Running from the Reflection [Daemonblade and Evilparsnips (and now Switchblade too)]

OOC: This takes place just after the events of Mockingbirds Nest. Nat and Mike only.

IC: Nathaniel was sick of running. When he looked back on his life it was starting to seem that it was all he'd ever really done. He'd run from his schooling. He'd run from the murders. He'd run from the voices. He'd run from his gang. Now, the way he saw it, he was just running from himself. Delaying. Putting off the inevitable. He'd have to return to the academy- to his team- at some point. He didn't understand it. This wouldn't have been the first person he'd killed, not by a long way. It wouldn't even have been the first time he'd killed someone on his own side. He didn't see why this time it was bothering him so much. It made no sense. Then again, neither did trying to kill Mike in the first place.

Something had happened back there. He knew the term 'seeing red' (after all, his life for a while had been one big river of red) but this was completely different. This wasn't losing control of himself, it was more like his  body had been taken over by something else. And then the visions. He'd always thought deep down that the voices were some kind of perpetual hallucination, that something had been damaged deep within his subconscious on the day he'd killed his parents, but he was starting to believe otherwise. A hallucination couldn't take control of your mind. He had a growing suspicion that on that day, in that moment of weakness, something much worse than brain damage had happened to him. He'd let something in...

He couldn't deal with this. Couldn't control it. For once in his life, he was faced with a problem he couldn't beat into submission. All he could think of was to kill himself, and he wasn't that desperate. Yet. Under such circumstances he did the only thing he still had left to do. He forgot about his twisted ankle. He forgot about the pain in his lungs. He forgot about the voices screaming in his head and the blood still trickling from his tear ducts. He kept running.

Angry would have been an understatement. The idea that even after he had just about killed Mike in cold blood, he still couldn't take things seriously, was beyond him. Forget whatever kind of psychopath Nathaniel thought of himself as, Mike had to be on a whole different level of crazy. Or maybe he just had a death wish. Either way, he still couldn't believe that the freak had decided to follow him all this way. It made no sense. He had nothing to gain, and there a chance that Nathaniel still wanted to kill him. Well, he always wanted to do that, but there was a chance that this time he might actually go through with it.

Sensing what Mike was doing, he skidded to a stop, simultaneously spinning, drawing a railgun round from his belt and throwing it straight like a bo-shuriken. He charged the other boy as the snowball exploded in a cloud of dust and the sharpened rod flew off out of sight. It was a lot harder with his bad ankle, but he managed to grab Mike as he swung down, using his momentum to swing him hard into a nearby tree. He pulled another round out and jabbed the point in against the other boys throat, just above his Adam's apple. Eyes hard, Nathaniel moved forward, using the rest of his body weight to hold him there.

If you really can do what I think you can, then you should be able to hear this. Leave now. Do not follow me, or I will have to break you in a way you will never truly recover from. You can read my thoughts. When I say this, I am not making an idle threat. Do not test my patience.

He started to turn away before, almost as an afterthought, he slammed the round through the loose fabric of Mike's jacket and into the tree, effectively pinning him there. Then he began to walk away, all the while cursing himself for leaving his beloved halberd behind.

Nathaniel spent a long time walking, simply trying to get away from it all. It wasn't working, he was just as panic-stricken as before. The voices were shrieking in his head, screaming meaningless chatter in his mind. He couldn't think, couldn't restore any order to his scrambled brain. With a resigned sigh, he realised that he was going to have to get soaked again. It was some cruel joke life was playing on him, paying him back for everything he'd done. He lay down in the snow.

Immediately things started to grow clearer as he focused on his breathing patterns, his heartbeat. They started dropping, and though his thoughts were weakening they were still becoming more comprehensible. He allowed himself to slowly slip from consciousness into sleep, from sleep into near-stasis. Alone in the woods, he fell back into another of his self inflicted comas.

Nathaniel brought himself back into consciousness, years of practice allowing him to snap back from comatose to battle-ready in a matter of seconds. There were three issues which presented themselves immediately to his attention. Firstly he was, as he'd predicted, lying in a pool of slush and completely soaked. Secondly, and more worryingly, he appeared to be blue with cold, and though he was no expert, on the verge of severe frostbite- a sign that he must have been here for quite some time. He always found it difficult to judge time when he was in hibernation. Worst of all though, as he suddenly remembered, he'd left Teres-Aris back in the dorm room. He really wasn't happy about that. He saw it as equivalent to leaving his arm behind.

