Rin was stunned into silence.
She was not a religious woman–never had been. She had only heard fractured bits of information from other people, small distorted sentences about ‘God’ and a ‘bible’....and ‘angels’. She understood vaguely what they were. Messengers, heaven-ordained for a single purpose.
For the first time, she listened for his psychofield.
Any experienced fighter could read a psychofield. The electromagnetic aura that radiated out from an ability user gave off an almost, but not quite, imperceptible buzz. The louder it was, the wider and more expansive–and powerful.
Yugi was surrounded by that heavy, low noise, like a thick mass of gnats, and she couldn’t identify the end of the circular field. She felt suddenly swallowed and condemned, like she had entered an execution ring and bowed down in front of the sword.
“...you’re a neuropath.”
That was not the surprising part–no powerless person could have hijacked a moving vehicle the way Yugi had so effortlessly
But his psychofield was bigger than hers. Bigger than it had been.
“You’re…you’re high rank. You’re strong.”
Did an angel abide by the laws of the scientific order? There was little room for scepticism in a world where humans could summon fire to their hands, or read the minds of others. Or perhaps ‘neuropath’ was far too restrictive a term for something that was heavenly, beyond human terms and definitions.
Yugi knelt down then, his white robes gathering around him like a pool of pure nothingness. A piece of the van’s metal bumper had been flung to his feet after the crash, twisted and blackened. Yugi’s pale hand closed around it as he straightened back up, cradling the material gently like a baby bird.
As he did, it began to return to its original state. The burn marks disappeared, the steel gleaming brightly like a perfectly polished mirror. With a quiet gloop, it untwisted into an evenly shaped rectangle, devoid of scratches or dents, and then, it morphed into a Christian cross.
Rin remained silent as she continued to stare. The newly-formed object glinted, bearing no resemblance to the damaged scrap it had been moments ago.
“I am god’s machine,” said Yugi. “The angel of metal.”
As he spoke, the cross slowly began to melt into a liquid puddle, before seeping into his smooth skin with no indication of being there at all.
“It burns me like a brand, whenever I must lay eyes upon their suffering. A city is just like a living being, did you know? When one part is diseased, the whole of it begins to falter, and to fall.” His eyes flicked sharply to her own, knowingly. “I’m well aware of your suffering, too. The suffering of your people. How it scorches my chest. I cannot look away, nor can I walk a different road. That’s the burden of an angel.”
The unnatural sight of it disappearing into his very flesh made her blood stir. Rin bristled, flexing her broad hands like she was about to curl them into fists and punch every tooth down his throat.
Yet she didn’t, staying poised on the verge of offensive. Yugi’s hollow, glass-like eyes remained calm and emotionless, and he made no sign of preparing to defend himself. He just gave a sweet and lackluster smile, that looked more like someone invisible had dragged back the corners of his lips.
“I am seeking people who bear a pain. I seek people who understand it.”
“For what?”
“For my followers,” he said. “I want to change the world.”
That was the point where Rin felt her patience crack.
It had been cracking ever since the words ‘My name is–’ had come from Yugi’s mouth. Since she made eye contact with him and looked deep into his pupils, right into the center where there was a pinpointed, blinking red light; and since he gave her that awful smile, so fake and so heartless, even though when he spoke of her pain his lips trembled with grief.
She couldn’t bear the contradictions of it all, and so her next words exploded out of her, raw and bitter and loud in the hush of the empty road.
“I don’t believe in god,” Rin snarled– “Never have, never will, don’t now. Tell me why I should, angel of his! Why should I? Was he there watching over me when I was born? Did he make it so that this happened to me, was it part of his plan?”
She dug one finger into the edge of her mouth scar and pulled the skin tight, exposing how the healed tissue was pink and shiny, running jaggedly all the way to her bruised-dark undereye, gums and teeth exposed to the air.
Rin continued to shout at Yugi as she took a step closer. “I was meant to die tonight! They were going to kill me. You had to save me, but if you hadn’t, it would have been god’s plan, isn’t that right? Did your rotten god decide I had to die? Fucking answer me, Coward!”
Her hand shot out to grab at the boy’s neckline. Yugi didn’t fight, didn’t attempt to wriggle away.
He laid his own hand upon hers. The cold of his skin chilled her all the way to the bone.
