn't it? Buried deep in stone. A necessary precaution when you planned to let the upper floors rot, he supposed. He starts to dig.
It's halfway through digging and melting everything he can find that he finds the room with the coffins. He feels a little guilty, for some reason, as if he'd forgotten something important and accidentally stumbled across it. He sets the guilt right by grabbing the thing he knows he'd forgotten, a coffin, and tossing it well out of range of his wrath. Big menacing dragon that he is, he still gets an internal giggle over hearing it splinter in the distance. Then a bit of chagrin pokes through. He didn't mean to break that. He looks over to find a body stumbling out of the wreckage of the coffin, looking around with an expression that's more than a little bewildered. There's no doubt, whomever that person was, that they were very confused about what the hell just startled them awake. He thinks this person is important for some reason, but it escapes his mind as to why. His memories have faded? Oh well. They can't have been too important then. He's tempted to keep looking at the small, red clad human, but thinks better of it. It'll be better if he lets the person think they've been overlooked. He is a big, scary dragon after all. It's also better to keep going with his destruction, too. More beams, more melting the stone to slag. There's nothing left of Shinra manor by this point, or the laboratories underneath it, but he's all too happy to be doing a little overkill.
And then, a voice.
"Monster! It's your fault!" He tries to ignore the voice for now, but he's got a sinking feeling in his chest. It only gets worse when he feels a weak metal blade shatter on his tail. He turns to look at the flaxen haired youth who has tears of anger and shame in his bright blue eyes. Raw fury. "It's you! You're the monster that destroyed the reactor! That destroyed my home!"
This person. This person is familiar, and he can't tell why. He turns to investigate more thoroughly. He wonders, briefly, how he's been recognized as the culprit who wrecked the reactor. But then again, maybe it is no big wonder after all. Not many dragons went around blasting things with WEAPON beams after all. The youth, perhaps twelve in age, with wild hair, goes very pale and stumbles backwards as Strife fearlessly approaches, long neck reaching out and lips curling back a little as he gets his nose working. He's almost close enough to grab the kid with his mouth. Who is he? Who is this hauntingly familiar child?
The retort of a gun cracks through the air.
Strife rears back, startled and in pain. Blood streaks from where a bullet has lodged in his nostril.
The man from the coffin is yelling, the boy in front of him retreating rapidly. Strife tries to figure where the gun is, and is rewarded with pain as the weapon sounds again. A bullet smashes into his eye and he roars in agony.
It's the man from the coffin.
No wonder he was important, Strife thinks. Enemies are always important.
He shrieks, focusing his remaining eye on the man and his ragged black hair. He's rewarded by another shot, another literal bullseye, even as he watches the man place himself in front of the younger blonde. He jerks his head out of range, but it's already too late. He's been temporarily blinded. He blinks as blood streams from his eyes, screeching in pain.
His eyes will recover, if he gives them time. But with his enemy shooting at him with far too much accuracy to be comfortable, he's not going to get much in the way of time. As much as Strife loathes to admit it, he'd severely underestimated his opponent. Retreat is in order. He cracks his wings open, shooting off into the sky even as he feels the broken handle of a sword bounce off his stomach with a metallic clang. He flies high, and shakes his head, and cracks his wounded eyes open as much as he can until he finds the hole where the reactor used to be.
"I'll kill you! I promise! I'll kill you!" screams the blonde.
If mako made him stronger, it would likely also heal him. Strife dives towards it, towards the broken reactor hole at the peak of the mountain, hearing the shouts from the blonde boy even from this distance. But that's beyond his concern now. He slithers into the mako, and waits to see if things are safe. Nothing follows him.
Perhaps he should have killed the blonde. Killed the coffin man, too, to destroy any witnesses. But in the end, one life probably didn't mean much in the grand scheme of things. And so, he rests.
V.
There's no ambush when he resurfaces again, some time later. No coffin men with bullets, no boys with swords. Strife knows he dozed off, he just doesn't know for how long. Either way, it doesn't matter.
He claws his way out of the ground, larger again. Tip to tail, he thinks he'd be almost as tall as a reactor now. And that, he thinks, is as good as an excuse as any for him to start blasting the rest of them to bits.
First, goes Modeoheim. It's a long trip, but he thinks it'll be easiest for him if he takes out the lesser known ones first. The longer he can slip the notice of Shinra, the better. The mess of metal and stone and ice falls easily to his might.