He stood up and stretched. He'd been sure something had prompted him to wake up, but he didn't have a clue what it was . Grateful for the support his combat boots gave to his bad ankle, he began to walk off aimlessly in a random direction.

This time there was no mistaking it. There was definitely something there, like a voice right at the edge of his mind- and it wasn't one of the ones which were normally there. It came again, and it was now discernible as mike... counting. From the tone of voice he appeared to be in some kind of fight, although he didn't sound overly threatened. Then again, Mike was Mike. Nathaniel didn't trust him to look after himself, and irritating though he was he was still a teammate.

Nathaniel turned and began to walk towards him. He still wasn't keen on seeing the boy again, and he had no intention of showing himself unless absolutely necessarily, but he figured it was better to err on the side of caution. He wasn't sure how well he could fight virtually unarmed, but he figured it might still be better than a hyperactive and incompetent child with a pair of knuckledusters.

Nathaniel was sure he had felt some kind of pain in that last comment, although what really stood out to him was the fact that Mike seemingly couldn't count. How could you lose track of numbers at four? Still, as much as he often wished grievous bodily harm on the Caudex it still wouldn't be particularly fair to let him get himself killed.

Cursing under his breath, Nathaniel picked up the pace, ending somewhere between a jog and a fast limp.

Nathaniel didn't need Mike's feelings inside his head to know that things were starting to get serious. The younger boy was in a lot of pain, and if he was still being hit when he'd killed off half a dozen of them then it had to be a dangerously large pack.

Nathaniel slowed to a halt. His eyes closed. He began to focus on his breathing, his heartbeat, pinpointing the specific actions of almost every muscle in his body. Only this time, he wasn't focusing on slowing them down. Suddenly his heart was pumping faster, deeper, his breathing likewise, and adrenaline began to flow around his body. A couple of seconds later he opened his eyes again, the pupils dilated to result in maximum light intake. He set off running, demonstrating to the woods around him the ridiculous speed for which he had once been known.

The technique had nothing to do with aura or semblance, but simply a decade of practice. It was a state of mental enhancement not dissimilar to meditation, the polar opposite of his regular comas, but it was dangerous. Every second he spent pushing his body beyond it's limits was time in which the likelihood of a heart attack or cardiac arrest was increased tenfold, but at times like this it was a necessary risk to take.

Nathaniel had no intention of letting anybody kill his teammate.

Nathaniel kept running, oxygen starved muscles burning, spots beginning to dance before his eyes. He was close now- very close. His mind was screaming yet again; a combination of the once again awakened voices, the pain he was sensing from his link to Mike, and the new issue of his overexerted body. A little more, he told himself, just a little more. He could see the other boy now, a few hundred metres away. He increased the pace yet again.

The last thing Nathaniel saw before he lost all vision was his teammate being thrown to the floor, another wolf closing in for the kill. His mind was in pieces, his limbs were dying, his heart was beginning to fail, but he couldn't stop yet. He still had a job to do. He shook his head in an attempt to clear his head, but at this point it was beyond futile. All sight gone, he switched solely to sense and ran through and into the clearing.

The first beowolf swung at him. He ducked beneath it's flailing arm and ran on, rolling beneath another one's swipe and coming up with a railgun round in his fist. He hurled it and it stuck in the shoulder of the wolf which had been about to kill Mike, but he was weak and tired and all he succeeded in doing was making it mad. Gritting his teeth, he continued his charge, heedless to the half dozen remaining Grimm now closing on the more interesting prey.

The angered wolf bellowed and ran straight at him. Nathaniel didn't waver, he kept sprinting directly towards it. He waited until the last minute before leaping upwards, using it's shoulder as a springboard to propel himself even further. It should have worked well, but a combination of his blindness and tiredness led to him misjudging the speed and distance. He landed badly on his already injured ankle and slid to a sprawling stop a few metres from his teammate. If his ankle hadn't been broken before it certainly felt that way now.

