Track this topic | Email this topic | Print this topic

Okay. So, I have yet to see a section in the fanfic library for crossovers. But I was in dire need of finding a home for this one. It was supposed to be for a fanfic contest, but apparently didn't make the cut (I began writing before the contest itself was announced). Anyways, any errors or Turk inconsistencies you can find would go a long way. Thanx.

--------------------

You are not your username. You are not your avatar. You are not the number of posts you have. You're not your signature. You are the all-typing, all-chatting crap of the Web. --Friend of a Friend

“Squared Circle”

This tale of mine has a beginning.

Not many people seem to think so. If they do not see something with their eyes or read about it in their textbooks, it never happened. Ignorance. Truly, it is the only real opiate of the masses. Let them ignore what they wish to ignore. It makes it that much easier for this whipping boy to slip the knife when no one is looking.

My reign of terror was born out of ignorance. Thousands would fall by my hand, and it would keep getting funnier each and every time I bore witness to it. But death, in its own right, was never enough to amuse one as restless as myself. So the thousands became hundreds of thousands, and then unto millions, until the sheer enormity of death carved furrows into the earth, sank and tore civilization asunder. My world, my legend . . .

Legend. Man does not know the meaning of the word.

Legends are not made by men of morals. Clemency? Good will? They are not the things that raise statues or write history books. Legends exist to endure, to conquer, to rip apart and tear away the weak so that they may sear their way into heart and stone alike for all time. This was my legacy, my beginning.

It was also my end.

All things end, however, so that they might begin anew in some other way or form. Ignorance will come again, and that ignorance will be my ticket home . . .

* * *

The matron mother tried to smile as her eyes, clouded by cataracts, passed along each of the mementos of her room at the former orphanage. The painting on her wall, the clock at her bedside, the sword that hung around her headboard which she may have wielded when younger. Once upon a time, she might have been able to associate each trinket with a face she had known in her early years, some place she had once explored that no longer existed. Now she afforded none of them much more than a passing glance, scrutinizing their meaning as though they belonged to a total stranger. Insofar as she knew, they probably did.

Take only what will sustain you on the trip. Those had been the words of their caravan’s leader. But who was to say what sustenance meant anymore?

A worn and crooked limb, spotted with age, finally emerged from the sea of voluminous black velvet that was her traveling cloak. Wrestling for a moment with small hands that quaked from arthritis, she was finally able to pick her faded leather knapsack up off the floor. All of her effects were in order. There was no point in bringing anything else. Whatever power those knickknacks once held over her, they were no longer present. That was another person now.

“Matron! Is there anything I can help you with up there?”

She paused for a moment at the sound of the woman’s voice, consciously struggling to find some context in which she might recognize her caretaker of over thirty years. When remembrance once more eluded her, all she did was shake her withered white head in defeat. With slow, measured footsteps, the matron eased her careful way down over the rickety stairway. The whole house around her appeared as every bit infirm as she was, from the creaky oak steps which bore her up to the worn yellow planks of the walls she now turned to for balance. She was glad that the day was calm. One stiff breeze could have been more than enough to take the house right out from under them.

“What? Matron!” The middle-aged woman by the stove turned heel in a flurry of panicked activity, helping her down over the last few risers of the stairway. “You shouldn’t go doing that without my help, especially in your condition. It’s dangerous!”

“Oh, please,” the old crone barked, suddenly regaining some of her lost wind. “I’m not a complete invalid yet. I can still do some things for myself, you know.”

“Yes.” She sighed the word more than spoke it. “Yes, I know.”

The matron of the house studied her reaction. She had to have been in her early forties, with a refined, windworn look about her face. Crows feet teased at the corners of her eyes, while the tawny brown of her shoulder-length hair was beginning to show traces of gray on and about the widow’s peak. Had her contrary nature and intermittent forgetfulness put those features there?

“Did you forget anything?” her caretaker quickly put in.

Everything, she felt like saying, but shook her head instead.

“Well, that’s good.” She helped the senior settle herself into a chair and went to pour her some broth from the pot. “You’d best eat up, then. We have a long trek ahead of us, and you’re going to need your strength.”

She fought briefly with the spoon before finally succeeding in getting some of the soup and vegetables into her mouth. “Where are we going?”

The woman kept her convalescence, more than aware of her failing mental health. “To the new city, mother. Don’t you remember? There’s a nice scientist waiting for us who can help you with your condition.”

The details of their journey were already forgotten. “Mother? I’m your mother!”

“Yes,” she replied, then added, “I mean no, not technically. You were the mother of the orphanage before we all grew up. You took care of us, and now we’re taking care of you.”

The old woman stared at her for one long, silent moment. “What’s your na--”

“Poline,” was her reply, even before the question was entirely off of her tongue. She knew this game, knew it all too well. Discussion of any kind was always the catalyst, forcing synapses into firing where few were still functional. As a result, the more questions she asked, the more information she forgot. It was an ugly cycle that Poline and the others sought desperately to end. “My name is Poline, mother. Now, please . . .”

“What’s the name of this city we’re going to?”

“What? Well . . . Midgar.”

“What’s my name? And what is this place we’re in? Where is every--”

“Mother.” Poline reached across the table and took the matron’s wrinkled face into both her hands. “You’re confused right now. Okay? And I know that must be very frightening, but none of us are going to give up on you. That’s why we’re taking this trip. Now, drink your soup. Please? For me?”

The woman’s eyes became pleading, even close to tears at having to see one of her oldest friends reduced to this state. The matron at last took her spoon back up, humming with fright and teetering back and forth on her chair as she fought to finish her meal. When it appeared as though the herbs were succeeding in somewhat pacifying her, Poline picked herself up from the table and made way for any sanctuary that didn’t have half-timbered walls.

A little ways away from the house, strewn off to the side of a beaten-down footpath, a herd of chocobos with manes of blue and black warked and scuffed at the ground with quiet impatience. Each one was reined comfortably to a series of tented coaches, where the last of the town’s orphans scuttled back and forth to make certain all of their cargo was secure for the trek. In spite of their mother’s failing health, their spirits were dauntless. Maybe it was just the thrill of finally leaving the nest that excited them so. Poline just couldn’t find it within herself to share in their enthusiasm.

“Watch it with those perishables!” her husband roared at one of the younger ones. “You smash that crate and that’s a day’s worth of rations we’ll be without!”

“Thom, don’t be so hard on them.” She rubbed a hand up against the back of his tunic as he tossed another bedroll into their coach. “Have you forgotten already how the matron used to care for us?”

“Quite the opposite.” He turned back around to face her, his thick peppered beard doing little to mask the sunken tiredness of his face. “The matron is the only mother I ever had, and I don’t want anything to happen to her.”

The troubled look on his face mirrored her own, and for a moment the entropy of the situation made the other orphans stop what they were doing. A simple look from their caravan’s leader sent them all scurrying back to the task at hand.

“I take it from the look on your face,” he said, “that things aren’t going any better between you and her.”

Her bottom lip quivered slightly, but she suppressed it. “We’ll have to leave soon if there’s any hope left of helping her at all. We’ll start out just as soon as I take her up to the cemetery one last time.”

The coldness started to creep back into her husband’s voice. “What possible reason could have have for taking her up there?”

“She asked me once when we were younger that if it ever came down to it and she started to forget the ones she had already buried, I was to take her up there one last time to say goodbye to them.”

Thom smiled, his cold shoulder having suddenly thawed. “Does she remember the promise you made to her?” he asked, not at all sounding bitter or sarcastic.

“I remember,” she told him. “That’s all that matters.”

The afternoon dwindled quickly, with a pale white sun constantly punching at the sullen gray skies but never able to penetrate them. Thom waited down at the base of the promontory while Poline lead their ageless matron arm-in-arm up towards the top of the rockface. At its zenith, small cairns with simple headstones ran in a circle along the verdant ground around them. Wincing slightly from the bitter sting of the wind, the more elderly of the two bent on wounded knee before the marker closest to them.

“I’ve . . .” she began, then closed her eyes as though looking within for the proper memory. “Have I been here before?”

“Many times,” Polina said to her, trying to lighten the emotional blow as much as she could. “Each time another friend leaves for the next world, you say goodbye to them here.”

She could feel the memory. It was close by, with its hand lightly brushing her shoulder but never squeezing it in support. It simply lingered like a shade, only barely conscious of its own existence. The matron’s hand probed the headstone, trying to make out its inscription. Too many decades of wind and erosion wore the cracked tablet thin, the name and epitaph all but erased. Her jittery, palsied fingers skirted lower down the marker, pushing back the dirt and moss where exposure to the elements was lessened. Her nails traced out what words were still readable, and an incalcuable grief abruptly tore at her chest.

. . . pure as snow . . .

“I’m ready to leave now,” she said to Poline without turning to face her.

“Mother?”

“Now!” Sadness cracked her voice.

Thom watched the scene unfold with silent sympathy. When it appeared as though they were through paying their respects, he gave their town one last look. Nature was already laboring overtime to take downwhat was left of the old, two-story townhouses. Most of their foundations bent and leaned at strange angles, with alders and vine already creeping across unswept porches and staring windows. Nothing much remained of it now but memories and soon, he realized, they would fade too.

* * *

Hojo watched with quiet vigil and laced fingers down upon Midgar from the 42nd floor, expecting to see something stew within the milling masses that was worthy of his attention. This floor was, as alleged by the tower’s architects, to be the floor where one could ‘see it all happen’. Not quite near the top nor the bottom, it gave spectators a nominal view of each of the city’s eight sectors without being too far above them to make it all seem frozen in time. Even through the jungle of steel and asphalt that latticed each plate, he could see men walking their dogs in sector five, an old man haggling for produce in sector two, even a lovely, dark-haired girl trying to peddle flowers in sector three. It was, simply put, the perfect place to keep an eye on everything.

So the architects had been right, he thought someone contritely. What of it? It wasn’t as though they had constructed the spire themselves, despite their insistence that they had. Everyone knew the tower had been found abandoned decades ago and that a city grew around it brick by brick ever since. He hated it when others took credit for things which they, themselves, had not achieved.

“Mr. Hojo . . .”

Speak of the devil.

“Mr. President,” he replied, ignoring the fact that he had not been addressed by his official title. “I’m glad that you could see me on such short notice, sir. You have a wonderful view.”

“I haven’t any time for pleasantries, Hojo, I’m a busy man.” Which, thought the doctor, was evident from the man’s rotund waistline and toro-red armani suit. “You’ve done an admirable job with ‘Project: Lifestream’, but now I need to know exactly how plans are proceeding for the protection of our investment.”

Hojo visibly strained against the impulse to hit him. The mako industry had not yet been a decade old and President Shinra was already holding a monopoly over resources which he, himself, had perfected. Once more, he placed his hostilities for this man to one side.

“Yes,” said the doctor, “Of course, your insurance policy. Well sir, competition in the mako field is minimal at the moment, seeing as how all files for mako extraction are under lock and key. And while Turks, practical though they may be . . .”

“Skip to the end, Hojo.”

The doctor nodded. “The plan, sir, is to step mako research up a notch . . . with experimentation on another humanoid.”

President Shinra reacted this time, as though Hojo really had struck him. “That’s a bit of a drastic step to take, given the circumstances. I mean, can those principles really--”

“They can.” Hojo smiled, unfastening the topmost button of his labcoat so that his chest might swell out more easily with pride. “And if all goes the way I think it should, this next one will be ready in a matter of days.”

The president was positively flummoxed. His jowels almost seemed to contract back in along either side of his jaw.

“Is it a he or a she?”

“He,” Hojo repeated. “A very special ‘he’. His primary gestation period has come and gone already. I’m confident that in the next couple of days, we’ll see his power unfold firsthand.”

Contempt burned in President Shinra’s eyes. “And you’ve been holding him back all of this time? My administration needs to be advised of these kind of experiments ahead of time, Mr. Hojo. Any unexpected side effect, even a small one, could compromise everything.”

“I’m aware of the risk, sir.” Across the large panaflex room, two Turks still with their sunglasses on shifted along either side of the door they guarded. “And with all due respect, greatness has subtle beginnings in Midgar. You can rest assured, though, that Project Palazzo will not be a liability to your investment. In fact, he may pleasantly surprise you.”

“It has a name then, does it?”

Hojo beat back a bang of his dark, cropped hair in mild frustration. “Yes sir, he does. It’s customary, after all, for scientists to label their experiments.”

If the doctor had been hoping to elicit another surprised or disgusted look on the president’s face, he would be disappointed. He merely turned on the balls of his leather-clad feet for the exit while the two Turks held the large double doors open for him.

“If I regret this, you regret this Hojo,” he replied over his shoulder. “And I’ll have that ‘project’ of yours put down like a rabid dog.”

Hojo wouldn’t let his closing remark faze him. He merely returned his gaze back to the cluttered throughfares and seething smokestacks of downtown Midgar.

“Not likely,” he replied calmly to his reflection.

* * *

“Are we close?”

Poline frowned at the young boy’s question, having heard it being asked at least three times a day for four days straight. Having to endure the nettlesome rationing of sundried preserves as well as the scorching touch of a crimson sun made it all the more difficult to tolerate. Thom strode aside her in the coach at her left flank, breaking the monotony of squeaky axles and trotting hooves whenever it was the inevitable question arose.

“We’ll get there when we get there, Jacob,” he barked without turning askance from the trail ahead. “The city’s not going anywhere.”

The tarpaulin of the wagon behind him was suddenly pulled to one side, revealing a plump young girl with olive skin. “Uncle Thom! It’s the matron! She’s not well!”

Both coaches ground to a dusty halt, with Poline already up over the stage and crawling in behind her husband in frenzied distress. The matron rested as comfortably as she could in a bedroll aboard a constantly shaking wagon, only now she seemed comfortable enough to be comatose. Thom checked for breath. Then, for a pulse.

“Get back!” he told the others, pulling the worn leather jacket from his shoulders and bunching it into a crude pillow beneath her head. “Poline, get some remedy!”

Bodies moved around him in a confusing waltz as the bearded townsman fought death itself to spare his surrogate mother. He pushed a solid breath in through her lungs, then several stern axehandles down upon her chest. When he found that his actions were for naught, he repeated them with a longer, more desperate momentum. From somewhere nearby, he could hear sniffles and strangled sobbing. He couldn’t be certain if it was some other orphaned child or himself letting emotions get the better.

“Confound it all! Don’t you leave us yet!” Poline was back by his side with a bottle of dark fluid clutched in her hands, hands which now trembled no less than their matron’s did on the best of days. “We still have a debt to repay to you! Don’t do this to us!”

