A/N - Chapter three! I still have no idea what I'm doing, and I think it shows a bit at the end of this chapter. Reviews and constructive criticism would be incredibly helpful!
Speaking of reviews, thank you to Erza1621 and Carolinefdq for favoriting, and a very special thank you to Carolinefdq for leaving a review! When I saw that little number pop up in my stats page, I had butterflies in my stomach for the rest of the day! Thank you!
Notes and translations of the Latin will be at the end of the chapter.
DISCLAIMER: Soul Eater is the intellectual property of Atsushi Ōkubo. I have no intention of monetizing my fanwork, and this is merely an enjoyable passer of time.
Chapter Three - Time Flies! The Tea-Loving Meister's Swift Entrance, Part 3
If you were to ask people in Death City whether they prefered the sun or the moon, the almost universal answer would be "the moon," and not without good reason.
The sun was very similar to the moon in a lot of ways; it spent the day looming over the earth, with its eyes always cast down on the people below with an unsettling grin on its face. The major difference, though, was that the sun laughed. It did not always laugh, but it laughed often enough and consistently enough that many people used it as a method of telling the hour. Of course, those same people would consider the laughter to be a bit unsettling. It was as if the sun was looking down and judging them, laughing at the futility of their lives and actions. At least the moon did its judging in silence.
Perhaps that was why all the wicked people did their evil at night, then.
Alecto perched precariously on top of a shingled rooftop, scanning the darkened streets below. She'd taken her large turquoise bow out of her hair and held it tightly in her hands, allowing the gentle rosy curls to flutter about her face in the wind that blustered through the air. "I don't see anyone," she said in a hushed, flat voice. "Do you?"
"Nope." Tempus was standing beside her as always, still as a board. He'd tied his long hair back into a bun instead of its usual ponytail, and he'd left his jacket at home, revealing the white button-up and bronze-brown vest underneath. He'd rolled the sleeves of the shirt up to his elbows. "You sure this is the right place? We've been patrolling this area for an hour now and we haven't seen anything or anyone."
"I'm sure. All of Hudine's victims so far have been found dead in this general area. It stands to reason that this is where he's kidnapping them as well." Alecto knelt down, leaning forward slightly as she strained to get a better view of the setting below. Death City was actually quite pretty at night, if you ignored the constant threat of someone turning evil and having their soul corrupting into a Kishin egg. But that was a threat people faced no matter where they lived.
Tempus shifted to sit beside her, bracing his feet against the shingles of the rooftop. "Maybe he just didn't feel like doing serial-killer stuff tonight?" he suggested, a rather weak grin on his face. Alecto glared at him in response, and his grin fell. "Do you really think this plan of yours is going to work? It's a long shot."
"Honestly?" Alecto didn't answer for a few seconds. "No. I don't. But even if I did know, it doesn't matter. It wouldn't change anything."
"Eh?"
"I was certain that we would catch him last night, and we didn't. My certainty about something doesn't change the odds. What does change the odds is my effort. If I let every doubt and worry I had affect my effort in something, I'd never get anything done. Qui audet adipiscitur, remember?"
"She who dares, wins. Yeah." Tempus didn't seem all that reassured. "You don't think it's going to fail, though, right? We're not running into a lose-lose scenario here?"
"I don't think we're going to fail. I hope we're going to win." Alecto yanked and twisted the ribbon in her hand, tensing under the pressure of his concerned gaze. She didn't want him to worry, and yet the words he spoke carried some significant weight. She couldn't be sure that they were going to win… did that mean she thought they were going to lose?
Well, with that attitude, of course you're going to lose, she told herself. Qui audet adipiscitur, qui audet adipiscitur… "I'll tell you this much, though. This time, I don't intend to stop fighting until either Hudine is dead or I am."
"Oh. Uh. That's… a thing, I guess."
"Yeah."
An increasingly awkward silence passed between the two of them. Alecto turned her attention back to the road down below. She went over the details of her plan in her head, running through them with a mental fine-toothed comb for any flaws or possible holes that would lead to Hudine escaping again. As casual as she had acted about it to Black Star and Tsubaki, she had to admit that the utter failure of last night had hurt more than a little bit. She didn't want that to happen again. She had to kill him and claim his soul for Tempus.
As if on cue, the terrified scream of a young woman split the air. Alecto scrambled to her feet. "Damn!" she explained. "It's him. It has to be." She yanked Tempus up by the shoulder and shoved the ribbon into his umber-brown hands. "You know what to do, right? This all depends on your timing."
"Timing?" Tempus scoffed, smirking reassuringly down at his meister as he loosely tied the ribbon into his own hair. "Ally, you know who you're talking to, right? Timing is literally my thing. I've got this. I'm more worried about you. Can you hold out long enough?"