Terrifyingly aware of the beowolf as it slowed to a stop, every inch a thousand agonies, he began to crawl towards the unconscious boy. Grabbing his arm, hating himself for what he was about to do, he drew two railgun rounds from his belt. The beowolf beginning to close on it's incapacitated prey, he stabbed one rod straight through Mike's palm, the other through his wrist, effectively pinning the grapple-blade to his hand. He'd avoided most of the major blood vessels so there was little chance of him bleeding to death, but it was going to hurt like hell when he woke up.

A shadow rose over him and he heard an ominous growling- he was out of time. He pointed the boy's arm towards a tree about thirty metres away and pulled the trigger. Mike was sent flying and stuck in the upper branches, hopefully out of reach of the prowling Grimm. His hand would be ruined, possibly beyond repair, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances.

He rolled over onto his back and stared up at his death. He felt no fear, no regret, no emotion at all, really. He was starting to wonder whether he really was subject to human feeling, or whether that was a privilege stripped from him the day he killed his family. Not that it mattered really.

The beowolve's claws raked across his face, shattering his nose and irreversibly shredding his right eye. He waved his arm across his face in a halfhearted attempt to ward it off, but it simply fastened it's jaws across his forearm, snapping the bone and almost biting it clean off. It was funny really. No matter how many times he'd been put through this kind of pain, it never hurt any less the next time. There seemed to be no acclimatisation.

He let his arm drop, the wolf still attached. He was done. His task was complete, and he had no more reason to continue. Considering how life had treated him, he was actually surprised that it had offered him a death in battle. He thought maybe he'd have died naked in the bathroom, or choking on a fish bone. A slight half smile crossed his face. It looked like just once, in the last moments of his life, it had offered him a little kindness. His remaining eye closed. He slipped away.

OOC: Sorry about the massive post. With Mike out of action, I can't really split it down into multiple smaller ones.

It was his first day in the Elites, and though he couldn’t say he wasn’t a little interested that interest was easily drowned out by his anger. For Eric Hughes, anger being dominated by another emotion was a miracle in itself. This time, though, his anger would have appeared a little odd to an outsider.

He’d been promoted into the ranks of the Elites, the men who made the best of the best look like little girls. They were men that other warriors viewed as only slightly less than avatars of war, gods of battle given human form. Legends abounded about these people slaying entire hordes on their own, or crushing tanks with their bare hands, and for the greatest of them these might not be so far from the truth. Most people would have been incredibly proud, and incredibly nervous, but all Eric felt was hatred.

It wasn’t his promotion into the ranks which had made him mad- after all, it had been his greatest desire for the past four years. It was the manner in which it had happened, and everything which had happened since. He didn’t like being accepted for the wrong reasons, and he didn’t like the way they were treating him now.

He was Eric Hughes, man, monster, an animal with a penchant for slaughter and an irrational hatred of every soul he saw. He’d never found a man he couldn’t beat in a fight, and never fought a man he hadn’t killed. He’d spent half his life carving his bloody reputation. He was another name warriors mentioned in their campfire tales, but for him it was whispered horror stories and the stuff of nightmares. They feared him just as much as they revered the Elites, and he was every bit the fighter any of them could be. He should have been accepted a long time ago, but instead it has taken them all this time to get around to it. Even now it was only because he’d, purely accidentally, managed to save the Boss’s life during an instance, that he’d been inducted. This was his reward, and he hated it. He shouldn’t have needed some big shot’s favour to get in.

Then there was the way in which they had treated him. They’d had the balls to summon him, like he was some common lapdog, but they’d also insisted he turn up at half past three in the morning. He valued his sleep, but he valued his pride more. He intended to have words with whoever had called him- words, and then there’d be a little blood spilled.

The one positive here was that he’d been summoned to an arena. That meant fighting, and fighting meant that he’d be able to assert his dominance straight from the beginning. That, and he’d be able to get a little payback for what they’d done to him. He hammered on the door. “Hey, you there? Let me the f*** in already!”

The door opened inwards, revealing a black dressed man in his late thirties, some kind of short sword on each hip. Eric pushed past him and through into the arena. It was a large, indoor building perhaps thirty metres in diameter. The floor was sand and grit, and although a few weapons rested against the walls in places it was otherwise empty. To his confusion, there was nobody else here. He turned to the man. “Is this some kind of joke? Where the hell is the guy I’m fighting?”