At last, her withered eyes flung open, with century-old lungs sucking in dry, stapled breaths. Relief washed over as Thom and Poline sat her up on the cushion, spoon-feeding her serum which would help to preserve her life for several more days.

“Mother?! Speak!” Poline touched her shoulders, searching the vacant stare for some sign of recognition. “Give us some sign that you’re okay, please!”

“Matron?”

The matron stared, as though noticing the man for the first time, then relinquished the stare in bitter defeat. Angered, Thom stormed back out over the stage, his patience in the whole ordeal worn to its breaking point.

“Stay with her,” Poline told the others.

Heading out herself, she found him standing some yards away, out upon a cleft ridge of rock that looked out over the grassy valley below. Even from a distance, she could make out the gleam of a small, silver flask that juggled to and fro between his hands.

“You promised me you were going to quit,” she said, not moving from her spot.

“Same as I promised her,” he replied, his face torn by guilt and sorrow. When at last he turned around, his smile was almost transparent. “Guess I was just hoping you’d have forgotten as well.”

“Come on, Thom. Don’t be like that.” She went to his side, taking the hand that wasn’t currently holding the flask. “The day was going to come sooner or later. We should have been preparing for it.”

“I don’t want her to leave until we’ve had the chance to repay her, to give her back the memories she’s lost. It’s the least we can do for all she gave of herself for our well-being.”

“You’re not telling us anything we don’t already know, Thom. But we don’t have control over these kind of things. No matter what we do, these may very well be her last days.” She sat down upon the outcropped stone, legs hanging out over the precipice. “I blame myself, really. The second we caught wind of Gast’s research on memory retrieval, we should have made tracks for Midgar. Now, we may be too late.”

Thom had had similar sentiments as to their delayed departure, though decided it was best not to say anything about it. There’d have been no way to voice such frustration as his anyway. Most all of what was left of their legacy was drifting lazily along each of the eight winds now, holding no ties with their past whatsoever. His marriage with Poline, while never unhappy or heated, bore them no children. And now his caretaker, the only mother he had ever known and only connection any of them had with the past, was about to leave forever.

Their legacy was about to end, and there was no feeling in the world quite so intimidating.

“Are we close?” Thom heard himself say.

Poline squinted at the relentless light of the horizon, trying to gauge distance in the wake of the failing sunset. Against the disparity of coming dusk, she glimpsed what appeared to be a large spire, eclipsed with gray mist. Crouching low to the rockface, she could start to make out the four pronged logo of Midgar’s epicenter of operations.

Shinra.

“We’re pretty close,” she assured him, heading back for the coaches.

* * *

The journey weary caravan hadn’t come within half a mile of the gargantuan city of metal before they took notice of the sky darkening. Still mid morning, this came as unusual to both Poline and Thom - until the smog and reactor emissions brought about fits of uncontrolled coughing from the group. Thom stopped his animals in mid gallop for one brief moment, his head sinking into his lap as he shifted the keffyieh around his neck to cover his mouth and nose. He called out to the others to do the same.

“And make sure those tarps are stretched tightly across the coach!” he called to Poline, voice muffled beneath a thin film of bandana. “I don’t want the Matron breathing in any of those fumes until we’re well beyond the outskirts of Midgar!”

“Do you think that will really make any difference?” Face partially obscured by the sky blue of her own keffyieh, Poline joined her husband on the ground as they moved to walk their beasts the rest of the way to the city threshold. “It could only be worse as we go further and further into Midgar.”

“I know,” Thom said to her. “Wouldn’t that be the day? If time doesn’t take the Matron Mother from us, a couple polluted byways could.”

“We don’t have to settle for this place, you know.” She regarded her husband admiringly out of the corner of one eye, unable to turn entirely away from the sheer size of Midgar’s entryway. “The inhabitants of Cosmo Canyon are well-known for their herbal medicine. They may be able to help better than Midgar can.”

Thom’s eyes watered slightly in the wake of airborne toxins. “That’s too far to the west of us. The Matron may not have that long. No, this place is her last hope.”

And so, they pushed on.

Entry into the vast, sprawling metropolis was no trouble for them. Still a city in need of expansion in its many employment sectors and para military branches, considerable bodies of men and women still commuted into the city each week. Rumor had it that once Midgar’s need for populace was met, it would effectively end its open-door policy. As of yet, no such problem existed. The first ten feet of Midgar was evidence of the contrary for Thom. People were everywhere in those dimly lit streets, clogging up commons and throughfares, some with large crates held aloft over their heads, others uttering profanity behind the wheels of cars as they made their way across the sector - all of them faceless and in desperate need of retreating from wherever it was they were. The sun, they were all quick to realize, suddenly vanished from the sky. The first thing to cross Poline’s mind was that they were having an eclipse, until the clamor on the plate above theirs told them otherwise.

“This place is a zoo,” she said, unsettled by the scheme of the place. “How are we supposed to find anyone in this mess, much less a doctor?”

“Keep watch over the wagons for a moment.” So replying, Thom handed the reins over to his wife before crossing the street they were on. The first one he was able to single out among the masses was an oriental man on the corner trying to sell poultry. “Excuse me . . .”

The short, beady-eyed man reared upon Thom in an instant, holding up a grilled chicken as though it were his most prized possession and gibbering in a thick Wutai dialect that was practically incomprehensible.

“Twenty-five gil!” was the only thing spoken which Thom could readily understand. “Buy or go!”

The aroma of the roasted meat threatened to seduce the plainsman, but his concerns came back to the enfeebled woman waiting for him in his coach. “I don’t want any chicken. I’m looking for sector seven. Do you know how to get there?”

“Want pheasant?” The vendor put the headless bird back on the rack and starting waving a slightly smaller one out at Thom. “Have pheasant! I sell for twenty gil! Buy or go!”

“No!” Thom growled, losing his resolve. “Not pheasant! Seven! Do you know how to get to sector seven?”

He was about to try and articulate each syllable when the sound of a gunshot had him scrambling for cover. Seething hot steam shot out from a flow valve just about the Wutain’s stall, causing dozens of passersby to scream and push each other out of the way. The vendor tossed the dead pheasant to one side and, with wrench suddenly in hand, he jumped up on a stool and started tweezing the manifold shut again. Thom used the opportunity to slink away from the picture and back to where the others waited for him.

“Seems like info comes in small doses around here!” He climbed back about his wagon, untying his keffyieh in order to sop up the sweat that had since begun to bullet across his forehead. “Unless it’s bought or bartered for, it doesn’t exist.”

Poline bit her lip in thought. “Maybe we could barter with the chocobos. That would probably get us as far as Hojo.”

“No!” cried out of the younger ones inside the coach. “You can’t give Boco away! We’re friends!”

“Doria, I told you to keep those tarps closed! The matron can’t breath in these fumes!”

Eyes wreathed in tears, she did as she was told. Thom and his wife exchanged a desperate glance as the harsh, frenzied ambience of the sector buzzed and flitted all around them.

“What do you think?”

The inquiring stare Poline afforded him only seemed to deflect Thom’s question back at him. Unbeknownst to either of them, across the square and staring out with his only remaining eye from a shadowed alleyway, one lone Avalanche member heard everything. The ocular lens in his blue looking glass zoomed in upon the two weary-looking travelers. No one traveled anywhere by caravan nowadays, not in this golden age of automobiles and airships. From the state of their clothes and the shoddy workmanship of their wagons, he was able to put two and two together for himself. The right people . . .

But atrocious timing.

“Maybe there’s a pawn shop around here somewhere.” Thom pulled his packsack over a shoulder as he readied himself to do some more exploring. “You and the others should find an inn somewhere until I get some more information.”

“No,” Poline told him, “I’m staying with you.”

The one-eyed Avalancher skirted hastily across the square, shoving people aside unceremoniously in the process. Panic seized him. Was she aboard one of those coaches? The blast would surely kill her if that were so, and steadily his pace quickened.

“Poline, it wouldn’t be safe for the little ones, or the matron. We have to think about them.”

The once-passive observer jumped over a fruit stand, littering produce and several patrons onto the cobbled square as he was going. His heart thundered in his chest. Very close, now. But close, he knew, only counted with horseshoes and hand grenades. If he failed her now, if he failed ‘them’ now . . .

Thom turned in his place, his wife’s heated arguing momentarily forgotten. Squinting, he was barely able to make out a dark-haired man with a patch over one eye cutting an anxious sway through the populace, beelining straight for them.

He spoke without turning. “Honey?”

“. . .and die and we wouldn’t even know what happened to you!” She momentarily put her lecture on hold. “What! What is it?”

But by then, the Avalancher had already caught up with them. Chest heaving, his words came out mostly as a series of harsh exhaling. “Thom . . . and Poline . . . I presume?”

They looked at each other, then back at the man.

“How do you know our names?”

Without answering, he was already pulling Thom’s knapsack off and putting it back inside the coach. “There’s no time to explain! We have to get moving! This whole square is rigged to explode in less than a minute!”

“What?”

But Thom had seen enough of Midgar in the last ten minutes alone to question the man. He appeared easily ten years older than either of them and his face, while somewhat drawn and grisled, was just as sharp and notched as any sword. He pushed his way onto the coach with Poline, ordering for Thom to keep up.

“Hey! But wait! Who are you? Where are we going?”

The next moment or so passed by in a blur. The coach ahead steared its rickety way into an alley adjacent to them and was then dipping violently downwards as though over a steep ravine. The chocobos whinnied along the riven gravel path but stormed ahead all the same. Ahead of him, barely perceptible but nonetheless present, he could see their one-eyed assailant checking a bright green palm pilot where a figure was gradually recycling to extinction: three . . . two . . . one . . .

“Hold on!”

A fierce blast of hot air and white flame lashed at the tunnel walls, with force enough to rip the shaft from the earth completely. Frenzied screams and panicked warking followed for at least a whole minute afterwards, then a perplexing silence took lease over the cavernous recesses. Throughout it all, the one-eyed Avalancher stared with his one eye at the destruction he had wrought upon his adoptive city. Dozens, if not hundreds, would be dead. Half a city block would be decimated.

And Shinra would be one step closer in understanding her desire for peace.

* * *

Her desire for peace.

The matron could barely recall ever having put up the fight in the first place. Scarce could she be certain even of the jarring explosion that had rocked the coach surrounding her, even though it had been less than ten minutes ago. All she could be sure of now was whatever she could cling to or, as was the case for the sobbing, screaming children bouncing around the wagon, whatever it was that clung to her. She patted them reassuringly, able to somehow sense doing it before at some point but never fully capable of determining exactly when or with whom.

Minutes started to pass her by, with each one as new and undiscovered to her as the one which had come before it. The chaos which had eclipsed the minds of the younger ones in her midst began to find comfort beyond the dim echo of the passing explosion. The matron yearned for sleep, for some place where she might be unfettered from her undying state.

Death, the great release, was often compared to a journey, and the journey to a train. She strained visibly to recall the tale. Detached though she might have been from her memories, her guardians had spoon-fed her the parable of that train since she was old enough to walk. Surely, she could remember something as innocuous as the name of a train, of the vessel of souls to the next life...

. . . Phantom Train . . .

A chill suddenly filled her coach. She couldn’t be sure, but somewhere, she felt a train derail.

* * *

As the thoughts of a long-forgotten savior drifted, the plates dividing sectors six and seven trembled with a forsaken and terrible power. The first district to feel it was the commons. Vagabonds and blue-collar commuters were quick to dismiss the racket as an imbalance of mako extraction. It was the way in which the Golden Age of materia typically worked, as most any wonder or oddity nowadays could be directly explained (and easily dismissed) through mako. Out with the old and in with the new. It was ever the cyclic way of things, vastly unpredictable and yet equally organic.

An unbroken cycle, until that very moment.

The explosion rocked the boundaries of the two sectors down to their very foundations, ripping apart and vaporizing a large swath of sterile earth amidst heaps of metal scraps and rusted out locomotive husks. The infamous Train Graveyard of Midgar was momentarily awash with the color of lifestream as the riven landscape fought the uphill battle to heal itself. As it did so, tendrils of the mystic radiance started to weave together an amorphous shape within the terran geyser of power. Points of light and energy danced and converged, filling a suddenly humanoid form with mass - and then, volume. Iron boot heels only recently remade stepped out into the ashen ground, leaving a set of flaming red footprints in their wake.

Color soon joined with the empty vessel, as every conceivable tint of unrefined mako filled the empty recess: a cascade of curled amber locks reigned together, commanding the form’s once-naked scalp; the gleam of ruby summoned life anew to its eyes, fanning out into a rictus jester grin across its pale face; and finally, lifestream itself swirled in a wide arch around the man’s sculpted physique - sheltering him, completing him.

He looked around.

Memory was not so quick to reshape itself in the resurrected man’s mind. Only half a thought, less than a spark enfeebled by cold shadow, would surface. Warcries - a battle! Yes. One veiled by thunder and darkness. What had become of him after that battle? The last thing he could remember seeing was some dressed-down relic hunter leaping into the air and lashing him across the midsection with a blade of golden light. The jester man winced inwardly, as though the sword still pierced his side. Could that miscreant still be around here somewhere? Could they all still be around here somewhere?

He took several more cautious steps towards one of the abandoned railway cars. It sparked nothing. Just a railcar. His eyes ventured, then, further away from the graveyard, noticing for the first time labyrinthine grids of metal gangways and python-like conduits which snaked down through the earth he stood upon.

Who could make such a nightmare of this land before he had a chance to?

“Shhhh, don’t give us away.”

The blond man stiffened, feeling his joints creak for the first time. It seemed like decades had gone by since last he had used them.

“Okay, okay. But I got dibs on his cloak.”

He pivoted, spinning on the balls of his feet. Those voices. Where were they coming from? What did they want from him? Realization seized his bones. The Returners. They were still here, ready to finish the task they had started!

A stray body suddenly flung itself at him, knocking him off balance. A second and third followed suit, bearing down hard with punching fists and stinging daggers.

“Looks like you caught a train into the wrong part of town, stranger!” one of them jeered, earning him fits of laughter from the man and woman in his company. “But that cloak and those boots could buy you another day’s impunity!”

The painted man puzzled over this statement. Maybe it was just dark. Maybe he was under one of their spells. Maybe the destruction he had wrought upon this world had been so great that his enemies were far worse off that he had realized. Assassins and plunderers, however, the Returners were not. Something was amiss . . .

“You will fail,” he warned them, face twisted with rage, “Just like you failed the first time.”

