Chapter 233: Close

DISCLAIMER: This story is NOT MINE IN ANY WAY. That honor has gone to the beautiful bastard Ryuugi. This has been pulled from his Spacebattles publishment at threads/rwby-the-gamer-the-games-we-play-disk-five.341621/. Anyway on with the show...err read.

Close

As the explosion rocked over the already blasted landscape, even I needed a moment to recover. My skin felt odd, as if it had been encrusted with something—like the very air had stuck to my skin like a bug to a windshield.

Which…kind of was what happened, honestly. At the speeds my other had Accelerated to, air molecules simply couldn't get out of the way anymore and so instead they were torn apart. At that speed, pretty much anything was devastating, and the ride we'd taken Malkuth on especially so. In its wake, the air had turned to plasma and high-energy wavelengths had filled the air, blasting everything around us mere moments before the fireball itself. The path of destruction we'd wrought, along with the massive crater that had been pounded into the earth, had reshaped the battlefield yet again, adding a massive, elongated crater to the existing one while slagged everything around us.

Inside of me, I could feel my other panting at the exertion. It wasn't just the cost it had taken in MP—though that had been exorbitant as he ramped his Acceleration up as high as he could manage—but also the stress it had caused him physically. That was another downside to Strength and the Chariot, if a hidden one; the massive increases to Strength and Dexterity didn't come with a corresponding increase in durability. Even I had felt my bones shattering with every hit; for my twin, who had gone so far past our normal limits that it wasn't even funny, the damage from simply moving was extreme, with every molecule in the air seeming to cut away at our flesh. I'd only taken a small portion of that so as to take some of the burden off of my other, and still I was feeling it.

But, I had to admit, the result was fairly satisfying. A pity we didn't have more time to enjoy it.

Cracking my neck once as the Gamer's Body brushed away the last of the pain, I took stock of myself and my other before applying a full heal to my twin, helping him brush off the aftereffects. Thanks to our unified nature, I knew my other could keep a stock of his own, so I didn't need to be too frugal, and if there was ever a time for it, it was while I was beating the shit out of Malkuth. I felt a response from him as a motion within our shared volume and accepted the thanks with ease.

Then, I stood up, using my strength to pull Malkuth—who my suplex had buried from his head to his waist even after obliterating just about everything around us—from the ground like a weed, lifting him by an ankle before punching him in the gut with all the force I could muster, which was thankfully a fair bit. Malkuth's body rocked forward, curled by the force of the blow, and his head came up to bang against my knee.

"—Dick," Malkuth grunted, seemingly brought back to the present by the blow, though I noted he still seemed dazed. It was nice to know that some things affected him, even if only while he was in a reduced form. Alas, stuck in the body of a Grimm as he was, Malkuth possessed nothing for me to kick him in, so I couldn't take advantage of the line he'd given me. With a touch of sadness for opportunities lost, I instead kicked him in the face, knocking him backwards and over my head, turning at my grip on his ankle. I couldn't imagine that was comfortable, which was a pleasant though, and I added to it by grabbing him by the back of his head as he came around and then bringing him down hard on my rising knee in a sincere effort to fold him in half.

Malkuth grunted again and I got the feeling he was glaring at me.

"Okay, that's enough," He said, hand snapping up to grab me by the head, massive claws closing on me in a brutal vice. Just as quickly, his other hand rose, smashing into my nose hard enough break it and pretty much every other bone in my face, snapping my head back as a side effect. Taking advantage of that momentary opening, he delivered another series of blows to my face, chin, and throat, tearing at the savagely until I let him go and freed up my hands.

Malkuth flipped over in midair, landing neatly on his feet before me in a way that spoke of yet more physics fuckery. I saw energy gather in his arms as he crouched and braced myself. I matched the first punch with my own, feeling bones break from wrist to shoulder, and then punched him across the face hard enough to make his head duck. He lifted it again and buried a rising fist into my stomach and I leaned over as I felt it pulverize my organs. Against my will, I staggered back a step and he pressed his assault, half a dozen hits landing on my chest in barely more than an instant, shattering ribs each time.

In response, I stepped into his next assault, lifting my arms quickly as if to strike him—and lowering them just as fast, trapping his arms beneath them. In response, Malkuth flexed his claws, bladed fingers sinking into my back and thumbs into my front, as if he was planning to pull my ribcage open lengthwise.