Alecto smirked back up at him. "I can handle anything that bastard throws on me." She reaches out and places her right hand on his chest. "Let's go. We're not letting that son of a bitch get away again! Twelve o'clock position, go!"
"Right!" Tempus shifted into his weapon form, the glove on his buckler folding snugly around her hand, underneath the sleeve of her cropped-waist jacket. The spears spun around a few times before settling into place right next to each other, in a manner that had them both pointed straight up when Alecto let her arm lay in its natural position by her side.
Tick.
Tock.
Hudine was standing in the middle of an empty street, a disgustingly wicked grin on his face as usual. His once-beautiful suit was filthy and torn up, the sleeves hanging in ribbons around his scrawny arms. He was standing over a young, pretty blonde woman who he'd wrapped up in his chains. She'd been the one screaming, staring up at the monster in front of her with wide, fearful gray eyes.
Alecto didn't waste any time. She stopped at the far end of the street, her feet colliding with the stone with a solid enough noise to attract the attention of both the kidnapper and the kidnapped. "Hey!" she shouted. "Remember me?"
Hudine let out a screeching cackle. "You!" he declared. "Welcome to the show! I was just about to showcase my newest trick, with the aid of my lovely assistant here!"
"I'm not your assistant, you sick fuck! Let me go!" the blonde screamed, kicking her bound feet in his general direction, to no effect. "Help!"
Alecto began to walk forward, slowly and deliberately. "You're not going to do any more tricks as long as I'm still breathing, kidnapper Hudine! In the name of the Death Weapon Meister Academy, I declare your soul to be a kishin egg and that you be destroyed!"
Hudine merely laughed in response. It was the exactly response that Alecto expected. "As long as you're breathing, eh? Well, I guess I'll just have to rip your lungs out!" He lunged forward, leaping over the chained blonde and racing towards her, swinging on of his chains in a wide arc.
"Brace yourself!" Tempus declared.
Alecto raised her right arm, Tempus's buckler knocking the chain aside. She hadn't strayed from her position. She couldn't stray from her position.
"Pfah!" Hudine spat. "That's all you've got? No fancy teleportation shenanigans? You're just going to stand there and take it? I'll break that clock of yours like a toothpick, and then crush you like a caterpillar's head!"
"It's time desynchronization, actually. And gross." Alecto didn't budge as Hudine lashed out at her with chain after chain, merely blocking the blows.
"How dare you think you can defeat the great Hudine just by standing there!" the proto-kishin roared. "You are no statue! You are a girl, a girl of flesh that can be torn and blood that can be spilled!"
The brutal, inhuman way he said it caused terror to fill Alecto's lungs, trapping her breath and tremors to run up and down her limbs. She tried to shake it off, tried to clench her teeth and take deep breaths, but to no avail.
Tempus could sense her fear, and as such she could sense his concern. "Ally, are you all right? Maybe we should retreat, think of a plan that doesn't involve us getting barraged with chains?!"
"No!" Alecto snapped. "We're not just going to let him get away. This ends now, one way or another!"
Hudine laughed. "I couldn't agree more!" Wrapping his elongated fingers around three of the chains wrapped around his form, he swung all of them at Alecto, the three long strips of interlocked silver nothing but a blur against the darkened sky.
"Ally, look out!" Tempus shouted from the back of her mind.
Alecto moved her arm to try and block the chains, but she couldn't block all three of them at once. She blocked the one aimed for her ribcage successfully, but the uppermost one collided squarely with her skull. A stab of white-hot agony blossomed, and her vision faded and blurred into a vague mess of dark colors. Her knees buckled and she fell to her side, sprawled across the street like a limp ragdoll.
"Ally! Ally, say something, anything!" She could hear Tempus's panicked voice echoing about her brain. "Ally, say something or I'm transforming and dragging you out of here, plan be damned!"
"Sona si Latine loqueris."
"Did… did you just tell me to honk if I speak Latin?"
"You told me to say something." With more pain and effort than she cared to admit, Alecto staggered to her feet, swaying slightly as she did. She could feel blood running down the side of her head, through the thick locks of her hair. "I'm fine. I'm fine. I've got this… nope nope no I don't." She crashed to the ground again. "Gi-we me a minute, I swear I'll get up."
"Ally! That's it, we're pulling out."
"Stop babying me! I can handle a lot more than one itty bitty industrial-strength chain to the face." Her anger at Tempus let forth a burst of adrenaline, and Alecto was able to get to her feet again. She dug her heels in, glowering in Hudine's general direction. "Do you hear me, Hudine? It'll take more than what you've got to take me down!"
"You refuse to die, then? Fine. It'd be a boring show if you fell so easily!"
Damn it, Alecto thought. That was not the reaction she'd expected. She'd hoped to make him angry, make him reckless. She'd hoped to rob him of the performance he so desired, not grant it to him on a bronzed platter. This wasn't going the way she'd planned it at all.