The man turned to him frowning, and looked at him as though he were some kind of pitiful insect. “That would be me. And having good manners is never a painful as you seem to believe.”

Eric sneered, marching up to the other man. “Listen, old man, I didn’t come here just so that you could get a few cheap laughs. Do you have any idea what I could do to you? I’ve half a mind to cut you down here and-“

That was it. One second he’d had his face in the other man’s, and the next he’d found himself lying in the dirt looking up at him. He hadn’t seen a thing, the man had moved so fast. It was purely insane, impossible- and yet it had happened. “I summoned you here. Much as I hate it, it is my job to train you. That starts here. Do you have anything else to say?”

Eric had been on the verge of exploding into one of his rages, up until he heard that this was the man who’d summoned him. His outward aggression was almost instantly replaced by a silent, predatory, threat. “You summoned me here? Why didn’t you say so earlier? Lead on grandpa.” He got to his feet. “But that fluke just then- you surprised me. It isn’t happening a second time.” He pulled Angel’s Fury off of his back. This was going to be his first time playing with his new toy, and he was enjoying it already.

“I see.” The man picked up what appeared to be a shock-prod, a kind of electrified aluminium quarterstaff. He cleared his throat. “My name is Captain Frost. It is my unfortunate job to train you. Today your task is to survive for twenty seconds. We will continue until you can achieve this. If you cannot achieve this within the next fortnight you will be excluded from the Elite. Once that happens, you cannot apply a second time. Are there any questions?”

“None. But if you expect me just to survive, you’re making a big mistake. I’m going to tear out your beating heart.” He took on an aggressive fighting stance. “You aren’t leaving this room alive.”

Frost made a sound somewhere between a choke and a laugh. “If you wish to believe that. The match begins now."

Eric smiled, took a step forward, then found himself paralysed on his back, staring up at the ceiling. “That’s your first failure. Go again.” He snarled in anger, hurling himself at the older man, and found himself thrown across the room by the electrical discharge. “Two. Again.” Murderous, Eric threw himself at the man and was faced with a similar outcome.

“You really aren’t getting this, are you? You don’t need to win. You just have to stay on your feet. I can to this all day.”

Very well, Eric thought. Try this one you half-dead f***. He pointed the railgun at the old man, his finger tightening on the trigger. He was thrown backwards again as Frost hurled the shock-prod. Before he had a chance to jump back to his feet he found himself with a wakizashi at his throat. “You have problems, don’t you? If you can’t get over them, then it is part of my job to snap you out of them. You’re nothing more than a wild animal as you are, and you are of no use to anyone. You’ve lost yourself, boy. Never, ever, forget who you are. Now, I’m going to let you up. Your mission has not changed. Don’t. Get. Yourself. Killed.”

Don’t get yourself killed.

Nathaniel’s good eye opened again. Never forget who you are. He looked up at the Beowulf biting through his arm, looked down at his twisted ankle. How had he become so weak that he could let this happen to him?

Remember who you are. This might not have been what Frost had meant by that, but he remembered all right. Nathaniel was a lie, a falsehood created in order to protect him from his past. It was a convincing illusion, but that was all it really was. A fraud. A fake identity. He’d put so much effort into making it real that he’d started to believe it himself. He’d forgotten who he really was.

Eric began to laugh, blood and spit frothing from his mouth. He focussed on the pain, savouring the delicious agony running through his body. They thought they had him. They thought they had him dead. They knew nothing. This was wolf and sheep alright, but if these mutts thought they were the predators they were sorely mistaken. He was the real monster here.

He roared, suddenly flipping over so that he was on top of the beowulf. He twisted his wounded arm around, wrenching the wolf’s head sideways, until it was at the perfect angle, then he used his other arm to plunge a railgun round beneath its chin and up into its brain. The beast suddenly stopped struggling, and he forced its jaws open, tearing his arm out. He stood up and inspected it. His forearm was nothing but a bloody mess, his hand and lower arm held on by nothing more than a few splinters of bone and scraps of flesh. If not for his Kevlar coat it would be completely gone. He tried to move his hand. Nothing happened, but then he’d been expecting that. Considering the amount of blood pumping out he must have had minutes at best. In short, there was a lot to take revenge for and a lot of pain to bring.