Before he could, however, my twin stepped back into play. Seeing as he was fully recovered, I let my other self go to town on our trapped enemy and while he stayed largely within the same volume as me, he reached out with his arms and began to deliver lightning fast punches to Malkuth's abdomen. Malkuth released another annoyed breath, but I held his fast, refusing to let him escape, and the air between us soon turned to plasma in the steady rhythm of my other self's fists.

Malkuth released a sound that I might have considered a growl if it hadn't been accompanied by his mask suddenly turning a deep blood-red. At once, my twin dropped low, crouching and slamming both of his fists into Malkuth's ankles to help keep him grounded. Without letting go of Malkuth's arms, I stepped on my other self's back and used it as a spring pad of sorts, contorting briefly in midair to get my feet in position before shoving both of them right under Malkuth's chin, forcing his head back.

A moment later, a narrow flash of red light flashed through the sky, tracing a line across empty air that seemed to glow for a long moment before exploding. The force rocked us all, nearly forcing us to the ground, but we endured and so did Malkuth.

That still left us in a rather awkward position, with my arms binding Malkuth's, my feet pushing up his chin, and my other self holding his feet onto the ground. Malkuth seemed to realize this as well, because he immediately flexed his arms and leaned back slightly before altering his shoulders in a fashion I immediately recognized.

A moment later, my twin hauled Malkuth's feet up off the ground, leaving him parallel to the Earth as he fired off his arms like he'd done to Keter beforehand. Instead of being launched away, I was fired straight up, and I let his projectile limbs carry me for a brief moment before releasing them, judging that I was high enough.

Then I let my twin take control as he Fluctuated into me and began his descent. I felt skills layer and time warp as he fueled our dive, even going so far as to add Atlas to the combination, and we fell towards Malkuth like a comet.

Predictably, he tried to dodge, having already seen such a tactic.

Obviously, we didn't fucking let him, changing directions with Yellow Path without slowing down.

To Malkuth's credit, he still managed to react in time, hand snapping up at the last possible instant to catch my other's fist with a regrown arm—but what he didn't expect was for me to continue on with the same momentum, leaving my other self's space at full speed to clothesline him anyway. As I caught him around the throat, I tightened my arm around his neck, letting my body snap forward as I dragged him down and back, hauling him off his feet and to the ground.

The moment he was prone, my twin hand on top of him, power already gathering—and then his hands flashed out, little more than a blur to my eyes. When he stopped, however, the results were obvious—ten neat holes from ten different Longinus, expending most of my twins remaining energy. One through the head, one through where the portal should be, and one for each of his non-existent vital organs; it was a move we'd practiced some, but it was, unfortunately, designed for foes with more vulnerabilities. Malkuth screamed as the spears pierced through him, but didn't fucking die, not that I'd been that hopeful.

Onto the next plan, then.

Before he could counterattack, my other self rolled over Malkuth and into my space, at which point I leveraged him up and over me as I came to my feet, slamming him back into the ground. This time, he was down for only a beat before coming back for more, body glowing grey as he struck me in the center of my chest.

For a brief moment, I stopped moving before continuing my earth-shattering punch—but by then, he was already gone, dancing several steps out of my reach.

"Not gonna lie, I'm getting a little tired of your shit now, Keter," He said, glow strengthening. "No offense, but I think it's about time we end this. You still have a job to do, as I recall."

"I'm procrastinating," I replied. "Beating your face in is just so much fun, you know."

"Glad you enjoyed it," He answered. "Because now's the part where I start having fun unless you do what you're supposed to. Why are you so intent on wasting time when we both want the same thing?"

"I feel fairly confident in saying we don't want the same thing at all," I replied. "But I'll ask you the same question—why are you still here? Why not go on your merry little way and leave me be? Do you need to be here for something?"

When he didn't answer, I clicked my tongue.

"So you want me to crack open the safe while you watch my back?" I asked him. "Sorry, I have trust issues. Namely, my issue is that you're a fucking godless piece of shit and I don't trust you."

Lines of purple-red power flashed down his arms and legs as he focused on me.

"The hard way it is, then," He said. "Now…which of your friends should I start with?"

"How about me?" Raven asked as a portal swirled into existence beside me.

Here's where things got tricky.

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I liked to think I was pretty smart. Yeah, I had a ton of points invested in both INT and WIS, but even beyond that. At the very least I tried—to plan things out, to think ahead, to consider the different angles and try to come up with a way around or through. I tried to learn from my experiences and mistakes both, taking into account lessons learned, and remember them in future situations. I had a lot of advantageous, I admit; my senses, my altered perception of time, my Semblance, and so on. But I honestly tried to think thing through and figure out what would happen.