But she didn't have any better ideas than to just let him pulverize her. If she tried to use their desynchronization to avoid his attacks, he'd just lay a similar trap like he had last time, and no doubt get away again. If she tried to attack directly, no doubt the results would be similar. She was dealing with a madman, yes, but the events of last night had showcased that he was a clever madman.
She wasn't going to allow him to escape, so she did the only thing she could think of.
She lowered her arms.
"What the hell are you doing? You can't just stand there and let him attack you, you'll be killed in seconds."
"I know," she growled. "Trust me, Tempus. This is still part of the plan."
Meanwhile, Hudine seemed just as confused and angry as Tempus did. "What's this? You're not going to fight?!"
Alecto raised her voice. "That's right. You want a fight? You want a 'show?' Well, you'll have to drag it out of my broken, bleeding corpse! You're so twisted you're not even worth the energy it would take to kill you!" she taunted.
It was that last sentence that finally broke through. His previous prey long forgotten, Hudine let out a scream of the purest, most unfiltered rage. "You dare?! You dare disrespect the great Hudine? You dare?!"
"Ago," Alecto said. "And you know what? For all your tricks, all your traps and clever ways of using those chains, you can't do one thing. You can't make me fight you. You can't make me see you as important." She spread her arms wide, grinning. "And doesn't that just drive you nuts?"
Hudine lunged forward. Any semblance of stability or foresight were gone, replaced by the fury that filled his heart at the idea of not being considered important, even if only by a single person. He threw one of his chains out, lassoing it around Alecto and pulling her to the ground. "How dare you!" he said, his voice guttural as he loomed over her. "How dare! How dare how dare how dare!" He took one of his chains between his two hands, the polished steel glinting in the wicked light of the streetlamps. "You haven't been fighting all night! Well, you'll fight or you die!" He moved to wrap the chain around her neck.
And then everything slowed.
Tick. She grabbed the chain with a firm left hand. Tock. "The word 'fight' implies you have a chance of winning," she said. "Tempus, now!"
The street was illuminated at the buckler spear faded into a white amorphous shape and soared over Hudine's stunned form, turning human just as he made contact with the ground. Tick. The cyan ribbon was still in his hands, and he looped it around Hudine's ankle the same way Hudine had wrapped the chain around Alecto's neck. Tock. He pulled.
The kishin-souled criminal crashed to the ground, blood spewing as his lip tore open. Tick. Alecto removed the chain from its place around her neck and slung it around Hudine's. Tock. Tempus turned back into his buckler spear form, his hands spinning into their twelve-thirty position. Alecto placed a firm foot on Hudine's chest and glowered down at him, holding the chain around his neck with her left hand and pointing Tempus's minute hand spear at his face with her right.. "You're done, Hudine. Your soul is ours."
Hudine chuckled. "Ha… so I did get you to fight after all."
"No," Alecto said flatly. "I got you to lose." She stabbed him in the left shoulder, the spearhead sinking deep into his flesh. "No more traps," she said over his screams. She stabbed him in the right shoulder. "No more tricks." She aimed at his heart. "No more deaths."
She stabbed downward.
Hudine exploded into tenebrous ribbons, whirling around and dissipating into the air around them. the chains clattered to the ground with a stern finality, and in the place where the killer had once been a single soul floated upwards.
This was not the same kind of soul as a human's. There was no bright blue glow, still flickering with the sense of life despite its host having died a long time ago. This egg was a dark red, with ragged scales peppering its surfaces. It didn't "flicker" so much as "hum," and the way the soul glowed seemed… unreal. Like it shouldn't glow that way.
And that was because it shouldn't. This was a Kishin egg, the result of a human soul corrupting from evil and the excessive consumption of other human souls. Fading into his human form once more, Tempus plucked the soul from the air and looked at it with a grimace on his face. "Ugh, I hate this part. These things always taste terrible. Like how you feel at the end of a really bad day."
"That does sound pretty terrible."
"Yeah. Ah, well, it's one step closer to becoming a Death Scythe, right?" Tilting his head back, he stuffed the kishin egg into his mouth and ate it in one gulp, making as face as he swallowed. "I can't believe some weapons actually like the taste of Kishin eggs."
"Well, some weapons aren't as picky as you are," Alecto pointed out, pressing her palm against the wound on her head. It wasn't as deep or as dangerous as it had felt to be, and the flow of blood had already slowed to a crawl. It mostly just hurt like hell.
Tempus noticed her movements, and suddenly he was by her side, his gaze stern as he swept her hair to the side and examined her wound closely. "Well, um, I'm not a doctor, so you should probably see one, but I don't think it's fatal?"
"I don't need to see anyone. Every meister's taken a few blows to the head, it's not a big deal."
"It is a big deal, Ally! Dr. Medusa can fix you up."