An amused confusion settled over the faces of his three assailants. The woman, her own face partially obscured by shadow, spoke first. “If we had jumped a circus freak like you before, I’m sure we would have remembered.”

“Yeah, really,” the third chipped in. “Kinda hard to forget a face as ugly as yours.”

The jester was suddenly smiling. Because he knew. He could suddenly make out the forest from the trees. These were not Returners. They may have been suffering from the same deplorable fashion sense, but they were nothing other than vagrants - directionless, with no power to call their own. As if to demonstrate, he took hold of the blade held firmly against his throat and pulled it back with little or no effort. His attacker tried forcing the dagger back down again, an effort which split the blond man’s face not in agony but with laughter.

Shrill, piercing laughter.

“Grab ‘em!”

Vision blurred in the wake of the jester man’s agility. Blinded by his own forward momentum, the thief who had first accosted the former tyrant felt his knife stray from target and disappear harmlessly into the dirt beside them. No time was wasted, as he then seized the vagrant into a vice-like headlock and hoisted him up off the ground. His legs flailed, sending a kick crashing into the face of each of his two accomplices and knocking them backwards. Reclaiming the lost knife, the jester straightened his helpless attacker with a hair-pull and slashed his throat out from under the jaw. A spout of crimson gore spewed out, killing the man where he stood.

This, thought the blond man with a hum of bliss, was sparking something.

The second of his male attackers roared and charged, wielding what appeared to be miniature pickaxes. He shook his head. His swipes were frenzied and chaotic, driven more out of hatred than any desire for striking true. He skirted left, then right, then left again. Not a single swipe found its mark. Finally, the sardonic looking clown locked wrists when the blades came around the next time, keeping the bloodthirsty man in his place. Spinning out and then away, he inverted the hold and jumped. A wretched cracking sound, joined with the roars of anguish, rent the air as the man’s kneecaps shattered from the kick. With the grace of a trapeze artist, he flipped over the now-genuflected man - the pickaxes suddenly under his control.

Each one found their mark - into the man’s eye sockets.

The lone woman of their company, now all that was left, saw not one second of the carnage unfold. She lay a little ways away from the jester’s meddling, spread-eagled beside the remnants of a long-defunct diesel engine. Tears courses from her eyes, blood from her nostrils. It was everything she could do not to scream as she heard her companions become undone. She cried out for her mother, needing her now more than ever.

“Oh mother, I’m sorry . . .” A set of cold, tight hands made their way up across her face, smeaing the blood into a mask of horror. She willed herself not to look up at the man. “I’ll come home, I’ll be good from now on. Please help me . . .”

Caustic chuckling was the only answer she would receive. This time, she couldn’t help but look up. He was there, upon her, with a look like fast culminating ecstacy rippling across his red/white face. Cold terror creeped up her spine.

“NAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH–!!!!!”

Snap!

* * *

Kefka lingered for the briefest of moments, nursing the dead, gory face between his palms, delighting in its clammy, bloody texture. Delighting in its lifelessness, in nothingness.

“Still got it.”

* * *

Curiosness snaked back around the matron’s world less than an hour later, and by then the steady gallop of their beasts had slowed to a trot. Up front, hushed, friendly words could be heard being exchanged between Poline and their one-eyed savior, pleasantries and explanations she would undoubtably forget before their trek ended. Her left side started to cramp up from lying in such a fashion for a prolonged period of time. The movement to try and reorient herself got the attention of several orphans nearby, who were quickly stirred into assisting her.

“I think she’s coming around,” Doria called out to the drivers of their coach.

“Let her know we’ll be there shortly.” Poline pulled the flap tight, so that none of the little ones would hear her. “Not that she’ll really remember being told in the first place.”

“I must apologize for the deception,” Tedrin remarked without looking at her. “You and your caravan have been through too much to be lead around by people like myself.”

“So, professor Hojo never had any intention of helping us, did he?” Poline’s eyes strayed across the slums of Midgar, given an all too painful reminder of the place they had once called home. “Tedrin?”

“No.” Seeing an ailing child out of the corner of his one remaining eye, he smiled and tossed her the Heal materia he had looted from a brothel owner in sector four. She giggled and catched it. “Hojo’s only passion is whatever specimen he works to perfect. He cares nothing for the troubles of others.”

“So, does that also mean there’s no treatment for the matron’s condition?” At a place where the slum roads started to fork out, Thom finally found leverage enough to pull out beside them. “Hey!”

“Sorry,” said the Avalancher, gyrating so as to acknowledge the plainsman. “My hearing isn’t so good in this ear.”

“A treatment!” he growled. “Is there one waiting for her?”

Tedrin was taken aback somewhat from the villager’s hostility. He wasn’t sure whether to consider it good or bad, whether their concern for the matron was genuine or just so overbearing that it would become a liability to her treatment.

“I wouldn’t invite harm to a former savior of this world unless I knew for sure I could assist her. She means as much to me as she does to you.” Taking the reins from his wife, Tedrin spurred their wagon to a slow gallop along down the westernmost route. “Go out on a limb of faith every once in a while, sir. You’d be surprised as to what kind of allies you stand to gain from the deal.”

“It’s hard to go out on a limb of faith,” Thom replied, “when a city starts blowing up less than ten minutes after you set foot into it.”

Several minutes of the quest passed by in blissful silence, as husband, wife, and their adoptive children took in the sight of the squalid landscape. Truth be told, however, there was little for them to see in the slums. No willow groves or wooded glens, no affordable tract housing or modestly kept piers overlooking any bodies of water. Just darkness and noise. The occasional playground would get passed by, though no children could be seen playing there. Every ten minutes or so, the roar of an L-train would careen across the wire-mesh platforms above, causing rails to thunder and halogens to flare out in static bursts overhead.

“Yes,” said Tedrin, finally reacting to the auger-like stare he was getting from Thom. “I understand how unorthodox our methods must sound to you. We steal, we rig things to explode, we work in concealment. But these are unorthodox times we live in, and our enemies are ignorance personified. That is the reason we do what we do - that, and it’s for the children.”

“The children?” Poline asked, sounding confused.

He nodded, giving one of their black beasts a kick into its piscine hindquarter when it seemed about to tire. “I can’t be sure of it yet, but your matron may be key to putting an end to all of this. Many of the early settlers of this city were brought up by your matron. But before she was mother to Midgar’s ancestors, she was a great soldier. It was a whole other lifetime ago, in the battle of Judgment’s End.”

A moment passed as the facts set in. Poline broke the silence first. “I’ve heard tell of that battle when I was young. It was believed to have happened before the orphanage was even founded. But she never spoke of having been a participant in the battle.”

“Most heroes and heroines tend to leave those details out in their old age. It’s the anecdote itself which a listener tends to relate to, not the one who swings the sword.”

“Enlightening,” said Thom, sounding anything but enlightened. “But it’s got to be something more than filial piety which drove you to help our mother. Is there something Avalanche would stand to gain from giving the matron those memories back?”

Poline bristled. “Thom!”

But Tedrin silenced her with a single upraised finger. “You’re a sharp one, plainsman. Yes, as a devout Avalancher, there are certain boons which your mother’s memory can yield for us. But not just for us. For all of Midgar. A tyrant in his twisted little tower was brought down by your matron a very long time ago. We hope that with her knowledge and understanding of that battle renewed, history may repeat itself.”

“Your quest for peace,” Thom bit back, “comes from a parable. It has no basis in reality.”

Off to Tedrin’s left side, Poline gave a harsh sigh of impatience. The Avalancher’s lunatic calm couldn’t be broken, however, as his bearded face craned high towards the harsh, moonless night of Midgar. Only barely visible, he could nonetheless make out the high rounded dome of Shinra tower in the smoggy distance.

“A parable,” thought Tedrin aloud, “from which no one learns the moral to.”

* * *

“Ever see anything like this before?”

Rosalind fought to get past the lump which had since begun to form in her throat. She had not been a graduate of Wutai a week, and already her trial mission as a Turk had her dealing with a forensic’s worst nightmare. Neither Rude nor Tseng had any information of the murders waiting for her, as she was meant to dissect and analyze the crime scene for the finer details herself. All the same, steeling herself for the hands-on training of this job was not the easy task she had originally made it out to be.

“Hey!”

Reno shook her, his expression seemingly strangled between amusement and sincerity.

“Yes,” she finally answered. “It’s just, well, it’s a bit different from what they teach you at the institute. I’m not use to this level of . . . blood.”

If Rosalind was expecting to receive any sympathy at this juncture, she would be disappointed. Reno was the type of colleague whereby appearance was actually an outward reflection of his own mischievous nature. The shock of his uncharacteristically red hair was impossible to ignore or predict, running and crashing in confused waves atop his scalp. The bemusement of his expression seemed as every bit set into his face as facets to a gem, never able to take real-life scenarios for anything other than face value. And yet, he was still somehow able to get through each mission the president entrusted them with.

“Every day’s a new adventure in Midgar, isn’t it?”

She nodded, then looked out across the area where other Turks were busy snapping photographs and questioning material witnesses. Though pretty much a no-traveled area for a very long time, Rude still considered it as prudent a precaution as any to cordon off the entire Train Graveyard out of fear their man was still nearby. Given the state of his victims, letting a psychopath such as this one drop below their radar was simply not an option.

“So who dunnit?” Reno heckled Rosalind over one shoulder.

“Huh?”

“The perp?” Reno pushed his goggles back up along his forehead. “Any leads, any theories?”

“My theory,” said Rude over his shoulder, “is that our greenhorn is going to be popping you one in the chops if you don’t shut up and let her do her job.”

“What?” The red-haired grease monkey straightened, shrugging as though trying to fool someone who didn’t know better. “Merely putting our newbie through the paces, making her feel like part of the team and all that.”

“She’s more a part of the team than you are, Reno.” He clicked another snapshot of the body who had its eyes punctured through with pickaxes, then swiveled her blond head part way around to face him. “She actually works.”

Reno made a face, one that was entirely un-Turk-like, before skirting off to see if he could find another partner to annoy. Rude crouched down beside Rosalind, who seemed very distant from the whole scene around her.

“Don’t pay any mind to him,” he said. “He’s always been a bit of a troublemaker.”

“The flesh around this wound has been cauterized.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Right here.” Hands coated with latex gloves, she gestured towards the ruined man’s throat. “The edges of the torn flesh became scorched when the blade came through. And yet the skin was neither blackened nor desiccated. The heat might have been generated by mako usage.”

“So our killer is a materia user. That’s great. We’ve narrowed the list of suspects so far to about three quarters of the entire Midgar populace.” Rosalind seemed visibly shaken from Rude’s reaction, and he quickly softened. “No kiddo, that’s not what I meant . . .”

But Rosalind only shrugged. “Just trying to make myself useful.”

“Hey!”

Both heads of blond hair twirled at Reno’s shouting as they rose to join him on the scene of the second homicide. The victim’s upper face was horribly disfigured by his own blades, jaws locked open in the throes of death. It seemed somehow wrong to Rosalind that he should be jumping about and patting himself on the back from finding evidence around a man who had obviously suffered a very violent death. Then again, she had to remind herself that it was an Avalancher. They all were.

“What is it?”

“Looks like our guilty party is either a very snappy dresser or one of old Don Corneo’s henchmen.” He was handed a latex glove, but Reno waved it away - choosing to handle it with his bare hands. “Look at this guy’s threads here: red; yellow; green. Guess victim number two took a couple clumps out of his attire while trying to fight him off. Could give us the edge we need to capture this clown.”

Rosalind ignored the Turk’s sudden breach of protocol, instead becoming intrigued with their topic of discussion. “Why bother stopping this person at all, then? Clearly, he or she has their sight set on doing away with Avalanchers. Maybe we have ourselves an ally.”

“Or maybe a couple middle-class mutilations are just the tip of the iceberg for this creep.” A couple yards away, Rude pushed back a mane of non-existent hair as he draped the last black tarp over a bloodied teenage girl. “No, we have to apprehend this one at all costs.”

“That’s no longer possible.”

And then, everyone’s head turned. A stalwart and fearless leader in many a desperate moment, Tseng now seemed quiet and resigned, eyelids half veiled in defeat. Gloved hands, once clutching a PHS in vehement verbal sparring, now moved to reorient the jet black of his ponytail. The habit did not go unnoticed by the senior Turks; they knew it was more than just an upset he was feeling at that moment.

“Sir?” Rosalind’s voice pleaded.

“I just got off the horn with Verdot,” he told them collectively. “The investigation is closed until further notice.”

Reno only needed a second to mull over the contradictory nature of their orders. “But we were only just assigned this task. Why would the president rescind those orders after just giving them?”

“I’m willing to bed it was Hojo,” Tseng said to her. “He tends to have his fingers in a lot of what goes on in this city.”

“Hojo?” said Reno, bristling. “Who died and made him coroner?”

“That’s irrelevant, Reno. All that matters is our reassignment. A serum was stolen from a Shinra laboratory recently by an Avalanche faction, believed to have been smuggled over into the sector seven slums. Hojo has ordered for us to return the serum to his lab at all costs. Rosalind, you and Reno were my first choice for this mission. Can I count on you?”

“Yes, sir! Absolutely!”

Her superior seemed ambivalent as to her eagerness to take on the assignment, as though he was hoping for them all to throw down their shades and mutiny as one against Verdot. Tseng mentally shook the thought free. He must have really been someone else this evening.

“Very well, then. You leave right away. Call as soon as you’ve recovered the serum. And please . . .” Tseng plucked the red and green fabrics from Reno’s hand, testing it for substance. “No talking to strangers in cheap clothing.”

* * *

Pathetic.

He had not stalked about these avenues an hour, and the insects which flitted about him were as every bit complacent and convinced of their own security as they were when he had held them under his own thumb. Who cared if they were not the Returners he may have earlier mistaken them for? They were of their ilk all the same, having spewed above ground from their ghetto havens and formed a city at the site of his own undoing as testament to their power. Kefka’s nose twisted up in revulsion as he shouldered his way past. They stunk of sweat and grime, their disposition hanging like milestones around all their necks.

It was of little consequence. Whether a corporate HR or a sector five slum lord, all would fall by his blade. It was all of question of finding the right blade for the task.

He spoke to no one, as speech would only lower him to their level. He would not dignify their existence by humoring them with a tourist inquisition. Rather, he would get the info he so desperately sought through fear: one alleyway; one stealthy pounce; one hapless victim at a time. He was surprised at how easy the task had since become. Eyes alight with flame, the shady streetwalkers and stonefaced muggers alike fell to his feet in mere minutes. Each one, overcome by the trepidation of the moment, poured heartfelt confessions, promises of wealth and luxury, anything it took to see tomorrow. Only when he was able to strangle the scattered direction from them did he finish them off.