Next, comes Gongaga. He knows this one will blow up anyways in the future, so it might as well be dealt with now. It's night when he arrives.
He thinks long and hard about what he's about to do. This reactor must go. But this reactor is close to a town, and he knows that when it goes, it will take many of them with it. He thinks of warning them, but... he needs every single advantage he has against Shinra. The element of surprise, most of all. If he warns the villagers, they'll warn Shinra.
A hard decision is made.
For the planet, he thinks. A few lives are nothing for the sake of the planet. Something in him screams in pain, shrivels, dies. For the planet. That's what he tells himself. They're just a few humans. This is for the best.
This is for the planet.
The only warning the villagers get is a beam of light. A massive explosion. The reactor is gone. Strife is tired at this point from flying, so he slips into the crater he's left behind, writhing past the molten metal and shattered earth until he's slipped back into the channels of the lifestream that weave their way across the world. He thinks about where to go next, and tries not to think of the probability of a ruined town. Slowly, his eyes start to droop. Where to next. Where to...
He tries to not think anything about the villagers, their town ruined by the reactor's explosion. Forces himself to not worry that he's turned their lives upside down, or accidentally ended some of them altogether in his planet-given quest. And in his guilt, forces himself to try and not think of someone he swore to never forget. A human that once was born in Gongaga. Has this one escaped death at his claws? Strife tries,l and succeeds, to not to think of people that were his friends in one life, and which could be becoming his victims in the next.
He holds, in the back of his mind, a little dread for the monster he is becoming. Strife hopes that he doesn't have to kill any of his old friends. Friends he no longer remembers.
VI.
Strife is awoken by drilling. The clank clank clank of machines, the crumbling of stone, sharp explosions. Something scrape along his scales, making him grow irritated. He dives deeper into the mako to escape whatever was trying to reach him, and keeps going. The scientists and surveyors above see no more than a slip of black, mako sheen scales before he leaves them behind, clueless as to what they've barely missed. The lifestream swirls around him.
Junon.
Junon is next, and it's not going to be an easy target. He sluggishly coils and slinks through the Lifestream, listening to the planet, listening to where she bleeds. Midgar is loudest, a scream. But it's soon, too soon, to take on such a large target. The others all wail at about the same volume, but one seems a bit closer. A little deeper. Underwater. And so Strife tries something different from last time. Instead of spitting death from above, he brings it up from below.
There's fire, and screams, and then salty, dark water. He grabs cables, cables that are twice as thick as his body once was. Now, they fit snugly in his claws. He pulls them out. Blasts them. Finds generators and pumps, and melts the reactor from the inside out.
Maybe there are hospitals somewhere relying on the energy from the reactor. Maybe. Not that it matters. What's a few deaths of a few meaningless people? What are they, compared to the planet itself? The planet is his home, his territory, and he won't abide anyone encroaching it. And they're just a few humans. He's sacrificed humans before, and he'll do so again. For the planet. He's starting to forget why humans are so important anyways. Wretched things, draining the life from the earth they live on.
After the destruction, he finds himself smothered, rather quickly, under the ocean. His wings do him little good here. He retreats back into the mako, and back to sleep, job complete.
VII.
When he awakes, an unknown time later, he can feel them trying to dig down to him again.
Foolish.
It's clear that they're trying to find out what he is. To excavate him, find out who is destroying their property. Perhaps even dig him out and use him like they used Jenova, may she rest in pieces. The humans like doing that. Shin... Shin... oh, whoever they were, the humans that ruled the world with an iron fist and callous heart. Those humans would no doubt love a piece of him. It would be rude not to oblige!
He leaves them behind, mako surging in his wake, and listens for the other reactors he knows should be there. Corel, and Fort Condor. But... he cannot hear them. He listens more, and looks more. But there's nothing there.
Maybe they were smart enough to shut them off, Strife thinks at first. But then he thinks better of it. Humans, smart? Pah! They were stupid! Weak! And quite a few of them needed striking down.
He had three objectives left. He tries to remember what they are. One was... a man with silver hair, he knows. A spawn of Jenova. Another objective was... humans. Humans, underground. And then, of course, the rest of the reactors. He can't remember any names. And why should he? What threat are any of them, really? They're just little humans! And he, a WEAPON! STRIFE snorts, and slithers, and he's underneath Midgar with a short flick of his tail and a swift swim through mako. He put this off for some reason, before. A reason he can't remember. But it matters not. He'll bring the city to ruin now, instead!
