Freyd

Freyd complied, choosing his own seat off to the side, from where he could keep a watchful eye on the phantasm that was proving too familiar. There was no reason for it. Why indulge an enemy? This was a dungeon, wasn't it? It's cunning boss sat before him, prodding the inside of his mouth with his tongue as he struggled to push his teeth back into place. "Okay. I'll give you points for creativity. This is definitely one of Cardinal's weirder ploys." Slender girl sat herself down on grandad's far side, obscuring her features all the more. Staring out into the dark expanse t

"I won't play any more of these games. Begone, old man." Confusion fell over his elder's face, blending his expression with just the right note of false yet mirthful sorrow. "Games? You know very well that this is no mere game." The old man gave a hint of crazed laughter. "The eternal challenge between man and fish is an epic contest of wills, the likes of which can shatter the heavens and lay low those foolish enough to make mockery of its proud and ancient traditions!" Splayed, spindly fingers waved around like kite strings dancing erratically in the wind at the man's exagge

"What is it you want, figment? What round of torture do you think you can inflict? Am I to endure this time?" A sneer remained cloaked behind the words, but even Freyd carried too much respect for the man's legacy to show his phantom such disrespect. Here was the only man who had ever tried to reach out and understand him. How alike had they actually been? What wisdom had the old fart garnered that granted him the patience of saints to reach out to such a troubled child. He had never raised his voice, never judged or prodded. He always managed to find just the right tone of voice,

"Come, Takeshi. Sit with me a while." The hunched figure held a rod in its right hand, worn, paper-thin skin pulled taught over a withered frame of bone and veins. His other hand patted the stone at his side - the same that he'd always reserved for their quiet chats. If the mob was aware of Freyd's defeat of himself, he failed to show it. "I doubt if my bite could do much harm, even if I managed it. These dentures are also just too troublesome for the effort." Another raspy chuckle wracked his frail form. "You are not my grandfather." He'd wanted to spit those words

Recollection was power enough, in this place, to spawn the image to which his father had directed his son's attentions. The old man appeared, seated upon a stone that grew from the cave floor to support him. A raspy cough as his cardigan-clad torso compressed painfully upon itself. His back heaved, turned away as he was. It was a sight Takeshi had seen countless times before the end. "Keep away from him, you twisted monstrous thing!" Fake Freyd interposed himself, his blade beaming brightly as it rose to guard its two companions. "He never did anything except try to help you, and yo

Someone had left a loose oddly-decorated book on the stoop, far from whatever forlorn shelf was surely missing its presence. "Always picking up after the kids." A sigh filtered through smirked lips, cloaked beneath a cowl of fine, charcoal-coloured wool. The Whisper had snared it upon his exit, meaning to return it to its proper place, but their promised meeting point was so close that it took him no time at all to meet up with the rest of their party. The Cathedral of the Lost was already nestled in the Forest of Memories, after all. Eruda, Sam and Freya were waiting for him when

Black figures in the darkness. Innumerable. They hovered close about, like ghosts that all could feel but never see. Only Freyd could hear their voices, echoing in the recesses of his mind: dogs of war, indeed. He found purpose in the role, sorely needed and eagerly fulfilled. A one-man pack of death unfolded and converged upon its hapless prey. The Big Red was teetering, broken by the smaller one in its ever-familiar robe. Ice and Fury had likewise drained the villain's strength. The boss needed only a gentle nudge to finish its fall and break the last bastion safeguarding the Crimson

"GO AWAY!" A second blow fell with less effort, but accompanied by that all-familiar screech. Absence of force made no difference to the void. It simply un-made whatever it touched, including those things most precious to him. Fake Marvin didn't falter. He simply fell apart, sundered into empty component pieces of armor that collapsed as Freyd swung through. "Hey! What the hell are you doing to my friend?" Fake Takeshi had taken notice. Pulling his hand away from his partner spawned a beam of light between them. It promptly whirled and twirled and smashed into Freyd's elbow w

Picking himself up off the floor, the shade wiped the corner of his mouth on his translucent sleeve, as if dismissing a trace of blood not in actual evidence. "You always were a violent child, Takeshi - impulsive, unpredictable and rash. Even now, you rush to conflict as some sort of solution." Shorter than his son, the man's smaller, slighter build only reinforced his words. "Is this all you can manage? Anguish between some teenaged infatuation, as compared to the stolid mindlessness of a drone?" More figures emerged from the shadows, the first a hulking titan in gaudy, ceremo

"I'm not going to have to carve open Darth Vader's mask to see myself inside, am I? I swear, if Kayaba tries to tell me he's my dad, I'm gonna run him through - twice." Montjoy just pointed at the opening, immune to Freyd's rambling taunts and attempts at distraction. He saw right through them. Ultimately, there was a point beyond which no one could lie to themselves, and he'd crossed it long ago. This entire delusion, if that's what it truly was, might well be self-inflicted. It struck him as his mind's way of forcing him to face the undesirable quandary that had plagued him since

Watching his own doppleganger, hearing him speaking directly into his mind, the thought occurred to him that he might finally have gone mad. It wasn't unheard of, and more than a few players had turned suicidal or homicidal, or even both, since Kayaba's pronouncement of their doom. For all of Cardinal's purported protections, could they truly rely upon their torturer's claims that the very tool of their imprisonment would also protect them? Raising his hand, which was always glaringly wrong when a shadow moved independently from its casting source, Montjoy pointed at the impact crater m

"Speak plainly!" I am. You're just not used to hearing this part of yourself. For too long, you've buried it beneath layers of obligation and priorities. Now, it will make you hear it. "Montjoy!" Freyd was clearly exasperated and growing angry at the cryptic messaging. You can't understand me because you can't understand the problem. You can't explain it to yourself. Therefore, I cannot explain it to you. This is your subconscious, Takeshi. It won't play by your rules, but speaks its lessons in its own language. Your task is to decipher it. Epiphanies don't just unrave

"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