In a city ruled by fear, any could monopolize it - if one were so inclined.

So it was that Kefka moved unimpeded across Midgar, around street corners, over the screaming trams, the bridges, the plates, the sectors . . . to this place.

He regarded it from a distance at first, busying himself in the flagstone street to rinse the caked-on blood from his face in the gently falling rain. The four-story building was in no less a state of disrepair as any other he had since come across in this city: half boarded up; pieces of the fire escape either in ruins or missing altogether; and fluorescent lighting on the inside that couldn’t decide whether they wanted to be on or off. Expression unreadable, except by the red/white tint of his skin, Kefka allowed himself in.

“We’re closed, stranger,” said a bald and portly arms dealer behind his counter, securing a lock on his cashbox and throwing a moth-eaten coat over his shoulder.

“Your last customer,” he said somewhat cryptically, “I guarantee it.”

The dealer paused briefly, sighed, and cracked his cashbox open again. “Fine, let’s make this as painless as possible then.”

“I will try.”

“What are you looking for?”

“A weapon,” Kefka told him outright, eyes wandering around the shop. Pikes, halberds, flails, falchions, many which the former general was intimately familiar with. Others were new, a handful of them giving off preternatural glows on the many shelves and racks surrounding him. “Something stout and lightweight, something that won’t notch or need sharpening after getting knocked around a lot.”

“Claymore or short sword might be your best bet.” The dealer spoke with the chafed tones of a warhorse, the words having rolled off his tongue entirely too many times before. Every customer to plod in through that door, whether some slipshod rookie or chiseled veteran, sought the same thing in a weapon. Lightweight and durable. “Two-handed blades aren’t the bestsellers they used to be around here.”

Kefka nodded, considering this a moment. “Any rapiers or sabers, something that can incise or has a sawtooth edge to it?”

The shopkeeper tried to smile. “Planning to dissect something?”

“If necessary.”

The sincerity of Kefka’s reply chilled him, so he tried to offset the anxiety with as professional sounding an answer as he could manage. “We had some scimitars of that design once, imported from Mideel. They sold out this afternoon. If you’d like, I could put your name down for pre-order.”

“I don’t have that kind of time.” Eyes still adrift, he finally came across a particular piece of inventory that peaked his interest considerably. Somewhat rusted, the prismed blade was marked with a string of arcane glyphs in its broadside, glyphs Kefka recognized a mile away. And it hung just overhead! “Is that . . . a Runic Blade?”

“You have a real eye for swords, pal.” He took it down off the shelf and handed it to him. “They sure don’t make ‘em like that anymore.”

Kefka tested the weight of the weapon, giving it a few expert twirls before noticing several hollowed out grooves cut into the metal of the blade. “What are these for?”

With each minute that passed speaking to this individual, the arms dealer was finding it more and more difficult to know what to make of him. “You born on a farm or something, son? Those are materia slots. You junction materia to each slot to unlock its innate mako potential. Of course, mako logists didn’t have blades of that caliber in mind when giving it slots for Materia. Everyone who’s picked that weapon up has never been able to–”

The dealer was suddenly beside himself, as he saw each glyph radiate with power in turn. Kefka exhaled from the strength the weapon gave him. Murder alone was enough to breed familiarity within him. But this was something else, some sensation above and beyond anything he had hitherto felt. The power of a Runic Knight rekindled - with an added bonus.

“Do what?” Kefka asked of the man’s unspoken question. “Wield a Runic Blade? Has it really become so uncommon in this day and age?”

“Who are you?” the man asked.

“One like yourself should not go about asking questions if they’re not ready for answers. Are you sure you’re ready for a little premature enlightenment?”

Prepared or not, the dealer nonetheless received it - through the gullet, out along the back, hoisting him up off the floor until he stopped twitching. Only one such as himself, a general to an Empire which history had long since turned its back to, knew the nature of this mythical weapon. For he was among the first to receive training for such a blade, training which had first costed him his sanity. So deep did those ties run, Kefka never took notice of the emerald glow of a materia orb leaving the dead dealer’s capsized pocket until it touched his boot heel.

“Well now,” said the jester man, securing the orb into one of the blade’s new slots. “When in Midgar . . . best to equip oneself.”

Merely making contact with the unremarkable green sphere unlocked the urge to sizzle, scathe, and reduce to cinders whatever it was that stood against him. It was nothing he hadn’t been able to call into being before. Clipped to a Runic warrior’s weapon, however, made the sensation almost everlasting, that his adversaries would never stop smoldering, that the boundaries between him and the world would be reduced to ash.

And so, they were.

Nothing remained of the arms dealer’s armory, erupting as it did in a hail of glass and stone shrapnel. The magically generated inferno soared and fought tirelessly against the night rain as a humanoid form, seemingly sculpted out of pure hellfire, strode calmly from the scene. As it did so, each trace of the caustic orange sorcery danced away from the destruction it had wrought, curtsying on the moist Midgar air, returning to the blade from whence it had come.

* * *

“We’re here.”

Thom and Poline reined each wagon to a standstill. So akin was one part of the sector seven slums to the other that it seemed to each of the pioneers that they had traveled nowhere at all. How it was this Tedrin person had found his way around in the maze-like squalor of Midgar neither could guess. Thom was the first to assume it must have been some brand of technology either invented or stolen by Avalanche which made the going that much more easier. The more time which passed in the presence of these pyromaniacal freedom fighters, the more Thom found himself questioning their true intentions - to say nothing about the Matron’s own past.

“This place?” Down over a shallow knoll of dead earth lay a series of battered townhouses, each one no more than a story or two high. Some appeared to be assembled out of still recognizable automobile and airship components. Other appeared skeletal, unmanned as though waiting to be torn down. Of a sudden, Poline felt the chill of yesterday start to seep back into her pores. “It feels like the place we left behind us.”

Tedrin payed their observations no mind, intent instead on getting their precious cargo to safety. Poline felt the coach jostle somewhat as the Avalancher’s weight left the stage. Dusting off the pate from their hasty travels, Tedrin faded back into the rear of the rickety transport and threw back the tarpaulin. The sage-looking woman appeared rattled from the trek, but otherwise unharmed. The younger, dark-haired passengers of the wagon started to react as Tedrin hoisted the Matron up into his arms but Thom kept them at bay with soft words and tight embraces.

“Where are you taking her?” the one Tedrin learned was Doria demanded of them.

“Less questions,” he shouted, spiriting the old woman off towards a shadowed, ramshackle hut into the distance. “Just keep up.”

It was a two-story housing, though most of the upper level looked to have been sheered away either by some gale hailstorm or construction mishap. Through one of the grimy, barred-up windows, Poline saw a buzzcut youth in his late teens running for the door - or rather, the environmentally friendly Shinra billboard which passed for a door. A small strip of the entrance vanished, replaced with the teen’s incriminating stare.

“What’s the password?” he asked when Tedrin huffed to a halt.

“Courage.” And the door swung open.

“Is she the one, then?” the teenager asked, suddenly rapt.

“We’ll find out in a moment.” Tedrin gave him a look, motioning with his head. The teen nodded, pushing the nearby table out of the way. “Has there been any word from our mole in Junon?”

“None as of yet.” The youth, whom Thom and the others took to be Tedrin’s protege, pushed old cushions and daveys together to make the matron as comfortable as possible. “We got on the horn with Barret over at sector three and were told that she reached Junon without incident. What’s become of her since . . .”

“She’ll succeed,” Tedrin assured him, gloved hands fumbling with the combination lock of a nearby safe. “She has to. It’s the only way to provide the distraction we need to get her to the president and talk some sense into him.”

“If she is who we hope she is.”

“Have faith . .

This post has been edited by Lothar Goldfist on 9th July 2006 22:37

--------------------

You are not your username. You are not your avatar. You are not the number of posts you have. You're not your signature. You are the all-typing, all-chatting crap of the Web. --Friend of a Friend

It wasn’t the pressurized air sound of the syringe’s cylinder emptying itself which followed, but the hammer of a nine millimeter getting pulled back for a focused explosion. Every head swiveled, back towards the door which Thom all too abruptly realized he had forgotten to secure. At its threshold stood a pair of Turks, one lanky with hair almost crimson, the other blond-haired and studying the scene with an acute sort of fascination. Each one had their eyes on the syrum in Tedrin’s hands.

“That’s far enough,” Reno warned them. “Just hand over what belongs to Shinra and nobody gets hurt.”

All was as a still life for several agonized seconds. So many folk cramped into a single room, and no place to make a move even if one occurred to anybody. Tedrin, juxtaposed by the cruel irony of it all, straightened and backed away from the matron, his one true eye gleaming with hatred undefined.

“Well, well,” the seasoned Avalancher replied, his hands held aloft in mock submission, “If it isn’t Shinra’s most loveable lapdog. Training a new generation of Turks to carry out your dirty work, are you?”

Reno’s answer found his tongue, though Rosalind’s weapon speared out defiantly before it could make any dismount. “You’re hardly one to talk about dirt, Avalancher. Now quit dawdling and hand over the syrum!”

“You heard her,” Reno said, priding himself on his pupil’s progress.

“First you tell us how you found this place.” Stealth his own forte, Tedrin’s hand discreetly sleeved the syrum, trying to buy his embattled little party some precious time. “How you found it, and your promise that you’ll never return.”

The Turk’s weapon gestured towards the empty attache case over in the corner. “Homing device. Little bit of an insurance policy, from Shinra the Good Hands people.”

“Should have known . . .” Poline suddenly felt the smooth glass of a syringe worm its way into her open hand. “That probably wouldn’t make you Turkish Delights any more different than a run-of-the-mill briefcase, tagged and set loose like the rest of Midgar’s wild animals.

“Poline, now!”

She didn’t think, started though she was from the Avalancher’s suddenly panicked yelling. The Turks took aim and fired, but weren’t quick enough. Pushing the matron down upon the floor, she emptied the syringe into her shoulder - buckling from the blind shots that stitched themselves into her back.

Everything and nothing happened all at once. A strangled cry escaped Thom’s throat before he leaped to his wife’s side. Rosalind’s eyes peered across at the scene beyond her smoldering barrel, unable to process what she had just allowed herself to do. The younger ones started to scream and wail, horrified by the ultrasonic sounds. Tedrin remained rooted to his spot, his only concerns reserved for the matron’s well-being and little else.

“Poline! Don’t . . . stay with me!” Thom fought against fear, raged against it. He wrestled to keep her comfortable, to keep her warm, to keep those living arms alive and around him. “Just . . . hold on. You’re going to be fine.”

“Thom . . .” As though half in a dream, she responded. A smile, rimmed with blood, formed at the sight of him. “Promise me . . . you’ll stop drinking.”

He tried to return the smile but couldn’t. The grief was too great. Tedrin swallowed and turned to face their two assailants. “There’s nothing left for you to collect here. Just leave us in peace.”

“I wish it were that simple, Avalancher,” And Reno meant what he said. While his job never ceased to be a cesspool of unscrupulous activity, he was sincerely adverse to the whole killing game. “But we were ordered to bring that syrum back to Shinra, and we intend to do just that.”

“You can’t possibly expect us to just turn ourselves over to you,” he fired back.

“Oh, but you have little say in the matter. Unless, of course, you wish to put the lives of the little ones at risk.”

Tedrin bit his lip, his first genuine show of weakness since luring Thom and Poline to this wretched city. He turned to regard them, trying to think of something to say. “I’m sorry,” was all that would occur to him. Thom sobbed, trying to keep Poline’s lifeless arms around him. The children wailed.

The matron’s eyes stared, uncomprehending.

* * *

Among the endless dapple of the Junon light, still complacent in the sleepy hours before sunrise, a set of mako eyes stirred amidst the black. Never one for scare tactics or stinging verbal blows, his approach in handling worldly disorder was as every bit calm and calculating as a city was in its small hours. Shifting his head slightly so as to get a better angle of the newly constructed reactor, his platinum locks were suddenly luminescent in the wake of a nearby lamppost. Light and shadow rippled across his set face in a mask of silent scrutiny. Someone was somewhere that they were not supposed to be, doing something that would cost lives.

“You don’t belong here,” Sephiroth warned, not immediately deciding to make himself known except by voice.

The worn-looking vagrant, whose every inch of dreadlocks and moth-ravaged clothes told the mako man was the cast of Avalanche, shot vertical in a heartbeat. The remote detonator, only partially configured to ignite the charges, tumbled clumsily from her hands at the sound of that voice. She knew the voice well. Everyone knew.

“Where do I belong then, mako man?” The stunted vigilante took controlled steps back towards the reactor casing, attempting to daunt her unseen foe with grandiose language. “Behind some desk? Throwing back cold ones in some bar?”

From concealment, the desperate woman pulled a nickel-plated Glock out upon the unseen threat, sparrowing the sidearm’s aim in frightened confusion. “Doesn’t anyone understand how close your kind come to killing this planet? Do you have any clue?”

The mako glare dimmed slightly as eyelids drew to a partial close in anger. What does a flea know of the beast it bites upon? Such foolishness.

“You don’t belong here,” was all Sephiroth would reply with.

“Show me my place, then!” Stooping without turning from the sound of the voice, the saboteur reached out to reclaim the detonator. “Pay me my tribute, you silver-haired bastard! Come on!”

A long metal gleam, cold and unyielding, speared out from nowhere and vanished just as quickly. Pain would have went unnoticed by the hapless Avalancher if not for the explosion of sparks and wiring that leapt from the device in her hand - what remained of her hand. Bravado crumpled as several digits slipped in crimson agony from her callused palm. One strangled cry was all the woman had left, before Masamune danced deathfire through her chest, neatly parting the tunic and picking her soundlessly off the ground with its follow through.

Her killer stared in muted ambivalence at the writhing form wrought upon the length of his blade, regarding her not entirely unlike his father would regard a specimen through the beveled end of a microscope. He didn’t know why, but the power chilled him of a sudden. He strained to put the tingle to one side of his mind. It came each time some creature was laid to waste by his hand, as though he could recognize the sensation of energy leaving some lifeless husk and rejoining the Lifestream from whence it came.

Sephiroth . . .

A lump formed in the soldier’s throat, as he willed himself to turn back upon the griseled corpse hanging from his blade. The woman had her head leveled towards him, dead eyes open and looking almost benign.

Sephiroth . . . my one-winged angel, you fly in circles with these menial tasks. When will you learn? Will you learn soon enough?

