Freyd

"I parted ways with you years ago, you creepy old bastard." If the troll meant to offer protest, it was never given the chance. With a brutal upward swing, Freyd hefted the mob clear off the ground and into the cavern ceiling with such force that it impaled itself upon the endless, tooth-like rows of stalagmites. Ugzeke blinked, twice, struggling to process what had just occurred, then burst into a cloud of fractal shards that rained down below, along with a cloud of shrapnel from the broken ceiling. A quick dive and tumble cleared sufficient distance for Freyd to reach safety, even as

Pulling the staff from his victim, Freyd spun to unleash a furious battery of strikes that whittled down the troll's already failing health. Ugzeke's crimson rage was always a tell that his end was near. One or three good blows would usually do him in. The mere notion that the mob had spoken in his father's voice was even more reason to want to pummel the beast into the ground. Freyd hated his father. The man's grating, pedantic prattle and obsessive need to try and craft his son in his own image, by force, had created a monster. Or, at least, such was what Freyd thought of himself. Al

"No, no, NO!!!" Slamming his staff into the ground whirled him with enough force that Freyd instantly regained his footing. Rushing his foe with blind rage, he found Ugzeke doing the same. Steam rose from the troll's back as his mottled greenish-brown skin darkened to that shade of red just beyond maroon, when things are considered to be so angry that they're never coming back to sanity. Colliding with each other, Freyd speared his foe with the blunt end of his staff, releasing its seal and unleashing the void within. What should have been a breath-denying gut shot ate right through

Good fortune had it that Freyd still held Freya's arm as her eyes rolled summersaults in their sockets and she collapsed again. Managing to catch her, albeit barely, he barked a sternly, sympathetic "MOVE" to Simmoné to clear a space upon the couch where he could lay his friend. She nearly jumped to the far end, re-curling herself into an even tighter ball in the process. "Water, and towels. A bucket also..." A demand made of her twin adjutants who scattered like mice before an approaching cat, his tone broking no tolerance for argument. "Please." He added the word as an afterm

A glance askance at his peers, Freyd felt proud that he could call them that. Once, not so long ago, they felt like a rag-tag band of misfits on the periphery of major happenings in Kayaba's infernal tower. Now, they had each come into their own, and so had Firm Anima as a whole. Fledgling Kasumi, once terrified to hurt a fly, had come to understand the importance of standing up for her principles and those she cared about, even if it meant causing injury to others. Her counterpart, Setsuna, was a kindred spirit, driven by cold yet fanatical zeal that chilled the land as much as her victim

"Now, now, Freyd," Ugzeke spoke, softly, "you know yourself better than that. You're struggling with something, and it's eaten away at you enough to lead you here." "Where is 'here', exactly?" Surprise was replaced with wary probing. "Nowhere, actually. Likely, it mirrors your lack of progress with you dilemma." "What?!" Dropping his guard for a moment, incredulous that this numbskull dared to presume to lecture him about his own psychological state, he recognized the foolishness too late to block the giant foot that hoofed him three dozen yards away and into another rocky c

A half-hearted swat bopped Ugzeke on the noggin. The troll's eyes crossed, as if he'd expected the middle of his face to cave in, when nothing happened at all. Freyd seemed equally disinterested. His heart just wasn't in it, and his mind felt distracted. How had he even come to this place? What was the last thing he'd been doing. Was this another of Cardinal's rapscallion pranks? It didn't seem like one. The entire scene was too familiar and his reactions too random. The system preferred greater predictability. "You lack focus today." Freyd blinked. Turning back towards his

Think of this as Calming The Soul, version 2.0. Freyd dusted himself off as he rose from the broken crater of his own point of impact. Ugzeke had paused again, captivated by a long trail of thick, slimy snot still tethering his nose to the point where his face had impacted the ground. A low, slow, endearingly stupid chuckle resounding off the cavern walls as he shared his amusement with the world, somehow immune to the realization that Freyd was actually trying to kill him. "Seriously? This? Couldn't we have done it in Cancun, or some other less-gloomy place?" You're not exac