He goes for the closest reactor first. The deepest reactor under Midgar. The nearest monolith of metal and mockery, daring to take the mako from the planet. The mako that made him stronger, healed him. His home's mako, the blood of the planet! The planet's mako. His mako! STRIFE rears, and surges, and his gargantuan neck is suddenly bursting from the earth, barely fitting through the hole the humans drilled into the ground to access the glowing green resource. The lights in the caverns go out almost immediately. His form is obscured in the blackness of the cavern, only his eyes giving him away. He can see perfectly in the dark. They can't. In the dark, STRIFE brings them death and destruction
He is unprepared for the war they give him right back.
There are little humans running around, most of them in grey clothes with glowing blue lines, but some are a bit more colourful, and it's those ones that hurt the most. They dodge his claws, and swing around his beams, and barely survive as he lays waste to the rest of their troops. A big blue one is finally crushed under his claws. But when he snaps the red one into two pieces in his jaws, she takes out an eye, and the crimson of her blood mixes with the bright green of his. He spots some humans, wearing all black armour, and a long-faded memory tells him that these ones control the others. These ones MUST go down.
And so they do.
But even when those ones are dead, there are others fighting, and they sting him, and they burn him, and there's shadows that try and tear him apart. He begins to fire his beams blindly. Whether or not he hits the ones tearing into him, he doesn't know. There's the shriek of metal though. The loud thud of things falling down. Carnage.
STRIFE remembers why he didn't go after Midgar right away. Midgar is defended, and defended well. He admonishes himself for getting cocky. For leaving the safety of mako to fight, rather than just blasting the structure to bits and retreating. He turns his back on the humans and flees, but not before they wreak unholy vengeance where they can. He's lost a chunk of his tail, and gained a new souvenir in the form of a gunblade lodged in his neck, before he makes it back to the hole whence he came. As he sloshes back into the lifestream below, as he settles back under the earth to sleep, he thinks he hears them curse him. They damn his scaly hide to rot, and his wings to break, and his blood to boil in his still living veins! Deepground was always pleasant like that, if he recalls. Ah yes. Deepground! He remembered! Good! That was one more target down!
Ironic that he remembered the name of it only after he'd finished destroying it.
VIII.
He wakes up after a long time. It feels like a long time. A good nap, he thinks. Now for the other reactors. There's eight more open above his head. Easy targets, perhaps. He coils his body and prepares to surge to the surface. He finds a hole where the mako reactor is, and leaps through.
And only then does he realize. They've formed a counterattack.
Spikes dig into him, deep and deadly, before he's even breached the surface. A thick grate is in place to stop him. It's not thick enough. It doesn't stop him. But the javelins of steel attached to it sink through his hide. The eye he only just healed gets destroyed again.
Ouch. Bad idea. OUCH.
He's frustrated, and fires a beam into the areas he knows will blow up ever-so-nicely when he hits them with enough energy. And they do blow. It's glorious. It's just not nearly as glorious as it used to be. STRIFE realizes that part of their counterattack was, obviously, to make the things less dangerous. To make his job of destroying them a lot less easy. No more "shoot it and it pops". Not at all.
Before the cameras can catch him, before the humans can fight back, he sinks back into the mako, and swims far away to sleep. He'll have to change his strategy again the next time he awakes.
IX.
When next his consciousness stirs from slumber, he moves to Fort Condor. The reactor is still off, he notes with pleasure. Still. A reactor is a reactor. It's gotta go. He makes ready to surge up from the depths below, and... gets stuck. His head butts into the edges of the small hole.
Wait. This isn't right.
He tries again. The earth shakes, and rumbles, and starts to give. Strife brings his claws to bear, the ground gives way, and the next thing he knows the reactor is collapsing in on itself, on him. Oops. He struggles to throw it off, falling back into the mako. The hole above him is plugged by the building's wreckage.
Mako had made him grow, again. And now he was too big to get up through the normal holes bored into the ground, the ones reactors used to pump mako. Drat it all! He slinks back under, into the lifestream, and swims to Nibelheim. It's the only hole he knows left that's big enough, minus the northern crater itself. And even he isn't keen on seeing if he'd wake up the other WEAPONs by trying to sneak past them. If his kin aren't awake by now, then the planet must be saving them for a later emergency. No need to start things off too early.
