Well then…my friend's trial turned out that she won but her dad still got partial custody, which for us basically means nothing changed. When she told me I was like "No! You know what, you know what, if he wastes the court's time in a trial HE KNOWS HE WILL LOSE, they take it away! He doesn't value his daughter! He just wants to waste time, welll you know what mister, YOU DON'T GET TO WASTE TIME ANYMORE! No custody for you! She ain't your daughter not more, if you don't take it seriously enough." Anyways…oh yeah, instead of the song basis, I'm gonna be putting in quotes from various thingies just below this bolded/italicized section. "A" means anonymous or Internet, names mean characters (usually from animes) and anything else should mean a book title. Got it? Moving on.
December 25, 2013. (Christmas Day)
We represent a force that could easily defeat an army of a million and one men! It is time for them to awake the ones who sent us screaming into oblivion, and who now lie sleeping. Let's drag them out of bed by the hair, and remind them of what we are! We will remind them of what it feels like to live in fear, we will remind them of the sound our jackboots make against their throats! Friends...let's bring them hell.
-Major
Kage's POV:
Once we got to the training grounds of the DWMA and made sure nobody else was using the level we were on –a bit extremist, but when Nightstalker fought things tended to get messy– before getting ready to test out what we could do. I stripped myself of my jacket, leaving my arms bare and exposing my brand as Akuma did the same, only without the incriminating moon and shadows on his pale skin. I flexed my legs a couple times, testing out how my jeans would stop movement, then rolled my shoulders and faced off with my brother. The Black Blood inside us is not active unless we activate it…I have a feeling if Queenie and DK were still within us they'd be in control as a third party. Good thing we got rid of them. I thought absently, watching Akuma through narrowed eyes as we waited for the other to make a move. I transformed my hand into a blade and made a quick cut to my wrist, feeling the blood drip out, oily and cool as I snapped my wrist forward, the black liquid solidifying in an instant and snapping towards my brother in a boomerang-like blade, making him duck as I let the blood relax in my mind, forming a puddle on the ground as we rushed together.
His hand slammed into my sternum as I hardened the thick liquid inside me, stopping most of the force as he growled and delivered a Soul Force, sending me skidding backwards a few feet from the blowback. "Too slow!" I taunted him, whipping and blurring from nothing to something and hacked down on his back, a gigantic spray of Black Blood fountaining up into the air as I moved away, punching his stomach and shocking him away from the puddle on the ground with a blast from my soul. He wiped a thin trickle of blackish liquid from his mouth with his thumb, smirking. "Too confident. Bloody Needle!" he shouted, and I choked as a large cone of darkness rammed through my stomach and came out my back, glaring at him painfully as a shower of sticky black exploded from my lips. "Damn…" I whirled into nothing, the shadows rustling behind me like leaves as I reformed a few meters away from the cone of hardened blood, continuing to cough as my body slowly reknitted its skin, bones, and organs. "Nice one. My turn." I barked, clapping my hands together then slicing my right one all the way up my left, creating another gigantic splash of the black liquid that I hurled at my brother, allowing him to dodge.
Unfortunately for Akuma, that put him right in the path of- "BLOODY NEEDLE!" He yelped, stiffening as dozens of tiny spikes rammed up, across, and through his body, jerking his head to the side to barely avoid one that would've taken out his right eye. He hung there for a moment, leaking blood down the hardened spikes of the same liquid keeping him aloft, then squirmed, melting out of its grip and reforming a few inches clapped his hands together and stretched out a blade of the blood, the liquid twirling in the air as he caught it and surged towards me, sliding into my blind spot and shoving the spike clear through my leg, the Black Blood wrapping around it in semi-liquid form so it was impossible to get off. I growled, standing on my weak leg and lashing my foot out, my silver-tipped heel catching him in the chin as he was sent tumbling back, cracking his skull against a tree trunk as I Soul Forced the band of blood around my leg, causing it to rupture and blow away. "C'mon big bro. Hit me harder." I taunted, stepping forward as the blood slowly dripping down my calves and knees spiked through my clothing, leaving an armor-like casing of razor sharp spikes around that particular leg.