You're useless, sometimes, you know that? Reaching down, Montjoy snared the shadow of Samael's Pride, cast upon the cavern floor by a series of dimly glowing fronts and mushrooms growing out of the rock face above his point of impact. Whipping the weapon around, it stretched several dozen feet before snaring itself like an inky black tendril around the troll's thuggishly thick neck. A flick of the shadow's wrist pulled his prey forward and off balance, sending him crashing to the cave floor and gasping for breath. Ugzeke's thick, sausage-like fingers failed to find purchase at th

Farming Ugzeke's had become rather commonplace in the aftermath of Shadow's fall. Troll's Blood had proven to be an effective consumable, even if not particularly plentiful. Its telltale effects were already pounding in his ears and thrumming throughout his nervous system, confirming that he must have taken some before commencing this hunt. But Freyd couldn't even recall coming down to the Underdark. Not that this place was unfamiliar, or that the ambient darkness was a problem. His darkvision seemed to have finally righted itself, making it easy to see the beats coming. Speaking of w

Twisting in mid-air, likely some gangly, bipedal cat, Freyd snared his hand on a passing linked column where drippings and deposits forge stalagmite and stalactite into a proper pillar. Thin enough to get his hand around, and smooth enough in surface to enable a spin, the slender spire had never really been meant to handle the load of a full grown male seeking to slingshot himself around it. The column broke, but not before Freyd had managed most of his intended motion before his improvised gymastic apparatus gave way. "Give me back my boot, you dimwit!" Ugzeke, meanwhile, was stil

A quick snatch and stab saw a flurry of shadows amidst the troll's grip, ending with an abrupt crunching sound as the end of Freyd's staff bopped his captor's already wide and oddly flat, misshapen nose. Twin black orbs continued to glare, the expansive void behind them and between Ugzeke's ears finally coming around to the conclusion that the thing held was unfriendly. "Awww, crap. Not good." A toothy smile and lungful of foul, tepid breath spewed from the giant's disgusting maw, nearly causing Freyd to wretch at the billowing cloud of stench. Though, the odiferous prelude did no

He wasn't quite sure how it had happened. Actually, her wasn't even sure quite where he was either. Layered on top of all that, was a distinct and obsessively predominant sensation that he no longer quite knew who or what he was, or wanted to be. And so it was that Freyd found himself emerging from an unsolicited daydream, staring directly, albeit inverted, directly into Ugzeke's big, ugly mug. Beady black eyes peered at him. Each was about four inches in diameter, and pitch as the dead of night. They were no more appealing or endearing at this close proximity than Freyd h

Chaos swirled around them, a maelstrom of battle with beacons of light clustered about the field. Each of those nodes was a member of Firm Anima, glaringly bright in contrast to the crawling carpet of mobs converging on them from every direction. One airborne critter hurtled towards his head, launched by Gaius. Leaping upward, Freyd spun mid-air and snared the mob's tattered clothes with the end of his staff. Momentum carried the motion through and whipped the poor, wayward mob in a new direction. It crashed like a meteor, bowling over a dozen nearby kin and skipping like a stone across w

"Shadow, the Malevolent." The name sounded slightly clownish when he said it out loud, but the boss had proven himself to be a real and mortal threat. "I never found out much of his backstory. Everyone on the front lines was too focused on psyching themselves up for the fight to spare time for explanations." A flick of his wrist sent a flat, polished, black stone skipping over the pond's surface. The ripples reminded him of faces surfacing on roiling black water, only to be swallowed by liquid despair. "He'd possessed a minotaur champion named Orgoth, who was an absolute titan of a t