Eric Hughes turned to the remaining five dead dogs, evil smile on his face, psychotic glint in his eye. He magnified the pain, used it to add even greater power to his hatred. “Come on then, bitches, is that the best you can do?” He spat blood onto the snow by his feet. “I’m making a new coat from your f***ing hides!”

Eric's head snapped round to take in the brat who had gotten him into this mess in the first place. "Of course I did. What the hell kind of weakling do you take me for?" Much as he wanted to go and thrash the kid, though, he had more pressing matters to attend to at the moment. He turned back to the now cautious wolves. "What's the matter? Scared? Damn right bitches, you'd better be."

He charged, only to have his ankle give way beneath him. He snarled at the pain, but he didn't give in to it. He reached round with his good arm and twisted his foot, grinding the bones against each other to prove to himself that he could handle it. The agony was almost unbearable, and he lost consciousness for a second, but then he was back again. Stronger. Angrier. More than happy to carve a bloody trail through these beasts. He stayed down, aware of the beowulves as they bounded towards him to capitalise on his 'moment of weakness'. Stupid mutts- they didn't have a clue what they were getting themselves into.

He waited until the last second, not wanting to relinquish the element of surprise. He was blinded again, this time by the sheer quantity of blood flowing from his face and into his remaining eye. He was forced to rely on sense again, but that didn't matter. It wasn't precision he wanted here, but pure bestial fury. And he could multiply these weaklings anger tenfold.

He left it until there was one only a metre away, then he cast aside the semblance of incapacitation. He sprang forwards and to the right, using the beast's own momentum against it as he drove a railgun round between it's ribs. He doubted he'd hit it's heart, but at the very least he'd gotten a lung. Stepping forward to meet the next one's attack, he leaped inside it's reach and met it with a bear hug, forced steadily backwards by it's greater strength and momentum. He locked his neck beneath it's chin so that it couldn't chew his head off, then proceeded to start biting chunks out of it's throat. The stricken beast shrieked and thrashed in an attempt to get out of his grasp, but he clung on hard with his arm, and there was no escape to be found. He bit deeper, deeper, spitting out chunks of flesh. It's claws raked across his back, but they were weak from this angle and couldn't penetrate the thick Kevlar of his coat. He let the beast go when he'd finally torn out a piece of carotid artery, and it stumbled away from him, getting only a short distance before it's legs gave out and it had to crawl.

He turned to face the advance of the remaining four. He spat out some of the blood, swallowed the rest. He smiled to himself. He was enjoying this, and he was still warming up.

One virtually dead, another heavily wounded; the way he saw it that left him with four more real targets. The remainder of the pack spread out and encircled him, but he wasn’t worried about that. A few house cats could encircle a lion and it wouldn’t do a thing to their chances of success.

The one directly opposite him sprang forwards towards him, and he was reminded of the conversation Nathaniel had had with that other boy in this very same forest, the first day he’d arrived at Beacon. Beowolves plan. They think and talk to each other. He focussed his mind, and sure enough there it was- a second beast mirroring the first, trying to get him in the back while his attention was elsewhere. Too bad. They still hadn’t realised just how outclassed they were.

He stepped towards the first wolf, feigning ignorance, though his attention was all the while directed towards the second. He chuckled to himself. He had two masses of teeth and claws charging directly at each other and they still hadn’t realised their error. Very well, it would be his duty to teach them.

He waited once more until the optimum moment, then hopped away to the right, his hand snaking forward and dragging the first Beowulf forward- dragging it right onto the claws that had been previously directed at him. The two went down together, and before they could disentangle themselves he drove a railgun round through the second one’s eye socket and into its brain. The other wasn’t moving, and appeared to have been impaled through the chest, so he left it be. He turned to the final two, which still didn’t appear to be making any attempts at escape. “What’s the matter? You two F***s got a death wish or something?” Still, he couldn’t really complain. It meant he had even more things to kill.

Sorry about this, but I'm going to have to leave this thread here. I'm just going around and tying up loose ends right now before I go for good.