“Mother,” he replied, steeling himself beneath her undead scrutiny. “It was for you. All I do is for you. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

You’re not to do this for me, my angel, not for lives passed. You know why you do this, have known all along. The reason is there. You don’t have to look for it . . .

The almost musical hum of his PHS jarred him back from rumination. Fumbling with the phone, it almost didn’t occur to him that the woman on his blade had since gone back to being dead.

“It’s done,” he spoke into the mouthpiece. “What next?”

“Hojo has asked that you return to Midgar,” Heidegger’s gravelly voice piped on the other end. “Says there is a job waiting specially sanctioned just for you. The mission’s a man . . .”

An eyewitness drawing suddenly popped up on the screen of his PHS, the sketch of some wild-eyed buffoon sporting a less than discreet harlequin getup. He clamped the communicator closed without another word. There was little choice but to carry out their wishes, to do the duties which others deemed fit. There was not yet the strength to break past the rigidness of Midgar’s para-military branch, that would come later. Of this, he was sure. For now, there was yet another lost soul for him to dispose of.

* * *

Thom missed his wagon - missed ‘their’ wagon.

It had never given what one would consider a comfortable ride. The axles creaked at each leg of the journey, any bump in the winding path meant either a bruise or some nerve-rattling jostle that upset everything, and there was scarce any protection from the elements. The slick black limosene which the Turks had since tossed them into was everything their coaches were not: stylish; enclosed; reliable. Staring down the length of the vehicle was like trying to plumb the depths of a cavern with no end. For all of its functionality, Thom would trade away an entire fleet of them to be back out there in the open country again.

Funny how one missed such things only after they were gone.

He sat now with hands clasped with a set of manacles in his lap, rolling his half-empty whiskey flask around and around in his fingers. There was no wrapping his mind around it. It was insane, idiotic. Poline just couldn’t be gone, could she?

“You gonna say anything?” Thom asked without turning to Tedrin. “About what happened back there? Or is this all part of your plan as well?”

Tedrin didn’t deign to reply to the plainsman’s question. In truth, everything worked out better this way. Once the syrum finally took effect, the last hero of Judgment’s End would have her memory back and they would at last be able to talk some sense into that smug little ruler of Midgar. Up until now, Avalanche had a difficult time trying to come up with the right kind of plan to actually infiltrate Shinra tower to such ends. It was nothing less of a sheer miracle that these two Turks came by when they did, so as to spearhead the whole operation. It seemed almost too perfect . . .

“Hey, cyclops!”

Regarding him with a sympathetic eye, Tedrin at last turned away. “I’m sorry about your wife, for whatever that amounts to. I never intended for her to get involved like this.”

Both of Thom’s cuffed fists flung up to nail the Avalancher square in the jaw. Tedrin didn’t bother to defend himself or fight back, not even when the former villager struck him a second and then a third time. “My wife is dead, Tedrin! And those children back at the slums? They were our responsibility! And look at our Matron! She’s as every bit out of it now as when we first brought her to this godforsaken city!”

“I’m sorry about your wife,” he repeated, rubbing at the sting vining out across the left side of his face. “But try not to worry about the little ones. The slums are a holy place. All are welcome there.

“As for your matron . . .” Both men turned to regard her, sitting to their left with hooded head bowed and her palsied hands looking minuscule in a set of gigantic shackles. “Well, why don’t you ask her yourself?”

The idea seemed absurd, given everything he knew about her frail mindstate and everything he didn’t know about Midgar medicine. But then, his thoughts returned to Poline and how much of a mother this woman had been to her. She had so wanted to know this woman’s real name in her own lifetime, so that she might know who to thank for looking after them all those years. He owed her that much at least.

“Matron?”

“That isn’t her name,” Tedrin reminded him. “She was a heroine of Judgment’s End. Address her as such.”

Thom sighed, long and hard. This was ridiculous. He hadn’t read that tale or been told the tale since he was twelve. Those names danced on the tip of his tongue.

“Relm?”

“Hurm,” the matron muttered, barely hearing him.

“Celeste?”

“Celes,” Tedrin corrected.

A pause of recognition, then, “Hurm.”

Thom tried again, leaning closer this time.

“Terra?”

A pause . . . then she turned her head. The expression wrought upon her face was undeniably one of recognition. Tedrin stiffened, as though pricked by a dart. The matron’s face . . . appeared younger! What manner of miracle cure was this? Truly remarkable.

“Terra Branford?”

She turned to him, appearing as every bit awestruck to see the Avalancher as the Avalancher was to see her. In the matron’s - in Terra’s - eyes, this was the very same child that had come to her as an orphaned child of Mobliz many decades ago. She had taken this one upon her knee back then, taught him the alphabet, read him his parables, watched him grow into a fine young man before he left for the new city. Yes, she knew him, knew him all too well.

“Tedrin,” she rasped, touching his bearded face as though discovering it for the first time. “And you’re . . . you’re Thom, aren’t you?”

Thom touched the craggy, blue-veined hand which caressed his skin. He never believed this day would come in either of their lifetimes. “Mother . . .”

Very discreetly, Rosalind watched the display from the opposite side of a two-faced mirror, unable to shake loose the guilt which snaked up and down her spine. Reno glimpsed her out of the corner of his eye, transfixed by both his driving and her maudlin expression.

“Come on, now,” he said to her, trying to sound his usual upbeat self. “I didn’t like being judge and jury back there either, but this is what we do. You’re still new to the team, but you’ll get it soon enough.”

“I get it,” she told him, pulling the sunglasses from her eyes. “I wouldn’t have bothered with the training in Wutai if I didn’t ‘get it’. It’s just with everything else you see out in the field . . .”

Reno nodded. “Yeah. It’s always different when it’s the real thing. That’s the unfortunate thing about--”

Shooom!

Reno jerked and felt his stomach twist as their limo leaped suddenly from the road, lurching and somersaulting through a cloud of flame. Upside down, the vehicle screeched to stop, punching at the brick wall of a nearby high-rise. One solitary minute of silence passed, as the gravity of their situation set in. Then, as lungs started smoking and wounds began to register, the survival instinct took over.

Bent and crippled, the car’s paneling creaked and bubbled outwards, its oblivious passengers fighting for their lives to free themselves from the conflagration. One of its back doors came ajar first, spilling the one-eyed Avalancher out onto the abutment with a dazed Thom bringing up the rear. As the two fought to disentangle Terra from the twisted wreckage of the limosene, an oddity not witnessed in over a century hovered a mesmerizing waltz over each of their heads. Smoke and flame fluttered across the cobbled square, gaining momentum, whirling and whipping about in a cyclone of energy before rejoining the blade from whence it had come.

Terra recognized this brand of prestidigitation, yet knew that only a Runic Knight could accomplish such a feat. The cataracts having finally parted from her irises, she followed the beckoning flame, tracing it back to its source . . . to the front of their upturned escort . . . wincing as old wounds festered anew!

“No!” she screamed, the sight of his carnivale-striped face seared into the back of her mind. “No! It can’t be!”

“Hey!” Reno snapped, kicking the driver side door open and bringing himself erect to face their saboteur. “That was Shinra property, bucko! If you don’t have any insurance . . .”

Rosalind at once recognized the color of the man’s garments and made the connection. “Reno, get away from him!”

But yesterday’s nightmare was already in motion, his sword pinwheeling. Gasping, Reno ducked. Feinted. Sidestepped, then faded back. The speed was unmatched, strength seemingly infinite. Growling, the fiery-eyed dissident swung the Runic Blade down to cleave the Turk in half. Reno skirted from the path of ruin, the blazing steel of the sword embedding itself into the asphalt. Scaling up the length of the sword arm and backrolling, a kick came out to try and put some space between them. Instead, the Turk was plucked out of mid air with a set of scathing hands, the thumbs burning their way into either side of Reno’s face. Reno screamed.

“We have to help him!” Terra cried out, fighting against Thom’s hold on her.

“Forget it! They’re the enemy!” Tedrin began to move in the opposite direction. “We have to fall back and--”

Turning, Tedrin looked and backpedaled despite himself. Seemingly materializing out of nowhere, Solder’s would-be general regarded the shabbily dressed gnat with a look that was anything but kind. Tedrin knew this one, knew him all too well. All of his ilk had been trained to recognize and fear this abomination of a man since day one, for none that had ever stood against him remained standing when it was over. All intent and resolve the one-eyed freedom fighter had up until this point dissolved beneath that mako stare.

“You . . .”

Sephiroth moved without blinking. He as well knew the man before him - or rather, knew all which the man stood for: a threat to Shinra. Masamune in hand, he was able to disarm Tedrin with one fell swoop. Terra his only concern left, the Avalancher let fly one of his patented right crosses. The Mako Menace smiled, catching the gnarled fist into his gloved one. The agony of the man’s crushing grip overwhelmed him, leaving Tedrin bent upon crippled knees and left completely at his mercy.

“No,” Terra cried, reaching for him. “Please!”

But for all the tools which made up the Solder’s arsenal, diplomacy was not one of them. Tedrin saw the long, sleek length of Masamune dance and jump before him, struck dumb by how graceful the display appeared. Then, the driving, shrieking pain of a stomach thrust skewered him, felling him where he knelt.

“Son of a bitch . . .” Disbelief twisted and warped the plainsman’s haggard face as the Avalancher’s body toppled to one side. Acting without regard for the consequences, Thom searched and plucked up the loose nine-millimeter from inside the limo. “Son of a–!”

BANG!

Plink.

His head cocked back, as though straining to see something coast by overhead. The deafening sound knocked Terra back onto her bottom, where she glimpsed the platinum-haired stranger in the distance swipe his sword at the empty air. She thought the gesture harmless, until she saw what it did to Thom.

“Are . . . are you okay?”

A scarlet stream of life came down around the plainsman’s balding scalp, dripping and painting the cobblestones red. Swaying slightly, Thom finally collapsed - deadheap, in his adoptive mother’s lap.

“Oh God . . .”

Heavy boot heels clomped closer towards her, the old woman’s eyes blinded by the pain of outliving those younger than her. Fire danced. Masamune sang. So this was it, then. The beginning of the end. Where were her children, her friends, the family that was supposed to bid her farewell? Gone. All having left before her. Edgar and Celes . . . and Locke.

Were they about to be reunited?

The mako one was close now, the distance between them all but swallowed, blade still warm with the blood of Avalanche. The nearby flame of the smoldering car caught and reflected with feral intensity in the stalky man’s eyes. Mother would be proud. Indeed, she told him so even now as he made away with their transgressors one by one. The metal of his shoulder guards clinked as his sword arm drew back for the killing stroke.

“Weak, pathetic fool!”

Sephiroth’s head swiveled on his neck, mako eyes porthole wide. It was him, the one Heidegger had instructed him to seek out and destroy - two car lengths away from him, with a screaming Shinra lapdog uplifted in his burning hands. The wrinkled woman suddenly forgotten, he leaped fully over the juxtaposed vehicle just as Reno was tossed to one side. Rosalind wrestled around in her seat like a trapped lion, unable to slacken her body from the shoulder harness as the Runic Knight edged ever closer.

“Go ahead and scream,” the jester man growled, blue lightnings gathering at the tip of his blade. “No one’s going to hear you, now.”

Rosalind obliged. Kefka swung...

And stopped.

“What the–?!”

He followed the accosting hand up to a felt-clad arm, across to its huge, heaving chest, then into the crippling stare of Sephiroth himself.

Kefka. Sephiroth. Toe to toe. Nose to nose.

The jester man leered, his red eyes fighting to penetrate green ones. “Who the fuck are you?”

An answer crackled up the esper blight’s arm as his shoulder left its socket with a cartilege-breaking snap. Kefka crowed in anguish, dropping his blade in the process. Sephiroth neither paused for counterstrike nor slowed to show mercy, his leather fists ringing out once - twice - three times across his enemy’s jaw. The blond, feathered head whipped back to and fro from the force of each smack, blood and spittle flying. The world waltzed and cascaded, forgotten around them as the would-be general seized the former general by the scruff of his neck and spat a hasty cantrip.

“Your beginning or your end,” Sephiroth warned him. “Leave Midgar or else.”

Kefka’s words dribbled like blood between his teeth. “Or else what, quicksilver?”

Again, the cryptic reply of unnecessary force as a spell came into violent life around them. Kefka convulsed and flew with arms flailing across the street, wreathed in flame before smashing sidelong into an antique shop’s store window. Sephiroth brought himself erect, neither priding himself for first blood nor turning his back on the firestorm of a man about to emerge anew from ruination.

“You’d be wise to leave right about now,” he told Rosalind over a cold, plated shoulder. “I’ve seen this one’s eyes. There’s no telling what he might be capable of.”

The unseasoned Turk considered Sephiroth’s words for a moment. Should she tell him about the horrors this one had caused over at the Train Graveyard? No, she told herself firmly. What purpose would it serve if Shinra’s finest soldier seemed more than a match for him? But then, was there anything new she could bring to the shadowed man’s attention? Rosalind swallowed hard, thumping on the roof of the limo as she was finally able to unclasp her seatbelt. Her first upclose encounter with the great Sephiroth, and she couldn’t bring herself to be either forthcoming or useful.

“Be careful,” she at last said to him.

The hawkish green stare turned about once to regard her. She wasn’t sure if he was trying to look assuring or intimidating but she smirked all the same. She could scarcely get over the tragic beauty of his face. Handsome . . . as he was deadly.

Movement flared abruptly out of the corner of his eye, as Kefka straightened and made for the emporium’s staircase and towards the rooftop. Sephiroth leaped, faded amidst the smog, and was gone.

* * *

“Tedrin . . .”

The Avalancher coughed, half a death knell rattling in his throat. Terra’s form hovered just a little ways above him, hands cupped around his face. He smiled. It would not be the first time she was there to help him find sleep, and could think of no better way to die than to have her there one last time.

“Did it work?” he rasped, staring at her withered form with an unblinking eye. “Do you remember?”

“Everything,” she said, lips trembling. It wasn’t fair. It should have been her saying goodbye to him, not the other way around. “I remember everything.”

“Then don’t forget . . .” The world darkened, his hand slipping away from her own. “Don’t ever forget us.”

Shouts echoed from her suited captors in the distance as Tedrin’s one remaining eye joined the other in darkness. Confound those wretched Turks. Could they have at least given her this one moment of peace, one minute to see the last of her children off? The frazzled one with blond hair approached, firearm trained. Typical.

“Matron!” she barked. “Terra! Whoever you are, I’m going to have to ask you to come with us. We’re under orders to bring you back to Shinra headquarters.”