Watching himself standing by Tuatha felt like some sort of out of body experience, yet also eerily like watching yourself and thinking of himself as a completely different person. Was it Montjoy? Was it himself under a better light? Was it who he thought he could have been, had circumstances worked out differently? Freyd was taking a chance, rolling the dice on that this situation required precisely the sort of expertise which he so sorely lacked. Were their places reversed, Freyd would likely have broken the boy's neck by now. That was precisely the reaction that the little twit see

With the last of his reports received and processed, Freyd was eager to leave the guild hall for a while. Agents supporting O&I had gradually been spread to every floor and corner of Aincrad and it was increasingly time-consuming to process all of the data they collected. "I'm becoming a bureacucrat, Persi. How the hell did that happen?!" His tiny shadow-mongoose companion was too busy to acknowledge his griping, playfully chasing fruit flies that had gathered around a plate of half-eaten something-or-other left on a nearby table. Somehow, the timer on the food had lasted l

From every direction, slinking shadows converged upon the Red Wanderer's position. Scouring the countryside like a seeker's plague, they whispered their way forward in search of their long-elusive prey. Soon, they surrounded those that had sought to encircle his fellow captain. One of the shadows, as featureless as the rest, spoke. "Don't they realize that they're outnumbered? And that's before you even count all of the me's." A low chuckle followed. Freyd was in his element, hot on the trail of a foe he had chased from one end of the flying castle to the other, then back again.

He’d seen enough. Simmoné, or Gisellé’s, emotional and physical collapse told him all that he needed. The anguish was clear upon her face, even as her voice echoed the betrayal of her brother’s memory. Even as Freya slumped to the floor, Freyd had made up his mind. With two simple strides he was at her side and risked laying bare his deepest and darkest secret, exposing that tiny withered thing that passed for his heart - the source of all that was still a decent human being inside his frigid shell. There was a weapon bound around it that should never be allowed to surface. He’d cont

The room's mood and tone of conversation has suddenly and dramatically changed. Freyd's hand instantly reached to the shadows and drew forth a sliver of void. Taking no action with it, his pride was literally swallowed, but ready to be regurgitated in case trouble arose. This was Freya's moment, and Simmone's to a lesser extent. Freyd's gaze drifted to the latter. A glance was spared for the figure in the mirror. He sounded like a jerk. Freya had the gist of it and took charge. Freyd, meanwhile, focused his attention on the 'dead' man's sister. There was no way to be sure that the fig

Freyd sauntered over, still cautious of the potential for fisticuffs flying towards his head. Freya was a nice girl, but unpredictable, in the same vein as Gaius. Simmone had been right to voice what might happen when the two united, but it wasn't likely to change anything. They were already peas in a pod, so to speak. It would be like formally sanctioning chaos. Who could tell the difference? Shuffling over, his eyes eagerly dissecting the chamber and its contents for everything save the obvious, he left the mirror itself for last. It, and Freya's query, had to merit some significa

"So, I'm the canary, is that it? Here to test whether you feel an overwhelming urge to punch something?" Freyd chuckled at the irony. "Fitting." Leaning against the same counter as his friend, he pondered hooking his leg around the stood, in case reprisal were necessary, or at least comedic. As always, his movements were slow and casual, belying any pending, underlying burst of action. He was content to play along, but it didn't mean he couldn't exact a toll for playing the fool's role. "Wait a sec. Brother? I vaguely recall there being a connection between you, this spirit and Si

Rank 5 Appraiser (Base: BD 10, CD 8+ for unique, 10 identifications per day) +1 to CD from Hermes’ Scale +2 EXP: Hard Working (also +1 IDs per day) +2 EXP: Lucrative (Firm Anima) (also +2 IDs per day) +1 EXP: Custom Ambition Tool (bought from own shop 2020-07-16) Consuming: Crafting Respite [172395] Witch's Brew: none Identifications: 5x T4 Perfect Items (@3040 col) = 15200 col +75000 col for re-rolls. (5 * 15,000 for 4 rerolls apiece) +16000 for one 5th reroll Total Cost: 106200 col Junking: 3x T4 Perfect Item (@1900) = 5700 col Total Va