He stops by Corel on the way. Shatters what he can of the Corel reactor on his way there, and long ago he might have prayed that a man named Barret would not be caught in the collapse. Prayed that his friend would be alright. But now, STRIFE no longer remembers that he'd ever had humans as friends. Forgets that he'd ever been one, himself. Too long in the lifestream, too long letting his mind slip under the spell. There was nothing left but STRIFE. Nothing left but a WEAPON.
Eventually he surfaces from the lifestream, snow once again on Mount Nibel. His coils drip with mako as he winds his sinuous body up the jagged spires of the range's peak. It's truly an intimidating place, he thinks. Maybe he'll make it his home once more. But first... first, he has a job to finish.
He looks to the horizon and spreads his wings.
X.
STRIFE flies. He flies long, and high, so high he would be no more than a speck to the casual observer. He needs this height. The element of surprise. Midgar is expecting him now, and he needs to blast away as much of it and its reactors as he can before they can counter. And he does need all of Midgar to go down, of that he has no doubt. Memory niggles him, the barest remaining fragments. Humans in Midgar made the reactors. The reactors had to go. So Midgar, obviously, had to go too. He thought only a moment of the humans that live there, but then snorts these thoughts away. He thinks (remembers?) of a world where Midgar is already gone. Already in ruins. So, clearly, it was something that must be.
The city is in his sights all too soon. The reactors. His targets. All lined up in a pretty row, ready to get blown to bits. He notices that the city seems to have already taken a lot of damage, a whole section of it has fallen in on itself. STRIFE wonders if that was from his fight with Deepground.
Oh well. There will be more carnage where that came from.
When he's good and ready, he drops from the sky. He emerges from the clouds, no longer hides in the smog, and blasts a beam from above into one of the reactors. It blows. He flys over, aims at another. It's gone too, within an instant. Before he can get at the third, a bunch of strange, metal things come flying at him. Helicopters? He thinks Deepground had those, too. He doesn't like them much. They chase him around the city as he blows reactor after reactor. They blow holes in the edges of his wings, shatter his scales, and even though he tries very hard to focus on his task, they dog him every stop.
He takes a moment to halt, aim at the very last reactor. He fires. And so does a helicopter. The last reactor goes down in a blaze right as a missile hits the delicate joint, the shoulder of his wing, and he shrieks in pain. STRIFE starts losing air, and it's all he can do to angle himself down and crash into the large tower in the center of the city. He takes several of the top floors with him, glass and metal and drywall shattering under his weight. More helicopters raise into the sky, and STRIFE is beginning to get rather mad.
A pudgy blonde man, wearing a red suit, is screaming as he leans out of the side of one of these helicopters, pointing at him and ordering his demise. There's a white clad human in a lab coat with him, too. These are important humans, he realizes. And just like those black men in Deepground, STRIFE decides, it is time for him to die. So STRIFE reaches out, grabs the helicopter, watches the men freeze in fright as his claws encase the metal object. A man in a blackish-blue suit is flung from the chopper, but a parachute opens moments later. That man will survive.
The other two won't be so lucky. STRIFE sneers. The do not appear to have parachutes equipped. So STRIFE grabs them one by one, holds them out over the edge of the tower, grins evilly, and drops them. Watches them fall, screaming, until the red of the fat one's suit matches the rest of his red splat on the pavement far below, and the one in white is a broken, shattered doll, splayed like the dissected frog of a child's science project. A satisfying end the them both. STRIFE rears back, overlooking the carnage he's made of Midgar, and is proud. Reactors? Down. Shinra? Gutted. He's only got one target left, after all of this. And so, he looks around near himself, wondering when and if that target was going to show. It's only a matter of time, really. Nothing escaped him for long.
He looks, and instead, he sees an... oddly familiar head of spiky black hair. He should know this young man. Know him dearly. There's another man beside him with a hand on Zack's shoulder, and he is holding a large sword (the Buster sword. This was a blade he knew? Why?).
"That... That thing... You! You... beast!" Zack's voice is raw. "Was it you!? Was it you who destroyed Gongaga!? You... you...!"
STRIFE blinks, and zeroes in on the young man. He shuffles his wings (still wounded) and spreads his body out, whips his tail, and watches as the black haired youth, the Buster sword wielder, and another man, dressed in red, fan out in front of him. They ready spells and swords. Troopers begin to march up from the bowels of the tower, dodging around the rubble in the collapsed staircase they are climbing.