That chillingly insincere, unsettling smile grew and pulled itself across Yugi’s delicate features, until it had almost entirely obscured the lower half of his face– baring a row of perfectly shiny, pearlescent white teeth, except for one right at the very back, which was blackly rotten.
“No," he answered.
“He sent me to pass judgement in his place.”
All that she could hear was the echo of her heartbeat in her eardrums, and the harsh whistle of her breathing. His hand did not grow warm, even though it rested against her hot skin. It remained as impassive as stone, a vacuum of temperature.
“...”
She released him, yanking herself sharply away.
“You out of all the others I have met are most privy to injustice,” Yugi murmured. “The categories of society weigh us all down the same. It’s the last true equaliser. If I am to make a difference I must have people of great heart behind me–people who are willing to fight for a cause. People who are–”
Rin interrupted him.
“Fine, then.”
Her voice was weary. With a heavy step, she stood nearly toe-to-toe with the angel, who was forced to bend his neck to the highest degree to maintain eye contact.
She could no longer pretend his words weren’t alluring.
“If you want followers who’ll fight for your cause, you should be prepared to do the same. You know that, don’t you?”
“I do,” he said.
“Then fight me.”
A series of pops echoed through the street as Rin placed the palm of her hand against her knuckles, and with a flex, cracked each one. The fastest way to gain a ketsujin’s respect was to defeat them in a fight, and such had always been the way of things.
“If you can best me, I’ll give you your chance to speak. I’ll think slowly and deeply on your words. But only if you can. If you can’t…”
She did not finish her sentence, nor did she need to.
“You think yourself that strong?”
At that, Yugi bared all his teeth into a wide, wide smile.
“Yes.”
It was not a blustering attempt at confidence, not a quick, splintered response to wave away her clenched fists.
He truly meant it, with full intent and awareness.
Rin was forced to conclude that Yugi was insane, and she had killed insane people before. They died exactly the same as sane people.
She used her heel to kick off the ground and lunged with an opening kick to the chest. Rin was not a small or slender woman. Her height and lean muscle hit with the force of a jackhammer, every time without fail–but when her foot made contact with Yugi’s chest there was that resistance again. Like hitting a brick wall, a metal tank, a slab of rock.
With a terrible noise, a crack split into the tarmac at her feet from the excess force finding itself at a dead end. Yugi spun round so fast Rin felt the light tickle of air whizz past her cheek, accompanied by the bright flash of metal and the reek of something acrid. He bore a pair of sharp, spiked wrist gauntlets now, ones she hadn’t even noticed he’d slipped on underneath his baggy white robes. The knuckles were reinforced over his entire fingers, and from the band around his upper forearm arced a large, curved metal claw studded with smaller spikes. A serrated edge gleamed in the dimness.
He’s armed.
Apparently in no mood for preamble, Yugi leaped into the air, coming down slashing with the gauntlets’ pointed ends. The concrete broke into a web of deep cracks, and Rin slid back millimetres away from what would have been a full-body skewering. It was almost impossible to keep an eye on the boy, not when he moved with the speed and precision of machinery. She kept up enough to counter with a flurry of blocks and swings, but every hit felt like a shockwave down to her very bones, and the jagged edges drew bloody lines across her skin.
Stronger than he looks. Faster than normal.
She creased her expression into a scowl.
His ability is metal control, isn’t it? What can he do?
Yugi cut through that thought by suddenly dropping low, trying to destabilize her footing. Once again Rin backed up in an attempt to create some space to swing, but Yugi pressed her so fast and hard that her spine hit the upturned van with a bang.
“You little bitch…you think just because you are small I can’t hit you! Come up here and t–”
The serrated edge of his gauntlet sliced off a strand of Rin’s white hair, and the falling lock flashed past her eyes as she lurched backwards.
Yugi punched directly past her, and flattened his palm upon the van’s side door.
SSS-KK-KK-KKKK
The noise was so deafening it registered last, after Rin was flung backwards through the vehicle and her head cracked against the solid brick wall behind them. The entire van screwed up like a piece of used note-paper in the span of a second. The metal frame screamed as it twisted and contorted into itself, folding into layers until the pieces tore apart and shattered upon the ground, in a sparking pile of shredded metal and plastic.
He relaxed his fist. A trail of thick, dark blood dripped down the brickwork from where Rin’s limp body had slid down it, and mixed with the petrol flooding out the fragmented fuel tank.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
She didn’t stir.