Of course, it didn't always work. There's always things I didn't or couldn't know, and I was often left scrambling when everything went to hell. I'd learn from that, too, not that it was particularly hard when I was so often in the dark. In that regard, I often found the act of planning more useful than my plans themselves—planning out every single detail didn't usually workout well, at least not for me; no plan survives contact with the enemy and all that. But in the process, I generally ended up with a pretty good idea of where I should go and what I should do. If they did this, I'd do that; if this tactic failed, I could resort to this—on and on, for eventualities and possibilities. I had a fair bit of free time, after all, what with the amount of it I spent in Accelerated grinding.

So while I could freely admit I hadn't planned for things to get to this point, the possibility hadn't caught me completely unawares. If things had gone according to plan, I wouldn't have had to face Malkuth like this, wouldn't have had to activate the Arcana this early, and, ideally, would have won already. But I wasn't arrogant enough to assume everything would work out exactly as planned, because that pretty much never happened to me, so I'd considered what I'd do if things went wrong at various points. If Gilgamesh proved vastly stronger than anticipated or somehow immune to my major trump cards, I could withdraw along these paths; if I couldn't catch him within my barriers at first, I could try to slow him or hold him still with this and that.

And, of course, there was the big one. What if Malkuth showed up to be a huge asshole again? That had been a major concern and it would have been nice if it hadn't happened, but…well, here we were. I knew it was a possibility from my fight with Conquest and it would have been foolish to do nothing to prepare for it. Unfortunately, there weren't many good options for dealing with him; ruining the lives of anyone and everyone appeared to be his greatest strength. With the Arcana, I'd been able to close that gap somewhat, but…

Well. Here we were.

Needless to say, I wasn't at surprised that he'd threaten my friends—I mean, come on. That was fucking inevitable and it's not like I have much else to threaten. I'd long since mulled over how people might try to get to me and there were only so many ways. Powers that affected my mind directly would be shut down by the Gamer's Mind, the things I did to myself on a daily bases casually dwarfed most methods of torture, and I liked to think I could be fairly stubborn when the need arose. When it really came down to it, there was only one way to threaten or compel me into doing something and it was to use something I valued. That could take various forms; you could offer me something I wanted, such as a powerful or useful skill book, and that would probably be enough to get me to do most things. You could also threaten my life, such as Cinder had, and that could make me do a fair bit as well. But there were some things that were worth more than baubles or skills or even my life and only one way to force me to act even at that point.

Target the people I loved. My family, my friends…I admit, I could do a lot for them. I'd thought about it, weighed the options, and if I had to…well, there were somethings that I'd never do otherwise, but would do for them. I wasn't proud of that, really; I was more scared of the fact than anything else. But it was a fact and I treated it as such.

I also didn't tolerate threats to the people I loved, as a rule—and I sure as hell didn't plan to stand back and just allow it. That wasn't limited to Malkuth, either; I'd considered what might happen if someone more…normal targeted Jaune Arc or Jian Bing through their family or team and how I might react. Generally, my plan boiled down to 'brutally murder whoever was responsible;' I sure as hell didn't plan on letting anyone who attacked my daughter or sisters or friends just walk away. I wasn't going to allow that precedent. As a rule, I didn't kill people, but that's because I was powerful and also thought that lives had value. If there was a bank robbery happening right in front of me or something, I could just reach out and snap the necks of those responsible with my mind…but I could disable them in a thousand other ways without needing to, so shouldn't I? Yeah, it might take a fraction of a second more effort, but so what? I might not be a saint, but I wasn't going to kill someone over a momentary inconvenience or pass judgement when I could just as easily see them tried. I liked to think that was just me being crazy. I didn't kill people not because I couldn't, but because I shouldn't.

Up to a point. If, for some reason, the only way to stop those same robbers from killing people was to kill them first? If they were a problem that couldn't be dealt with in any other way? If I had to, to protect others or the ones I loved? I could do it. I had done it. I'd even killed my own father, to keep him from hurting anyone else and because I knew he'd have rather died then threaten innocent people. And when the question arose, 'what would I do if someone put a metaphorical gun to my daughter's head?' The answer was simple.

I would fucking kill them. If there was any way I could stop the gun, prevent it, or get around the problem without risking Autumn, I'd take it and then kill whoever was responsible. Like I would for the rest of my family, for Adam, and for Raven.