The hooded woman closed Tedrin’s staring eye and turned back on to confront her. “You’re not really going to shoot an old woman now, are you?”

“I’d rather not have to,” she answered in earnest. “But we can’t afford to compromise our safety again this night. These streets aren’t safe. That thing that attacked us . . .”

“His name is Kefka.”

The barrel of her sidearm faltered somewhat. “You know its name?”

“I know quite a bit about him.” She drew herself up from Tedrin’s body, trying to keep the emotion from her voice. “Could you please just stop pointing that thing at me? Honestly, how far do you think I’m going to get before that bullet catches up? Please.”

Rosalind considered the request for a moment, then clicked the weapon’s safety on. No sooner did the two of them start moving back towards what remained of their transport did Reno leap out from around a street corner, staggering lackadaisically with his head still stuck in a garbage can.

“Where is he?!” his voice droned angerly from within. “Let me at him! I’ll kill him!”

“Reno . . .” Rosalind took hold of the can and gave it a sharp tug. The cylinder sucked itself up off his head with a loud popping sound. “Terra knows this person we’ve been tracking. She’s agreed to help us find him.”

“Before he has the chance to kill again,” she added.

Reno’s eyes shifted to Rosalind, then Terra, then back to Rosalind again. Before he could say anything, his Turk-in-training smirked. “What?”

She touched the sides of her cheeks. “Nice tattoo job. Did our fiery little friend give you those as a parting gift?”

“Huh?” Reno stepped between them, contorting his body beneath the limo’s rearview mirror to get a better look at himself. “Son of a bitch! I’m gonna kill ‘em!”

Terra wanted to smile at the display but couldn’t. “So, how was it that you came to meet Kefka yourselves?”

“The president had us investigating a triple homicide at the Train Graveyard on the far side of town. We found evidence at the scene to corroborate that it was the person you speak of, although Hojo called off the investigation at the last moment.”

“Why would this Hojo person do a thing like that?”

“I’m not sure. Reno?”

The red-haired Turk sulked and pawed at the two red marks on his cheeks. “Son of a bitch . . .”

“Focus, Reno. Is there anything special about the Train Graveyard that we should know of?”

“Not anymore, there isn’t. The applied sciences division of Shinra used to use it as a testing ground for new mako subjects. It was believed that beneath the ground was an old airshaft that could take one into the heart of the Lifestream, the life force of the planet.”

Rosalind shrugged. “I guess that doesn’t really help us then, does it?”

Terra paused for a moment, considering the new info. “I think we should have a little talk with Hojo.”

Reno was on top of it, bringing himself erect and clicking his PHS open. “Tseng, we’re gonna need a chopper to pick us up on Firion Street, south of Matoya.”

“A chopper?” Rosalind asked. “Don’t you think that’s a bit excessive?”

“Insurance policy,” Reno corrected, “to make sure we don’t get hamstrung by any more unexpected surprises tonight.”

* * *

Yes. Kefka ran this time.

Over hill and over dale, the world’s last great tyrant lead Sephiroth on a cocky little chase through downtown Midgar. Up one fire escape and down another, over rooftops and across railways, through taverns and stables and out brothels and nightclubs, all the while killing for the sheer sport of it. Slipping the knife. Loosing the static bolt. Wreaking havoc. At each and every turn, along the endless winding trail of human debris, the ever nimble soldier stooped with blade close-by. Smithy and thrillseeker alike, bards, barflies, topless dancers - all slain in the same brutal fashion. This one was still warm!

Sephiroth followed.

And Kefka ran.

Like anyone else, Kefka occasionally knew when to back down. It wasn’t often, but he still knew when a horrid game of cat and mouse was upon him. Half a hope held out that he could probably just wear this one down, maybe even incite a bit of terror into that long-haired melon of his with a dead body littered here and there. It was only on the scattered occasion when he stopped to catch a breath that the all-too-close gait of his pursuer’s stride was back upon him in an instant.

And Kefka ran.

He ran until his heart pumped mercury and his leg muscles seized up at the tendons. Then, he ran some more. The city around him blurred and swayed.

An entire sector later, he saw it. Less than a city block away, spiking out of the twisted city around it like the last man after a battle royale, was his tower. Time had done nothing to diminish its elegance, indeed it seemed even more of an eye catcher than when last he had left it. Armored. Gleaming. Glorious.

Kefka frowned of a sudden as he took in the intricate markings of his stronghold’s logo.

Who or what was a ‘Shinra’?

It didn’t matter. He would deal with the erstwhile king of his castle soon enough. Then take back his tower, with the world to follow. And then . . .

Lungs heaved and complained in his chest as he ventured out across the walkway ahead of him, his little pouch of pilfered materia pebbles rattling at his side. You knew it was a good age to be alive again when magic stopped making itself available in incantations and started making itself available in pure form. No magic words to be said nor devices to be wielded. Just pure magic. And he knew the name of each and every one of them: Fire; Gravity; X-Zone; Scan . . .

Kefka gave a start as the Scan materia buzzed between his fingers. He knew what it meant, even before Sephiroth’s cherub-like form somersaulted down from out of nowhere at the end of the gangway. The jaw was set, his silver hair spinwheeling, Masamune held out at an angle, beckoning him, challenging him.

The ex-Imperial sighed and casually dropped the orb back into his pouch. “I’m somewhat new to this neck of the woods, so I’ll just assume it rains long-haired pretty boys here in Midgar. If you’ll just be so kind as to let me pass . . .”

Kefka started to walk around. Masamune swiveled at the wrist, clinking against the guardrail mere inches from Kefka’s torso.

“I’m under orders,” he said very simply.

Sephiroth expected harsh retribution for this, would welcome it even if it meant being given some form of obstacle or even amusement for his troubles. But Kefka did nothing of the sort. In fact, he was actually smiling.

“How delightful,” Kefka vaunted. “After all this time, all these years, it is still the stronger ones deferring to someone weaker. And what’s your little reward for stopping me? A bonus? Tenure? A commendation, perhaps?”

The soldier’s eyes rolled askance for a split second, as though seriously considering his prey’s words. Sephiroth’s neck cracked side to side.

“I’m under orders,” he repeated.

“You’re a god being led around by insects. What can they seriously do to you if you refuse their orders. What will you honestly let them do?”

“I’m under--”

Kefka swerved, stoopling low yet kicking high. The mako man danced to one side, intent on catching his pray as it found vertical base. Jester eyes followed, locked not upon blade but the soldier’s wrists as they worked to maim. Sephiroth jerked as Masamune caught stone-tight in Kefka’s grip. For a moment both men stood transfixed, arms knotted as they vied for control over a single sword. Face split with a dervish’s grin, the blond man capitalized by sweeping the armed hand out in an unfocused arch. Masamune baton-twirled away from them, singing through the empty space, before embedding itself into a distant partition. Sephiroth grunted, weaponless and with one appendage trapped in an armbar.

“My turn . . .”

And so, the ill turn was reciprocated fivefold, each of Kefka’s kicks smacking and ringing home into the soldier’s skull. Clarity strayed as Sephiroth felt his head whip to and fro, the disks in his neck clicking and scraping against one another under the brutal assault. Each strike twisted his body into the parody of a primate: back hunched; free arm dragging at his side; seeing only the latticed boardwalk beneath them. Still with the tall man’s limb trapped in his clutches, Kefka stepped over the hold with his left foot. His right leg windmilled to follow, catching Soldier’s finest full in the shoulder blade and driving him face-first into the steel platform.

Sephiroth reeled from the impact, groaning as each squared segment of unforgiving steel bruised and bit into his skin. Gradually, he felt himself get pushed further and further into the walkway as all one hundred and eighty pounds of the madman bore down on him mercilessly. All he could hear was the whine of riveted mesh wire and laughter: shrill, piercing laughter. Mako eyes rolled to beneath the platform. At least thirty stories between them and ground level. No chance. Undaunted by vertigo, Sephiroth readied a spell . . .

“Any last words, tall man?”

“Gravija.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.”

The soldier smirked. “You’re about to.”

Acute, Imperial ears soon heard it. Distant at first, its intensity soon rent the air as gravity capsized all around them. The Lord of Judgement felt his stomach jerk as the walkway became a ravine. End over end, Kefka breakfalled, tumbling until he crashed sidelong into the distant guardrail. Winded from the impact, he arose only half steadily to his feet. Across the way, Sephiroth (no worse for wear) found footing first. Arms outstretched, his hands started to twirl and slash, encircling empty space. Little by little, the pale light of an arcane sigil formed in the air before him. Kefka, only partially recognizing the symbol, fumbled at his side for the right materia, the right spell, the proper retort.

Eskallanilna guides you, my angel. Return the gesture in kind . . .

Sephiroth nodded to advice only he could hear, and with sleight of gloved hand the attack came to life. Masamune, screaming its way free as though given a life of its own, became ensconced with black light, suddenly a sixty-inch-long projectile! Cartwheeling blade over hilt, it moved as though shot from a cannon, straight for Kefka’s position.

Too fast, he thought. Where was it?! Spells and summons formed and vanished as his fingers probed blindly along each and every polished gem in his pouch. He was beginning to feel the air part around him as the sword converged upon his being. He had to have one, just one!

There it was.

A simple touch of the crystallized mako was all he needed for the sorcery to take shape. Bare hand outstretched as if to receive the weapon, Masamune’s approach started to slow. With a dreamlike stillness, it moved as kelp on a seabed, enough so for Kefka to reach out and pluck it from the foul Midgar night.

The platinum haired soldier grunted, starting to lose his patience. “You never learn, do you?”

“In this golden age of Materia,” he replied, “one really can’t be bothered, now can they?”

He gave Masamune a few experimental swipes, bedazzled by its weightlessness. Then, with the same materia still in his grasp, he hurled the blade back upon its owner. Masamune hastened as it cut a sway through the smoggy spaces, almost at the speed of sound. Only Sephiroth, Jenova cells within him beckoning, was the faster, leaping out of the way and catching hold of the weapon as he descended.

Each one stood regarding the other for one tense minute, gauging the other’s ability to handle himself. They seemed equally matched. Sephiroth glared mako-tipped daggers at his most recent assignment, having suffered little in their tug-of-war thus far beyond the mesh-wire impressions that spider-webbed across his face. Kefka, while somewhat off-center of himself from having to think on his feet, was as every bit unscathed. Equally matched. Both demon and soldier considered this.

No. This would not do at all.

Kefka vaulted forward, open palms unleashing volley after volley of fireballs upon the enemy. Sephiroth followed suit, running counter with a salvo of jagged ice shards. Flame and glacier collided and fizzled. Vapor and smoke swirled and parted. The soldier leaped, body corkscrewing with Masamune ready to vanquish. Kefka stood unblinking as the katana cycloned with its wielder, breaking from the motion suddenly and cleaving down into a ruinous swipe. With a thought Kefka vanished, fading into æther . . .

. . . then materializing into the mako man’s blind spot. Fists like newly forged mythril speared across Sephiroth’s vision, colliding with flat, hard packing sounds along the angelic face. Left, right, left, left, impossible to predict. Right, left–

Kefka roared as one of the blows buckled against the brutal metal of Masamune’s hilt, then again as it swung back around, clipping his jaw. He staggered back, careful to keep one eye on the human whirlwind. Left, right–

Sephiroth seized both cuffs of the late general’s robe, swinging out and away to invert the hold. Armored knees rammed themselves repeatedly into his lower back, moving to paralyze.

The jester man kicked back, satisified as the greaved foot found purchase into a leather-strapped solar plexis. Inverting the hold for the second time in as many seconds, Kefka reached for the soldier’s neck with ringed fingers and threw a knee into his midsection. Sephiroth grunted, doubling over as Masamune faltered in his grasp.

“Yeah . . .”

Kefka, capitalizing in a moment of weakness, headlocked the silvery-haired titan, going straight for the beatdown. Axehandles caved down atop Sephiroth’s spine. Heels flew back, smacking the hawkish nose of his adversary. Whatever it took to break the big man down, to turn the tables.

To end this!

“This world belongs to me, mako man!” he growled, his hold over Sephiroth tightening with vice-like intensity. “Either follow or get out of the . . .”

“Over here! I found them!”

Both men still transfixed upon the other, each head of unkempt hair turned to the spectator’s frantic calling. In the heat of their violent feuding, Kefka hadn’t considered the fact that half of Midgar’s populace would be gunning for him. Sephiroth twisted around in the dead man’s hold, each of them looking wide-eyed as Avalancher and taxpayer alike flooded through the distant streets and started bulleting up the nearby fire escapes and high rises. Powerful though they both were, each one arrived quickly to the conclusion that they had little hope of holding their own against one another as well as an entire sector of lawless denizens.

“Midgar revolts this night,” Sephiroth coughed from below.

“Well then,” said Kefka, laboring to both speak as well as keep his adversary from escaping. “I think what we need is a change of scenery.”

Fingers fidgeting briefly with his inventory of materia, Kefka eventually freed yet another of the green orbs from his drawstring and pushed it into one of the open slots of the juxtaposed Masamune. Ripples like splashing in a millpond flared inwards and outwards upon their position, causing reality to warp and refract all around them.

“Going my way?”

Sephiroth fought to turn his gaze up to the red-eyed hellion but couldn’t. “And where would that be?”

With a smile, he shoved them both off balance, over the nearby guardrail and plunging them several stories before the X-Zone took them. Violently.

“Come on down to my world,” Kefka snarled triumphantly, “and die!”

* * *

A very elderly Terra Branford took in the view of the landscape from high above the city of Midgar, awed by its splendor. The scattered township had since sprung up which she didn’t know the name to and the distant sea seemed a bit lower than when she had last laid eyes on it, but this was indeed the world she knew. A world she had delivered from destruction. So Tedrin had been right after all.

And wrong. So very wrong . . .

Her only recent memories of the man suddenly chilled her in a way no high altitude ever could. She had raised them better than this, she thought, had taught them the difference between right and wrong. And now Avalanche, some twisted neo-Returner offshoot, was going around blowing things up, killing innocent people, trying to bring down a brand new generation of madmen. Had Terra and her friends saved their own world only to doom the next?

Her once emerald locks blew lazily in the foul winds.

“Is everything alright?” Rosalind yelled out across the din of turbulence and copter blades.

“What?!”

“You just seemed upset about something!”

Terra squinted, not making any attempt to veil her anger. Look at her, so smarmy and cocksure of her ability to function under pressure. And yet so young, indeed no less younger than she was when she had brought an end to Kefka’s reign.

“I just . . . miss my friends.”