Yugi waited there for a moment, just listening to the peaceful drip, drip, drip. The ruined metal sparked as electrical components were left exposed to the air. He watched the petrol creeping towards him, running into the grainy surface of the concrete with a glimmering rainbow sheen.
His bare feet began to make a light slap against the road as he walked away.
krik
The noise from behind was so inconsequential he almost missed the vibration of it completely. Yugi’s hand shot behind him and grabbed the needle-thin shard of metal which had been flung at a speed no normal human could ever hope to react to, the point just barely touching his robe.
He slowly turned his head.
Rin was standing upright against the bloodied wall, and as he swivelled round she dropped her arm, a few more pieces of the wreck clutched between her fingers.
“Hh-hah-hah. Have you never fought a ketsujin before?”
She stepped forward with a single large stride, and Yugi fully turned to face her, bringing up a single defensive gauntlet.
“We survive like roaches, boy.” A gooey string of blood dripped from her nose. “It takes worse than what you’re giving me now to kill us. Don’t go easy on me!”
The two corners of Yugi’s mouth stretched out a little as he watched.
With a flick of his wrist, he tossed something else from under his sleeve at her. It was a spiked shuriken, which Rin knocked aside with the tip of the shard in her hand. When he retaliated with another, and another and another she hit them all away with a symphony of metallic clinks, and the lethal spinning stars lodged into the ground and the bricks around her.
“Dilatant. Have you ever heard that word before, Rin?”
She performed another run off the wall and lunged, aiming to dislodge his neck with a wide sweeping kick, but Yugi simply moved faster than she could possibly track, and with another slice he opened up a deep gash through her trousers.
“It’s a property of something called Non-Newtonian fluid.” Crimson strings hung from the serrated teeth of his gauntlets, and Yugi straightened up, dealing a parry that pushed her back so fast she left skid marks upon the road. “Fluids that don’t obey the normal laws of matter.”
The clear ring of metal pierced her ears as Rin grabbed both of Yugi’s wrists, trying to force them down and break the joints of his arms– but Yugi’s hollow, glassy eyes only watched, as he resisted with no more visible effort than blinking.
“Fluids that harden in response to sudden pressure,” he murmured, as the muscles in her arm began to tremble.
“It’s no use, Rin. The more you hit me, the more solid I become. There’s no point in trying to break the unbreakable.”
He flung her off and Rin once again felt the cruelly unforgiving brickwork steal the breath from her lungs. The injuries on her body were racking up; the residual drug, her fractured ribs, bruised head, the various small cuts weeping bright blood onto her clothes. But damage was temporary. Damage was the measure of worth.
Yugi began to circle her as she struggled back to her feet.
So I can’t hit him. Don’t know what else he’s got up his sleeve. She didn’t understand any of the complicated scientific terms he had spouted, but the core idea was all she needed to hear.
Sudden pressure…eh?
He seemed to be watching Rin now, waiting for another attack, perhaps expecting a surrender. Instead once again, with the dogged determination of her species, she charged and took a leap over his head, causing the boy to jump back and away from the wreckage of the van.
Rin was leading him into the petrol that had run and leaked into a wide, shallow puddle a few feet back. If Yugi realized, he made no attempt to avoid it. His soles became coated in the thick dark substance, smearing it about into bright rainbow-like patterns.
“You are persisting.”
His voice was quiet, still emotionless. There was no winner’s gloat to it, and somehow that frustrated Rin even more. It was as if Yugi didn’t care whether he won. Like a heartless automaton simply carrying out a directive.
“Why?”
She no longer bothered to respond. Now the shoe was on the other foot, and Rin was the one silently pressing onwards.
She knew she was beginning to get tired, needed some time to retreat and regenerate, but the petrol was still creeping towards the sparking electronics.
Yugi seemed tired, too. The boy was walking heavier, dragging his feet as he circled her. She matched his pace as the air was filled with nothing but her heavy, laboured breathing, whistling through her deep lungs. He bowed his head, arms hanging down limply by his sides. It was a striking difference from his unwavering energy mere moments before.
With each step, he kicked at the road, and she felt the sharp sting of a pebble clip her ankle. How childish, she thought. Like a little boy having a teary-eyed fit.
He kicked the ground again, producing nothing but a small metallic noise, and Rin nearly scoffed.
Metallic noise.
The derision died in her throat. Light glinted off of the metal plating on the underside of Yugi’s feet, and the spark that jumped from them seemed, in that split second of realization, brighter than the very sun.