He wiped the tiny trickle of blood away from his mouth again with the back of his hand, smirking. "Ready to oblige." he shot back, whirling into nothing as shadows whipped out of everywhere and nowhere, his hand impacting me solidly in the small of my back as at least twenty small spikes of blood shot through my torso from the blood covering his palm, thicker spikes of shadow blasting up through my legs as I choked, the oily black liquid filling my mouth as it sprayed out my mouth. "Oshī!" I spat, grinning as shadows whirled around him in turn and locked him down, the Black Blood binding his limbs tightly in razor-sharp ropes as he swallowed hard, my spiky leg resting calmly on his throat. "I win." I said calmly, and he smirked, chuckling and closing his eyes as I followed, laughing wildly at each other, bloody, smears of shadows and darkness left all over the grass. "Damn! I love this stuff!" I shouted giddily, catching his hand and swinging him up as his bonds melted away, my spiky coating and shadows relaxing and sliding back to the ground as he high fived me, grinning. "Yeah! And this was just manipulating, think of how much easier it's going to be to beat DK and the others when we can harden it!" he crowed back, and we laughed for a few moments, scaring robins and sparrows out of the trees covering our heads.
"Oy! CRACKHEADS!"
We turned as one, seeing Lock waving frantically from the edge of the trees, several of the new kids who got brought along with Hazel staring at us, looking slightly green. I whistled back merrily, and she rolled her eyes as we approached, summoning my jacket and shrugging it on as Akuma did the same. "So then, I never did get the names of our other new arrivals." I said lazily as we came even, and all four gulped, even the young one. Lock sighed in unison with me. "Kage, this is Rowan, Berry, Linden, and Birch. Guys, this is Kage, you know her already." I narrowed my eyes, studying them.
Rowan had bright green eyes not unlike my own, however his hair was a dull brown and his nose was turned up at an angle that suggested the world at large was BENEATH him. His soul was green as well and it told me this "Rowan" guy was a meister, and a snobby one at that. Birch was tucked in between him and Linden in a way that suggested she was trying to hide, her china blue eyes nervous and frightened behind her curtain of pale blonde bangs. Her anxiously pulsing soul was that of a witch, with little cat ears, making me perk up a little. 'Well, one's a cat at least.' I thought dryly, glancing to the next one. This guy was the one meister that exposed us as Nightstalker, his eyes covered by a dirty strip of cloth and his hair a bone white, one long hand resting nervously on the shoulder of Birch, the cat witch. His other rested lightly on the shoulder of one "Berry", the youngest of them all. Her hair was dyed a bright cobalt blue, her eyes a vivid shade of violet.
A Weapon.
A weapon not unlike Tsubaki.
Hmm…
"So then, anything to say? C'mon, don't be shy, I don't bite." I said in a friendly way, smiling at them cheerfully. "Much." Akuma added in a cough, and I elbowed him. "I only bite YOU." I said ominously, and there was a muffled giggle, from Berry. The others relaxed a little, and Linden took his hand off Berry's shoulder. "Can you teach us to fight like that? You were incredible!" Rowan said eagerly, his green eyes shining with avarice as I glanced sidelong at Akuma. "Nah, we'd crush you to the dirt. But c'mon then, have at me. I promise, no Black Blood, no special, just me as a Nightstalker and all you as you." I said slyly, and Linden quickly backed away, nervous. "I c-can't see-" he stammered, and I rolled my eyes. "You can see my soul can't you? When you fight someone like me, that comes in handy. Now hurry up before I get bored and decide to crunch you." I said menacingly, falling into a ready crouch.
Lock's POV:
After showing the leftover losers around the places they were allowed to go, Barrel and Shock had been called out on a possible collection round, leaving me to take the brats to the DWMA. Once we arrived -I could pull the "infinite shadow vortex" like Kage on important occasions- I saw the smoke coming from the grounds and figured my best friends were busy training. Since our beloved greenhorns needed some schooling, I took them on over. Rowan was mercifully silent, and both Birch and Berry's eyes were huge as they took in the dueling pair, and Linden's hand was in a vise around the latter's shoulder.