Rosalind nodded, olive eyes straining amidst the chaos of wind and cabin light. “If it’s any consolation, I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” she replied, barely audible.

Less than five minutes later, Terra, Rosalind, and Reno were making their careful way across the helipad at the zenith of Shinra tower. The recollection Terra had of her friends first casting anchor into Kefka’s monolith at Judgement’s End momentarily impaired her step, but the two Turks in her company were soon able to make her continue onwards. It wasn’t long after that they were back at Shinra’s applied sciences division. The esper woman’s memories of Kefka were gone now, replaced with the harsh flashback of Magitek experimentation: creatures in cages; arcane instruments; the stench of what narrow-minded fools called ‘progress’.

The feeling was more than foreboding. It was creeping death.

“At last, we meet.”

The spectacles little man was back on to them on the far side of the room, eyes studiously taking in the most recent results of his bioscans. Punching several shortcut keys so that his findings might be recorded, he finally swiveled to face the trio.

“Do I know you?” Terra asked.

Hojo smiled. “Only by name. I, on the other hand, am intimately familiar with you, Terra. All that you are and everything your Empire never had the chance to be. Your entire past has become my life’s work.”

“My . . . past?”

“Let’s take things extra slow here,” Reno put in. “You were the one that called off our investigation of the murders over at the Train Graveyard, even though you know that anything even remotely related to Avalanche is under the jurisdiction of the Turks. Why?”

Hojo’s gaze was slow to focus upon the fiery-haired agent, as though he only recently started to phase into existence before him. “Your people were getting in the way of a top-secret experiment, thus I had no choice but to rescind the president’s orders. What is at stake here is vastly more important than the lives of a few meaningless vagrants.”

“Are you the one responsible for bringing Kefka back?” Terra said as firmly as she could manage.

“Let me ask you something--”

“Did you bring him back?!” she screamed.

The scientist seemed jarred, even wounded, from the stinging harshness of her words. Just another short-sighted fool that couldn’t appreciate what it was he was trying to do.

“Yes,” he said, very simply.

“Why?”

Hojo shook his head. “How disheartening. I’d have imagined a former Imperial like yourself would understand the real reason behind this kind of experiment.”

Rosalind, herself, started to lose her bearings with all of the madman’s stalling, having nearly succumbed to Kefka’s lunacy herself. “Stop tap dancing around the subject and spit it out.”

Face complacent as always, Hojo merely smiled. “The aim of the experiment itself is not to recall spirits from the Lifestream. That can be accomplished easily enough. Rather, it is to bring to a head the culmination of two eras worth of scientific breakthrough.”

“Kefka,” Terra said with a controlled cadence, “is a psychopath. A monster. He took thousands of lives during my lifetime, who knows how many he’s taken this night alone. He mustn’t be allowed to live.”

“That’s why I called in Sephiroth to deal with the threat personally. If my calculations prove correct, he should be able to dispose of him with little or no trouble.”

“He’s already been disposed of! Your experiment makes no sense!”

“I’ve improved upon evolution a thousand fold with Sephiroth, just as the empire of old had improved upon evolution a thousand fold with Kefka. But improvement is not perfection. There is only one way for such a goal to be achieved, only one process.”

Terra bristled. This man’s ignorance astounded her.

“And what ‘process’ would that be?”

Hojo grinned. “The process of elimination.”

* * *

Sephiroth . . . Sephiroth . . . my one-winged angel . . .

Mako eyes flared with sudden life as the soldier rose shakily to his feet. A stone blasted landscape surrounded him, nondescript and practically featureless in the blood dusk that illuminated it. All he could make out were stone bulwarks and gunmetal-gray towers, empty but for the beacon-like flames that swayed and undulated to unfelt winds. A kingdom long dead and buried . . .

I’m disappointed with you.

Sephiroth stiffened before the sound of his mother’s voice, a voice that both permeated all of existence and yet was nowhere at all. Rising to full height, his gaze fought to plumb the ironwork depths, scanning stairwells that spiraled away into blind eternity. At the upper level of one of the ramparts, he glimpsed what appeared to be a cherub’s shadow. No matter how he scrutinized over the image, there was simply no bringing her silhouette into focus.

“Mother,” said Sephiroth, unable to make his mind work. Was it truly her?

You were supposed to make me proud! You were more, you were everything! Why debase yourself by following the orders of a creature lesser than yourself? You’re supposed to destroy them! What good are you to me if you can’t do that!

A man who had never displayed emotion in his life fought against the tremble of fear and despair that crept along his skin. Masamune drooped uselessly at his side, his training as a soldier unable to prepare him for this kind of confrontation. And yet, his statue-like face of determination remained unchanged.

“I do it for you, mother,” he was finally able to say, his deadpan tone oscillating with unchecked emotions. “It’s always been for you.”

Awww . . .

The winged figure finally cast itself out from the shadows, naked torso the hue of alabaster. Fear turned to anger, then anger to obsession, as Sephiroth was once again face-to-face with his prey.

“Moma’s boy.”

Something screamed then, a gut-wrenching, slate-scratching sound that could put the nerves of a colossus on edge. Neither man, for all of their cunning and quick wit, could tell that it was actually Masamune – groaning from the soldier’s crushing grip as psychosis overtook him!

Sephiroth swung, blind with bloodlust. No finesse, no gauging the distance between them, no acrobatics. Just swinging to kill. Kefka had no time to react, lurching as the blade sluiced a gory red line crossways through his bare chest. Blood spilled and boiled out in a monsoon at his feet. Sephiroth swung again. Viscera spilled from the fallen angel’s chest cavity. He swung again. An arm came loose. He swung again. A leg toppled free. He swung again. And again. And again . . . until there was nothing left to swing at.

His corded chest heaved so much from the workout that the leather of his coat started to complain from the sheer effort it took to contain him. It was only when he once more picked up on the dead man’s multi-octave cackling that his ecstatic breathing trailed off.

“Temper, temper, tall man. You can’t kill me that easily. Where would the fun be in that?”

The very masonry beneath Sephiroth’s feet seemed to reverberate with the words of his enemy. He gave a quick scan of the hellish frontier but could detect nothing. Impossible, he thought. How could so much nothing occupy the one space? His blade once more brought to bear, he ran and leapt upon the nearest parapet, in the direction where he believed the voice to be emanating from. Both feet coming down hard on the flagstone platform, he made the attempt to further survey his nonexistent environs. So many metal spires, so many brass palaces. Practically an empire, and yet there were no people. The idea would have driven him mad with illogic, if not for the murder already blossoming at the back of his mind.

Sephiroth decided he’d humor the man with the golden voice. “All you’ve done is make things harder for yourself . . .” He jumped down into one of the cobbled courtyards. “I try to detach myself from these tasks, these assignments. Only now, you’ve made this job into a vendetta, something personal, something I might even enjoy.”

No response this time. Had he struck a nerve somehow? Sephiroth pressed on across the empty square, not wanting to be hamstrung or taken off guard yet again by this one.

“Deferring to one who is weaker than I?” he asked rhetorically. “Come out so we can finish this! Let us discover who the weaker of us is, right now!”

A cast-iron mandible, the size of a titan’s gauntlet, lashed out from behind a nearby corner, backhanding the soldier. Sephiroth flew back a good ten yards, landing spread-eagle. The satanic looking muse, dove wings open but eyes ice-cold, leapt from the golem-like abomination he was perched upon, walking out with even paces to face his foe.

“That’s the spirit.”

Sephiroth heel-flipped himself back to standing position, Masamune flaring as it spun end over end. Waving out with one sleeveless arm, Kefka hurled a distant cadaver into the path of the mako-eyed wonder. Hilt nipped flat against his wrist, Sephiroth swiped and cleaved the airborne body from neck to navel. Another quickly followed, and as every bit quick it was reduced to gore.

Kefka’s frantic air curtailing became faster and more elaborate, the motions of some frustrated composer masterminding a symphony of destruction. Dozens of limp forms were suddenly suspended in the dead sky, flailing oblivious as they converged upon their target. Masamune sang through the festering rot of Imperial flesh, striking out falsetto tones as the weapon rung against brass armor. Visored heads bound free from their shoulders. Putrid limbs rained ichor as they littered the ground around him. And Sephiroth was taken aback.

Soldiers. Each and every one of them was a soldier. Rank dictated either by the rust or olive tint of their uniform, their allegiance was now bound only by carrion. Masamune swirled and dismembered all the more quickly. He would not join those ranks, would not become their general. He fought on against the tidal swell of death.

Kefka did likewise, hands gesticulating all the more wildly.

One patchwork limb suddenly struck the mako man hard in his calf muscle, capsizing him. In quick succession, a dead Imperial’s head cracked audibly against his own. The makeshift world did laps around him as Sephiroth vanished beneath the dead vortex. Kefka leered at the sight, howling his victory.

Then, silence. The terrible din of entropy when a battle was ended.

The crimson-eyed angel started circling the imposing little pile of flesh and steel, searching for his nemesis amidst the human rubble. Nothing to find, he thought triumphantly. Nothing left to fight. Just the dead unmourned, an Empire left unsung, a hand—

The foothill of carcases scattered as Sephiroth’s outstretched digits shot out, seizing Kefka by the throat. Choking, sputtering, he hoisted the winged hellion up off the ground effortlessly as the soldier, his once calm demeanor now darkened by impossible fury, charged a spell with Masamune. Kefka kicked the angled blade to one side, sending a firy orb streaking across the courtyard and bringing ruin to a nearby armory. Pole-dancing around the accosting arm, he telegraphed yet another booted heel across the mako face, contorting both legs until he fastened them securely around the soldier’s neck. Twisting, with both wings beating for leverage, he catapulted Sephiroth several yards away. Though his body windmilled, the soldier once more landed on his feet. Yet to be daunted.

“Spoony little . . .”

Kefka’s outrage trailing into silence, he swept into the air, charging it with the gale force of his winged form. With no spell in his immediate arsenal, Sephiroth could only flail helpless against the wall of wind before getting planted into the stone partition at the end of the commons.

“Circle gets the square, bitch!”

Whether Sephiroth could hear him berade his enemy or not was meaningless now. All that mattered was victory, no matter the toll, no matter the cost. Touching down upon the helltorn landscape, Kefka once again laid claim to the abandoned Masamune and moved to make the mako menace a part of the foundation. Sephiroth jerked slightly as a feathered appendage pinioned him against the stone mortar, preventing escape. Blowing back loose wisps of silver hair from his eyes, vision was scarce able to focus on the approaching threat before the blade caught him in the shoulder.

Sephiroth roared in anguish.

Pain! So swift and unavoidable. He had never been dealt this type of blow before, at least, not by another human. Indeed, none had ever been this agile (or perhaps this foolish) to make the cut. As his blood heaped and spilled from the grievous wound, their eyes momentarily locked onto one another. Through the death blows, somewhere beyond their obsession to main and kill, the compulsion to deal pain as well as receive it, the two towers of power connected.

Each one a soldier, not yet a general.

Each one a general, not yet a god.

The moment was fleeting as Kefka twisted the blade end over end, grinding and churning the razored blade against torn tissue and worn bone. Screeching, Sephiroth decided that this had gone on long enough. With unsteady hands, he reached out for the hilt of the blade, pulling Masamune not away from him, but towards him! Somehow, beyond what he believed to be his own ability, the dizzying agony was pushed to one side. The katana surged ahead, punching an exit wound out through his back and trembling its way through the dry stone rampart behind him.

“Finally seeing things from my perspective, are you?”

Sephiroth craned his silver head defiantly, mako eyes getting lost in the crimson glare.

“Hardly.”

The soldier kicked out with his right foot, with all the strength his weakened condition would allow. The fallen angel leaped back on reflex, learning all too late that the kick wasn’t meant for him. Instead, Sephiroth was able to effectively dislodge the rogue material from his blade, the very same orb which had first brought them to this place. White lightnings started to coalesce around them, surgically removing the two hellbent duelists from the nightmare realm.

Kefka couldn’t make his lips move fast enough. “What did you--”

And not for the first time, the Imperial world disintegrated.

* * *

“So, what’s the plan then?”

Less than an hour after an unfavorable encounter with Professor Hojo, the trio of Reno, Terra and Rosalind sat in silent thought at a café on the thirty-third floor. Terra fought with palsied hands as she tried to grip her Expresso, finally giving up the fight with the paper cup less than a minute later. Rosalind had a difficult time taking her eyes off the woman even after Reno had spoken.

“What?”

“About our two rebels without a fashion sense? They’re still out there somewhere, bleeding around the streets killing each other just for the sport of it.”

“They’ll kill a lot of innocent people doing it.” Terra’s voice cracked in her throat, having been silent for entirely too long. “No mater what else happens, Kefka mustn’t be allowed to come out as the victor.”

Rosalind took heart as she noticed the trouble Terra was having with her drink. “Can I give you some help with that?”

“No!” she growled, more forcefully than she really needed to. Both Turks were taken aback and even the distant café owner momentarily stopped his whistling as he went about wiping down the table nearest him. “Just . . . focus on the task at hand. I don’t really know any of you, and you don’t know me. But right now, the best any of us can do is to give this Sephiroth person a leg up, the edge he needs to finish Kefka.”

“Us?” said Reno. “Help Sephiroth? Sure, he’s the finest soldier ever to come out of the woodwork around these parts. Hojo can attest to that.”

“I don’t trust this Hojo person,” Terra replied, not at all sounding caustic or spiteful. It was simply a fact. “And I know about as much about this Sephiroth gentleman. But I do know Kefka. He can stoop to more despicable lengths to get what he wants.”

“So where do we go from here then? What’s your plan to get rid of him?”

Rather than replying to the goggled Turk directly, she produced a worn, notched blade from beneath her cloak, one with a string of esoteric symbols soldered into its metal. Straightaway, Rosalind recognized it as the same weapon which Kefka himself had nearly used to garrote her when their limosene overturned.

“That sword,” she said, reacting immediately. “But . . . I don’t think I understand. What’s so special about it? And how can we use it to defeat Kefka?”

“Kefka died more than three quarters of a century ago. Whatever it was that attacked us back there, it couldn’t have been flesh and blood. This life force thing that you spoke of earlier . . .”

“The Lifestream?” Reno replied.

“The Lifestream, exactly. If I understand the professor’s approach as well as I think I do, Hojo didn’t so much resurrect Kefka as he summoned him, so it probably stands to reason that we could dispel him like a regular magic spell. This Runic Blade should be able to help us do just that.”

“So, how do we work the thing?”