The sound of the explosion was delayed, but then it ripped across the area with a pressure wave of hot air like the inside of an oven. Rin dove back, but the searing heat lapped at her skin, the smoke and blasted pieces of scrap lacerating her as they lashed by, and she rolled over and over and over the road until everything stopped ringing.
She had just barely avoided the fireball of scorching petrol, but her left boot had been reduced to an ashen mess, and her ankle sizzled and bloodied and blackened as it turned mottled red in mere moments. Little flames licked and lapped at the cuff of her trousers. Rin slapped at it repeatedly until the splattered petrol no longer burned, but her own burns were not so easily wiped away, and sickening pain rushed viscerally through her nerves.
If I can feel it, she screamed out in her mind, then the skin’s not burnt away. I can feel it. I can feel it.
Foul smoke obscured the air, as if Rin were trapped in some distant dimension of fog. Ears still ringing, eyes watering, she pushed herself away with her hands, buckles clattering across the ground. Scanning the area ahead for a flutter of black fabric, a lock of grey hair.
There was nothing.
Surely…he didn’t just kill himself. No chance, none. Surely…not…
“Haah…haah…haah…”
Icy blood trickled down from her nose, again. Rin swiped it away, feeling how sluggish her fingers were.
The ketamine hadn’t truly made its way through her system, she realised. Even a ketsujin like her, with her innate blood-purifying skill, would struggle with the lethal overdose they had pumped into her. That, paired with how many times she’d taken a concussive blow to the head, spelled nothing but bad news for her chances of survival.
The smoke and dust were settling now. Flames were still eating at the petrol upon the ground, filling the air with a crackling roar that became clearer every second her ears had to adjust.
“...”
As Rin strained to make it out, a small and brief gust of wind dispelled the cloying grey; and she saw exactly what she had been expecting from the start.
Yugi stood there unharmed, nude, his clothes burned into shreds of dark ash upon his skin. He took a small step, flames licking around those pale, smooth calves, not a trace of inflammation or redness marring that perfectly pure skin.
She realised that even though he was unclothed, there was no genitalia between his legs. His crotch was simply smooth, just like a doll’s body. It was so unnerving, so unnatural, so inhuman, that the bile rose unexpectedly in Rin’s ragged throat. His nakedness was almost holy, primeval; a sexless, heartless mimic of life.
As he approached her, a terrible electric sense of the uncanny valley shot down her spine. This was not a human. Beyond the evidence before her eyes, every cell of her body rose up to chant:
This is not human. This is a monster.
“You almost died,” he said dispassionately.
He raised his hand, gripping the air in that same motion with which he had reduced the van to scrap. All five fingers trembled with tension, and then the first two hooked down, yanking backwards.
Rin was suddenly pulled up into the air by the buckles of her jacket that wrapped around her chest. For a moment, she dangled inert in the air, and then Yugi flicked his wrist downwards.
Crunch. She crashed into the ground and bounced, rolling over and over as everything flashed white and then black, first her face and then her shoulder slamming hard against the unforgiving surface, until her momentum faded and sent her skidding to a stop as the back of Rin’s shirt shredded from the friction.
The ringing was deafening now.
Yugi’s knees hit the ground either side of her chest as he sat atop her. He raised the side of his hand, fingers clamped together, and brought it down like the rushing blade of a guillotine, and suddenly, the buzz of his psychofield flared to a deafening degree the precise, exact instant he struck her solar plexus.
Oh, she realised faintly. He’s trying to Shutdown my field.
The blow made her entire body lock up into the most paralysing pain she had ever felt in years. Her stomach convulsed, foam and vomit bubbling to her lips, as Rin froze into a shuddering, silent figure–fingers grasping, bleeding on the road, eyes rolling back, throat choking on shattered gasps of air, a silent scream.
But she clung to it.
To consciousness, and her willpower. The shakes abated, a nauseating weakness filling her muscles, and the black halo overtaking her vision reduced to a hazy, unsteady glow, splitting everything she saw into doubles.
As the semi-transparent ghosts of her vision began to merge back together, Rin made out Yugi’s pale, slender face as it bent over her, caught in a waiting breath.
He looked surprised. It was the first real expression she had seen him make.
“Thought…that would work…did’ja?”
“Your psychofield.”
She bared all her teeth in a bitter, bloodied, defiant grin.