"It's late. I'll see Dr. Medusa tomorrow."
Tempus stared at her. "Promise?" he asked.
"Promise. But for now I just want to report to Lord Death, then go home and have a nice cup of tea. Or twelve."
Tempus let out a shallow laugh. "All right, fine. Deal." He placed his hands on her shoulders, locking a stern gaze with Alecto. His hair was a bit of a mess, with blonde locks hanging loose from his bun. "But I'm not making you the tea. Goodness knows I'll find some way to mess it up and then you'll just end up shoving me away so you can do it yourself, so let's just skip that whole mess, shall we?" Alecto laughed in response, and she could feel Tempus's hand's slacken in relief.
A nervous, high-pitched cough caught their attention. They turned to see the blonde-haired girl still wrapped up in the chains that Hudine had used. Her wide eyes were a little confused as her gaze darted between the two of them. "Could, ah… could one of you untie me?" she asked. "Please?"
"Forty-two, forty-two, five-sixty-four, whenever you want him, knock on Death's door," Alecto muttered, writing the numbers onto the steam-fogged glass of the window. The glass rippled with blue energy before turning completely opaque. "Lord Death, sir!" Alecto said, straightening her stance. "Meister Alecto Bellatore reporting on the matter of the kidnapper Hudine!" She ran a hand through her hair nervously, her ribbon having been returned to its rightful place and the blood having been cleaned from her carnation locks. She didn't want it to be obvious that she'd been hurt in the fight.
The window rippled again, and Alecto found herself gazing into the Death Room. For a room with such a dark name, the Death Room was actually a very bright location, with the appearance of a bright blue sky with puffy clouds that floated by. Alecto knew that this was just an illusion of the walls; if the indoor location of the Death Room didn't give that away, the seemingly floating windows certainly did.
But Alecto's real focus was on none other than Lord Death himself. A tall, thin figure cloaked in black, with a face shaped like a hyper-stylized skull, he stood in the center of the Death Room. "Ah, hello there, Meister Bellatore!" he said amicably. "How are things?"
"Thing are going well, sir!" Alecto said. "The kidnapper Hudine has been defeated and his soul claimed." She beamed. "He won't be killing anyone else, sir, belie-we… believe me."
"Ah, excellent! This would be your fifteenth soul that you and Tempus have collected, yes?"
"Yes, sir!"
"Ah, good. I'd hoped you'd have progressed a little bit quicker, given your talents, but it's good to see that you were able to take down Hudine. Was that all?"
"Y-yes, sir!"
"Ah, very well, then! You take care of yourself now! And remember, I have high expectations for you!" The image in the window faded, giving way back to the immaculate glass and Alecto's transparent reflection.
Tempus ambled up to her, hands in his pockets and hair falling haphazardly over his shoulders and back. "Report go well?" he asked casually.
"Uh, yeah." Alecto was still staring at the window blankly. "Hey, Tempus. We did good tonight, right?"
Tempus stared at her. "What are you talking about? Of course we did. Hudine's dust, we saved that girl, and we're one step closer to making me a Death Scythe! The only way we could have done better is if we hadn't even been hit at all, and that's a pretty unrealistic."
"Yeah," Alecto said. "Yeah, I suppose."
Then why do I suddenly feel like an underachiever?
A/N - Aaand that's the end of Alecto's introductory arc. The hilarious thing is, there were about twenty billion better plans that would've worked in killing Hudine, but who ever said Alecto was a good strategist? And yeah, that final scene isn't just fluff to wrap up the chapter. I promise there's a point to that. Promise. Pinky-swear.
I'm actually learning a little bit of Latin while writing this. Mostly what I'm learning is that I'm really glad I've never taken any foreign languages classes, because damn this shit is complicated. Speaking of Latin!
Qui audet adipiscitur: "She who dares, wins." I know the translation is stated in the context and I translated it in the first chapter, but I sort of wanted to bring a little emphasis to it because this is sort of going to be Alecto's arc phrase. I won't include it in any future notes.
Sona si Latine loqueris: As mentioned in-story, this means "Honk if you speak Latin." I ran across this phrase during a research spree and my first thought was "I need to have that in my story I NEED TO HAVE ALECTO SAY "HONK IF YOU SPEAK LATIN" IN LATIN." So, there we are.
Ago: In this context, it's supposed to mean "I do," as in, "I do dare." I'm not sure if I got the grammar 100% or if I used the right specific word for "to do" for this specific context (I found three words that could have all worked equally well for all I know), but I do hope that I did. Latin is hard, guys.
I've been releasing this on an every-other-day schedule, but I don't know whether that will be consistent throughout the fic's run. Do you know how many words I've written in a single week alone? Too many. In either case, Chapter four will be up soon. In the meantime, please review and tell me what you think!
- Diana "Nocte"