The only question was what I would do if someone was threatening them and I wasn't strong enough to stop it—like Malkuth was doing, here and now.

Truthfully, I'd always known that it would come down to this. If Malkuth wanted to force me to do something—which he did—he'd start by targeting the one place I was vulnerable and I wasn't sure I'd be able to stop him. Given the nature of his powers, the presence of his servants, and everything else…hell, Malkuth had ways to create portals and I'd known it even before this fight; he used them to maintain some of the stronger Grimm. Even keeping my loved ones away from the battlefield wasn't enough, in and of itself, to guarantee their safety.

Assuming I hadn't managed to stop him before it came to this—which, unfortunately, I hadn't been—I would have to take that fact into account.

And the only thing I could really do was prepare for it as best I could. My mother, sisters, and grandmother were in an airship somewhere over the sea, and Malkuth hopefully hadn't been able to notice the first portal we'd made; that didn't mean they were safe, but it meant they would be at least a little harder to target. I'd sincerely considered leaving Adam, Autumn, and Gou behind for the same reason, in the hopes of making things tougher on Malkuth, but hadn't for two reasons.

The first, of course, was that I couldn't do this without help. I needed them here for any of my plans to work. Had I been alone, it would have been far harder, maybe even impossible, to beat Gilgamesh and his flunkies, and I'd have definitely been worse off. Had I been able to get as far as my barriers, I might have been able to manage using Lucifer, but even so, it would have been a tougher fight.

The second, however, was more important—hiding them away wouldn't have solved things, not by itself. If Malkuth could make portals, he could escape my grasp at any time and I wouldn't be able to catch up with him fast enough to make a difference. Even if I was able to hide everyone I knew away somewhere he couldn't find them, itself a dubious proposition, it wouldn't stop him. If it really came down to it, he could always just go 'I'm going to kill some horrific amount of people every second until you obey' and make good on it while I could do nothing but watch until I gave in. If he made an actual effort, he could probably get my loved ones as a side effect; our current fight could have leveled cities and then some.

In the end, that wasn't a risk any of us had been willing to take. I'd told my team about the possibility and they'd agreed on how they would face it—head on. So long as Malkuth knew about them, he was that much less likely to wiping out Kingdoms. In large part, they'd put their lives on the line for the sake of the world.

And I'd allowed it. Though, truthfully, if it came down to it…I might fold.

But Raven was here to make sure that didn't happen. She was one of my few remaining trump card, the only way I could keep both Malkuth and his attention in check. With her Semblance, we could pursue Malkuth if he escaped and she thought she might even be able to stop him from leaving entirely. In that regard, she played one of the most important roles, allowing me a chance at winning just by being her.

And that meant she was in the most danger, too. By being here, she'd be the target of a person I wasn't sure even I could survive, had he wanted me dead—and unlike me, she was standing before him without any clout, any protection, anything to keep her alive if he tore off her head.

Except, perhaps, me.

And even then, it all came down to the Arcana

Be enough, I prayed. Be enough.

"…And you are?" Malkuth asked, looking her over. He seemed more confused by her presence than concerned.

"I don't see any point in making introductions to people I plan on killing," Raven replied, unflinching in the face of his attention.

Malkuth tilted his head to the side for a moment and then laughed.

"Fair enough," He said. "Let's skip introductions then, shall we? Thank you for volunteering; goodbye."

He lifted his hand, power gathering—

And Raven vanished.

My heart didn't skip a beat as I shifted my eyes and saw that she'd reappeared perhaps five meters behind Malkuth, who abruptly staggered.

"The fuck?" He asked, looking over his shoulder, but she was already gone again.

At the same time, I felt the Arcana shift.

The Lovers: The Arcana of the Lovers—the balance and strength that comes from relationships with others, be they friendship or love. It is the power of choice, of deciding who one shall stand beside and care about, where one chooses to care about more than oneself but also those to whom they have connected. When the user is within this state of being, all skills which target the user may also affect another individual at no cost, even if the skill in question does not normally allow such a thing. In addition, damage received by the target of this ability may instead be transferred to the user and vice versa. While this ability remains active, however, all of the user's attacks have their damage reduced to 0.

The Magician: The Arcana of the Magician—the representation of the power to act upon the world and the will to do so. It is the power of concentration and action that are born from the conscious mind, balanced by the intuition and understanding of the High Priestess. When the user is within this state of being, they're Intelligence is tripled. Reduce the damage of all physical attacks to 0.

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