“Lost it,” she rasped. “When I was young. Means… I can’t do Shutdowns. But…”
She reached up and grabbed Yugi by the throat. Her singular hand closed perfectly around his small neck, and he did not try to flee, only gazed at her with an unreadable expression in his large grey eyes.
“...it means I’m immune to them too.”
The trump card of every ability user, slapped from their triumphant hands. Rin had seen it all before. With no external psychofield to force-reset, they couldn’t stun her into unconsciousness; and so she persisted, like a cockroach.
Spurred by ancient primal fear, Rin suddenly scrambled to regain her footing, knocking him from atop her body. She did not know how she put weight on her ankle, only that she was now consumed with a rage that ran far hotter than her burns.
Once again Rin leaped forward and met Yugi’s gauntlets with a clang. He gazed at her calculatingly, and she almost physically saw it, the thoughts running behind such seemingly blank and lifeless irises as he calculated each move and countered every possibility with the ease of someone who had done so for years.
Rin knew how children raised in violence fought. Out of everything she’d forgotten, she recognised it. Child soldiers fought like they had their very souls staked in the conflict.
And he was fascinated with her–staring, as the sound of grinding metal accompanied each hit of his gauntlets against her own resistant muscles.
Now.
Rin unexpectedly lunged forward, guard down, arms open, and in response Yugi skidded back, but before he could dodge she wrapped him in an embrace.
He gasped a little, and Rin felt the pressure of a speeding truck trying to expand out of her grasp, but she only hugged him tighter, her height lifting the short boy off his feet as they dangled limply in the air.
“Sudden–pressure? Isn’t that–what you said?”
The crush force of Rin’s lethal embrace slowly increased by degrees, with each subtle tense of her arms. Yugi’s body was cold as ice. There was no pulse to be felt, only a faint and eerie hum.
She heard his ribcage crunch.
“My punches weren’t working,” she strained out, voice thin with pain and effort. “Not when I was hitting you, when I was moving fast. You just resisted all of it, didn’t you? But slow…slow and steady….”
With a sound like a crushed snail shell, Yugi’s sternum caved in, and she could hear the bubble of blood rushing out, down her front, staining her shirt and trousers.
“...you can’t fight back, can–you?”
It was a perverse, miserable mockery of a hug. She could smell his metallic hair and his rusty skin, the foul reek of mould clinging to his body. His breath bubbled wetly, rasping against the closing confines of his throat.
She recalled the blood, and the ice, and the guttural throat-cries like an animal.
It wasn't real ice, but it was a spreading cold seizing her skull, like claws that gripped, and claws that tore.
Her blood splattered across the ground and ran in rivulets down Rin's face as she stumbled forward and felt the intruding bullet lodge deep within her skull.
In the memories, she tasted something bright and forbidden. The smell of grass.
“With the payment he received for his wickedness, Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out."
Her blood splattered across the concrete.
Rin was ripped from her flashback by the ugly, fleshy crunch of something piercing both her upper arms clean through. The pain came late, like a delayed text message to her amygdala. It turned the entire world bright bleach-white.
Yugi withdrew both arms from around her quivering midsection, where two jutting shards of dark metal had emerged from the tops of his arms. There was no indication of where they had come from, no hidden strap or buckle. It melted with his flesh, as if no boundary existed between him and the material.
The spikes began to melt away with a liquid noise, and in their wake Rin bled.
"I'm so happy…eh heh…and so clever.”
Yugi's voice was calm, collected, even though his ribs were crushed inwards like a stepped-on bug's exoskeleton. He knelt on the road as Rin's own body began to slither down, and grasped her atop the weeping wounds.
"I'm just so glad," he murmured, with only the barest flicker of joy in his tone.
Rin's hazy, distorted vision could only make out the darkened shapes of his body now, wherein the two bright points of his eyes looked like matches of burning sulphur; flickering with a bleached sickly blue.
“This is exactly what I always wanted.”
He gently cupped her face in his cool hands, and laid a single kiss upon her forehead.
“We live in an unequal world, Rin. I only seek to balance the scales.”
She hit the ground with a thud.
the_four_rules_of_a_Psychofield_Shutdown
- A critical weak point of the opponent’s body must be struck at the same time as your flare.
- If either step is out of time, the opponent will not be stunned.
- A normal hit to the body will not work.
- You cannot perform a Shutdown on someone higher in Neuropathic rank than you.