"They…they're going to teach us to fight like that?" Rowan asked after a few moments, his green eyes wide. "Not exactly. Kage and Akuma are a level all their own." I said calmly, and they all glanced at me questioningly. I sighed, leaning against a tree and watching them fight through hooded eyes. "Kage and Akuma were born to a normal enough family as Nightstalker go, nice fighters, good strategists. What happened when they turned six was what really changed things." They waited with baited breath and wide eyes. "They accidentally awoke both the Nightmare Queen and the Demon King, two powerful demons that our religious icon, the Pumpkin King, had locked away. During the process of possession, the fiancé of Jack, our leader, came upon them. She was slaughtered."
Their eyes widened until they were huge orbs just begging to be poked. "That was it as far as the clan was concerned. Kage and Akuma were no longer part of our kindred. There was a mob, it beat them both until the point of death. Akuma was actually dead, truly dead, when they stopped to take consideration. Kage was barely alive, and they branded her an outcast and then literally threw her out the gates. She found her brother's body and used her new power to resurrect him. Jack expected, we ALL expected, that they would die in the wilderness, alone."
"But wouldn't someone have like found them, took care of them?" Birch asked, and I shook my head at her. "The land for miles around was controlled by us. It still is. There was nothing but forest and Kishin out there for them to find. But somehow, someway, they both got out. Not just survived, but got out. They actually managed to leave the forest, run a few miles, and then collapse at the edge of a town. We had an agent there, she saw them. By that time they had been healed, rested, and they were healthy and completely unharmed. Jack was furious. He sent out orders to every Witch and Kishin he knew, that we knew, that if Kage and Akuma were spotted they were to be killed on sight, by pain of death. The reward was either as many souls as you could eat with proof of death, or at least a coven's worth of power from our city."
Kage activated a Black Blood attack. "So that was it. Kage and Akuma were now the most wanted of the criminal world. They had to keep moving, never staying in one spot for more than an hour. Every day something tried to kill them. Sometimes more than once per day. It's frankly a miracle they survived for more than a few weeks. They would have died for sure if not for their demons. Even then, it was one close shave after another. They came crawling to our door plenty of times, half dead, and once we stitched them up they'd fade back into the night. Eventually they started eating the souls of the ones who came after them, grew in strength, and started being a problem. Jack himself joined in personally on the chase, and around that time they must've started heading to the DWMA. I think they were in Holland at the time, so it was several months, almost a year, before they could get to the academy."
Linden whistled under his breath. "Incredible." I nodded. "Yeah, it was. After that, a whole mess started up, and through it all, Jack was killed, our deity was imprisoned, Kage lost the Nightmare Queen, and Akuma separated from the Demon King. You know that guy with the black hair, dark clothing, red eyes, hangs out with them? That's the Demon King in his new body. We prefer to call him DK for short. But the upside is, Kage and Akuma are now more vastly powerful than all of us combined. Outcast or not, they have a large part to play if we're going to rebuild the clan. But there's a slight problem with that, as you all can guess. As outcasts, Kage and Akuma can neither be candidates for our next leader nor have any say once the leader is elected on whether or not we still maintain friendly ties with the academy. Me and my brothers originally had very little say in what went on, and we probably won't when the leader is chosen, unless it's one of us."
"But the new leader, they can let Kage and her brother back in the clan, right?" Berry asked, hanging onto Birch's sleeve. I bit my lip. "Maybe. Maybe not. They will be a powerful re-addition to our ranks, but Kage is involved with Lord Death's son, Death the Kid. They know a lot of the meisters here by name. The politics of their relations are something that no matter what happens, someone will protest. The decision won't be an easy one." I said worriedly, seeing my best friend laugh, tossing her bloody hair out of her eyes.
*Nice try!