Gongaga. Ah, yes. The first of the hard decisions. He mourned for them, once, but he has a job to do. He must wipe out the spawn of Jenova. He must-
Oh. SOLDIERs all had Jenova in them. Fragments of her. All SOLDIERs were... targets. His final target, given to him by the planet. (Maybe they were, maybe yes, maybe no. Not quite right. Targets? Targets...) He stares at the men before him, his teeth clenched in determination, his eyes narrowing. But then a staggering, horrifying truth is realized.
All of Jenova must die. And so must each and every one of these humans. Wretched, planet-killing humans! But... Zack. Zack... Zack. It rips his heart out. Why does that name repeat in his head? Is that this youth's name? He... remembers? He finally... remembers. He can finally recall an old friend. But it's too little, too late. His targets must be destroyed.
STRIFE rears back, and keens. He wails, long and loud, and prepares to do what the planet has said must be done. He opens his maw, and gathers energy, and prepares to make it as painless as he can for his former hero. The SOLDIERs around him gasp and brace.
Masamune pierces him from behind.
STRIFE bucks and screams. He claws at the metal he can see poking through the front of his neck, the blade's unnatural length just enough to run his windpipe through. He twists and writhes, agony and fear and rage biting into his heart like the blade of his mortal foe.
"Thanks for the distraction," Sephiroth quips at the others, and STRIFE sees red. Sephiroth. Sephiroth! Another human he remembers! Forget Zack. Sephiroth. Sephiroth! Sephiroth must die first. (The target! The target!)
He lunges and snarls, and Sephiroth is taken aback. The fight becomes quick, and vicious. Small, agile humans versus a gigantic, metallic beast. The auburn haired SOLDIER, red leather jacket snapping in the breeze, is soon firing off a litany of spells. Zack and the man with the Buster Sword bellow and charge. Other SOLDIERs appear, baring their swords. Troopers open fire.
All of this, he ignores. All of this is nothing, when Sephiroth is in front of him.
Their battle is brutal. Masamune shrieks off his talons as his wings buffet away attacks and men, his tail smashes through the troops. Spells dissipate on his hide he kicks away the rest. His aim is single minded. Sephiroth is his target. And Sephiroth must die.
They fight, long and hard, and there's little footing on the rapidly shattering peak of Shinra tower. Many are forced to retreat, or die. Many die anyways, crushed by his coils or swatted to their deaths far below. Blood flies.
And then STRIFE pins him. A claw smashes down, and Sephiroth is cornered, tired, who knows how or why. He doesn't dodge it. He can't. His arm is pinned to the side, Masamune skittering from his grip, and STRIFE doesn't wait for this chance to be lost. He snaps his head down, opening his maw, seeing the look of blank incomprehension on the silverette's face as the jaws rapidly approach.
It will be a finishing blow. Not even Sephiroth can survive a beheading.
"Sephiroth!" Someone screams.
The jaws close around flesh.
A sword is through his skull.
STRIFE loses his grip, has maw opening in a death cry. He writhes, and falls back, and his coils and legs begin to lose their grip on the side of the building. He looks down, staring dully at the blonde standing in front of Sephiroth, his arms covered in holes from STRIFE's teeth, guarding the silverette.
"I promised you, didn't I?" The blonde from Nibelheim stares him down.
He stares back. Now it is his turn for incomprehension. Now is his turn for realization. He has been killed... by himself? STRIFE stares, stares, stares. And then, STRIFE falls.
Well, he figures as his vision fades, he did say that one life didn't matter much in the great scheme of things. One life, a few. Many. Gongaga, Junon, Midgar. He'd felt remorse at first for his collateral damage. Concern for the casualties. But his conscience, his memories, had started to fade long ago. Maybe that was something the planet had caused, to make him less likely to balk at his mission. Or maybe, he'd just stopped caring, even before he'd been sent back.
What was one life in the scheme of things? Not one life, not one lost soul, could change the course of his actions to save the planet. He couldn't care for a few lives. Not a one. Not even his own.
As his mind falls to eternal silence, he can barely feel his limbs bounce off the tower as gravity takes him. Strife hopes he has done enough. His life fades. All he can think of is, he's glad, he's just so glad, that he didn't have to kill Zack and the others after all...