“It feeds off of magical energy. Imperial metallurgists crafted them with this in mind. All we need is to get the jump on him in a moment of weakness and he’ll be fed to the Runic Blade.”

Rosalind considered this, biting on the rim of her paper cup for a moment in thought. “And what if these Imperials knew something that Hojo didn’t?”

The silent blade of deep thought slipped beneath everyone’s hopeful vibe of a sudden. The blonde Turk hastily banished several loose hairs from her face. Though wishing she hadn’t spoken, she couldn’t help but to bring these concerns to everyone else’s attention.

“What if Kefka really does have what it takes to defeat Sephiroth?”

Terra grinned, almost (though not quite) with a cryptic look. “Then we’ll get him in a moment of confidence. Should make it even easier.”

“So the only question that remains,” Reno put in, “is where do we find--”

The unfinished inquiry was abruptly answered to the sounds of a reality-bending explosion from just beyond their window. For a moment, the three of them stood transfixed as the distant boundaries of sectors six and seven warped and rippled with frantic distortion.

Reno jerked up from the table, spilling his coffee in the process. “They’re playing our song, ladies. Anyone care to join me in the quick step?”

Whether they acknowledged or not, the Turk turned tail and sped off down the hallway, speed-dialing up the rest of his motley team as he was going. Shaking her head tiredly, Rosalind soon followed suit.

“Here,” she told Terra, “Let me at least give you a hand up.”

“Thank-you.” Her Expresso forgotten, she took hold of the woman’s arm and returned somewhat shakily to her feet. It was then that the two locked eyes for the briefest of seconds. And Terra felt stirred, almost as if by deja’vu. “By any chance, was your mother or grandmother an orphan? Or maybe, a soldier?”

“I don’t know,” she said, somewhat affronted by such strange questions. “I can’t remember a whole lot about my family. Why do you ask?”

“No reason. You just . . . remind me of someone I used to know.”

* * *

Each of their limbs flailing, coattails singed and stinking of sulfur, Kefka and Sephiroth flew down from out of nowhere, crippling the rooftops of several cars in a crowded carpool lane. His wings once again traded in for Imperial garb, there was nothing but steel and asphalt to break Kefka’s fall from near-victory. Sephiroth gave a silent wince as he expelled three quarters of Masamune’s length from his arm. Delirious and trying to draw enough strength from his own materia horde to comport a Cure spell, it took him only a few seconds to recognize the commuter’s tunnel which divided sector’s six and seven. They were back, back in Midgar.

Advantage: Sephiroth.

“On your feet, ‘soldier’.” He practically spat the word as he beckoned the sadistic looking trickster back into standing. Back yelling in anguish and mind akimbo from their unexpected flight between worlds, Kefka was barely able to hear his enemy much less be able to find him. “It’s time we finish what we’ve started here.”

Spine snapping as he jerked erect, the painted one took a hasty look about him. What was this place? All he could see, as far as he could see, there were nothing but screaming, swearing men and women in row after row of bumper-to-bumper traffic. So many foolish souls in desperate need of being anywhere other than where they were. One of them, a large, dark woman

This post has been edited by Lothar Goldfist on 17th July 2006 22:38

--------------------

You are not your username. You are not your avatar. You are not the number of posts you have. You're not your signature. You are the all-typing, all-chatting crap of the Web. --Friend of a Friend

But Kefka appeared nonplussed from the destruction that moaned and smoldered around them. In fact, he appeared to be reveling in it: soaking it up like a life-giving spring; drinking in the robust ambience of a million screaming voices like a well-aged vintage. One snapped neck later, another incensed commuter was added to the ruination, to their monument of nothingness. So beautiful.

“Something about you,” he replied, “makes me feel like a conqueror again!”

Each one stood a dozen or so feet from the other, once again sizing up their competition. Masamune sang as its wielder lashed at the air with several elaborate swipes. Whether he was readying a spell this time or merely moving to intimidate Kefka couldn’t be certain. It was only when the madman reached a hand into his bag of tricks that Sephiroth reacted – bolting forward, sword slashing in a chaos string of death.

Then, just as quickly, he was screeching.

Zigzag spears of lightning ricocheted endlessly off the coruscated tunnel around them, electrocuting any unlucky enough to be lingering in its presence. Kefka howled like the lunatic he was as the magical bolts spider webbed around his body, coating him, shielding him. Sephiroth fought to disentangle his fingers from his lightning rod of a weapon, but the stress of his nervous system only resulted in him clutching the blade all the more tightly. At the last possible second, he dispelled the attack, seizing the moment. He jerked into a run.

Sephiroth swung.

Kefka twisted out of the way, checking the gigas in his kidneys with an armored elbow.

“You’re slow,” he growled, flipping the soldier a lecturing finger, “you’re stupid . . . and ya got no style.”

Chuckling from the defeated look in Sephiroth’s eyes, he readied himself for the next of his clockwork attacks. He drew back again, a muse to decapitate. Taking the bait, Kefka’s body suddenly corkscrewed as a ball of gelatinous ice tiger-clawed out of the mako man’s free hand, striking him full in the chest. All in the same fluid motion, he reared forward, kicking the frozen Imperial out of midair. Smashing into the distant tunnel wall with all the intensity of a wrecking ball, Kefka’s impact was enough to at last dislodge the pouch of materia from his belt. Every conceiveable shade and color of rounded mako rolled and rattled around over the dimly lit tarmac, leaving a battered harlequin groaning defeatedly in their midst.

“At least I still have my marbles,” Sephiroth taunted, this time gauging the distance for a true beheading.

Kefka fumbled for a weapon, any weapon. Not thinking rationally, he plucked a loose hubcap off of an upturned pick-up, holding it out as a stopgap shield. Masamune crossbowed towards him, thrusting through metal, past cloth, piercing flesh, shattering bone, tearing sinew, through cloth again, and finally shrieking out resonantly against the tunnel wall behind him.

His agonized roar rattled the tunnel all the way down to its rivets, sensation all but lost beneath the painted man’s collarbone. The look in Sephiroth’s triumphant face, however, told him that true punishment was only just beginning. “No. Oh shi--”

Trapped on the full length of the blade, Kefka yelped as he was immediately hurled fully across the width of the tunnel, his pulverized body shoving a savage impression into the steel canopy. And then, just as quickly, he was hurled back the way he had come.

Left. Right. Left.

Whompf! Bang! Crash!

Like a journeyman trying to extinguish his torch, Sephiroth flung the fiery Kefka to and fro in an endless synchrony, literally pounding the life out of him. So it was that by the time they had reached the mouth of the turnpike, back out into the sackcloth night of Midgar, there was scarcely any life left to the demented little man at all. Just a limp, groaning mass of muscle. Standing somewhat unsteadily, muscles still convulsing from the electrical discharge, Sephiroth at last catapulted his pray down over the dark precipice. Arms flailing useless, screams silenced by distance, Kefka flew – fading, fading, and finally crashing down through an apartment building skylight.

Sephiroth felt himself stagger somewhat from their bout. Sephiroth never staggered.

His body quivered from a very recent loss of motor function. His body never quivered.

Was Kefka still alive, even after all of this? Yes. The battle-hardened soldier didn’t know how he knew or even why, he just did. This would be it, then. For good or ill, this would be their final round. The bout to end all bouts.

Steadying himself, the ever nimble hunter leaped down after his prey, intent on finishing this.

* * *

“There they are!”

Terra sat with hunched shoulders and veiled eyes between the half dozen or so Turks that were clustered into the limo with her. All of them gathered around the satellite feed as two hellbent souls went about knocking seven different shades of materia from one another. Rosalind kept only one eye on their endless fighting, too busy in securing a Dispel materia into her sidearm to be bothered. With any luck, the entire affair would last only as long as it took to bury the Runic weapon into that maniac’s back. The night was quickly beginning to wear on her. She didn’t think they’d have gotten as far as they had without the help of her colleagues.

“Man, that guy’s tough!” Rude exclaimed, visibly shaken as the reception flared with an explosion of car parts and late-night commuters. “I’d hate to be the one that has to clean that mess up.”

“I’m ready when you two ladies are.” Goggle-eyed, and carrying more artillery than a Junon battleship, Reno was impatient to leave, to turn the tables, to even the odds, to kick some ass! “Just say the word!”

“I think it really ought to be just me and Terra going into this one, Reno.”

“Are you kidding? After that Kefka clown messes up our ride, brands me like an ox, endangers our lives? No ma’am! I’m beating him down, I’m beating him down!”

Terra sighed. The impetuousness of youth. “Rosalind’s right, Reno. The more of us that go out there, the more attention we’re going to draw towards ourselves. She can just ring you up on that walkie thingie if we need some help.”

Reno felt like raising anarchy at this point, as though the fact that he held seniority over Rosalind went completely over the both of their heads. Only through a supreme act of will was he able to hold his tongue.

“Be careful, then,” Tseng put in, seemingly preoccupied with some other thought. “I don’t have to remind you two how much Midgar is counting on you.”

The sat feed suddenly focused on some wingless form descending heavily from the distant turnpike above, crashing through the rooftop of a building that was less than a dozen yards away from them.

“That’s him!” Terra cried out. “That’s got to be Kefka!”

Without so much as a goodbye, the two women headed off into the nearby building’s direction. The men left behind sat silent for a moment, unsure of what it was they were supposed to be doing at this point.

“So what now?” Tseng finally asked to his stout troupe.

Reno turned up the volume on the television screen.

“Hope? Pray? Place bets?”

* * *

Kefka stirred from Lethe, broken and weary.

Thought and reason started running together, a limbo of ill-gotten gains and misshapen intentions, muddling his senses and clouding his mind. Stirred to consciousness by the sensation of broken glass beneath him, the events of he and Sephiroth’s very recent godspat – a war to make devils wince and angels to tear the wings from their backs out of faith ungiven – returned in an instant. It wasn’t over. Would it ever be? Body feeling as though it had been run over by a steamroller, Kefka nonetheless forced himself to get back up.

This machine, this Sephiroth, what was he? The creature that time forgot? A being from some other planet?

“What?”

Checking to see if nothing was broken or even missing, he noticed at last. He didn’t bleed as the shards of glass pierced him, at least, he didn’t bleed as he once remembered bleeding. Rather, he was venting, venting a mystic green vapor, a vapor that escaped from cuts and contusions like steam from a flow valve. Was there no way to staunch such a flow of precious life force? He grimaced.

“Suck it up,” he growled inwardly, snake eyes spinning to find an exit. “We . . . you . . . still have a soldier to put down. On with it!”

Dazed, nauseous, and stinking of whatever it was that flowed out of him, Kefka shouldered his way through the aluminum door of the blackened room, finding that once again he was outside. Midgar repulsed him. Everything about it – its people, its toxins, its bureaucracy – all of it was just about as base and wretched as he was about to stand. Once he was done with this jackal man, he would rip it all up by its foundations. Smote its ruin upon the countryside. Oblivion. Nothingness. His gift to the world. All would be complete then.

Barely able to balance himself on the rickety fire escape, Kefka didn’t even notice the other on the grated landing with him until his head leveled.

Sephiroth.

“For fuck’s sake . . .”

The blade came down, moving to part his head from its shoulders. Arm suddenly attrifuting, however, slackened the warrior’s grip, knocking it clear off target. Kefka seized the moment, no longer grinning or cracking out into frenzied laughter. No more. Rebounding, the jester man planted a solid kick into the soldier’s gut, winding him. He never gave the unflinching soldier an inch, sledgehammering several lightning quick blows into Sephiroth’s jaw. The silver head whipsmacked to and fro, back and forth, in concert. Again, close quarter chaos. Again, the vice-like holds, the turn of the tables. No . . .

Not again!

The soldier reacted to his mother’s voice like so many earth-cleaving attacks he had been given, seizing Kefka by the waist and pitching him fully over his head. Cartwheeling, the hellish harlequin landed spread-eagle behind him. Masamune speared down after him, a blur of movement.

Schink.

Kefka twisted away at the last moment, letting the blade shriek harmlessly through the iron landing. Free hand snaking around the cruciform blade, he counterattacked – stealthily channeling the katana’s materia as he sent a series of brutal kicks up into Sephiroth’s chest.

All throughout their danse macabre, however, each man was beginning to tire, their hidden reserves of strength beginning to wane. They were down to the wire now, with the current, against the current, back again, forth again.

Who would survive?

* * *

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Rosalind asked.

Then, she did. Grunting and groaning. The sounds of stone mortar and reinforced steel complaining in the wake of a hellacious contest. They were close by, but where?

“I hear it. It should only be just a couple more floors.”

“Wait . . .” Terra wheezed, her century-old voice grinding in her throat. In the case of both Kefka and Sephiroth, the victor was anyone’s guess. In the fight against time, however, Terra knew better than anyone that there was ever only one victor. “I can’t . . . go on.”

“Fight it, Terra.” Rosalind’s lithe fingers took hold of her spotted ones. “We’re almost to the end now.”

She coughed. She wheezed. Life unfolded in a frantic montage before her eyes, blotting out the dimly lit stairwell above her. One step, two. Terra kept moving, Runic Blade just at her side. Finally, they had reached the top – what was left of it.

“Where are they?”

The blasted out walls of the uppermost floor were completely silent, and Rosalind’s mind began to race. Had they taken their duel to some other realm this time, some other plain of existence? Had they done away with each other already? As quietly as she could, she stepped out onto the warped fire escape and across the nearby catwalk, her nine millimeter gripped with a steady hand, ready for anything.

“Do you see them?” she said. Then, when there was no answer from her infirmed friend, she swiveled back around. “Ter—oh, God! Terra!”

Terra gurgled blood as the full length of the Runic Blade protruded from out of the black folds of her cloak. And behind her, leering, was her killer, finishing the job he had started over a century ago.

“Told you I’d be back, bitch,” Kefka growled, victorious.

He kicked the esper woman from the sword, like so many others he had laid to waste, before zoning in on his next victim. Rosalind backpedaled, her face a mixture of rage, sorrow, and fear. Mindless of her direction, she tripped and fell on her backside, her gun loosing a blind shot. The materia-charged projectile tore at the air wildly but fizzled several feet short of its target, its energies already unraveling and feeding the Runic Knight with life again. Kefka roared his impatience with the brazen young woman and flung a sphere of ice from off the length of the sword. The spell nailed her hard in the sternum, sending her up into the empty space and through a townhouse window.

The ex-general flexed his fuming muscles, lost for a moment in diabolic thought.

“Yes, now where were we?”

Sephiroth groaned weakly on the opposite end of the catwalk.

Kefka sighed. “You’re really beginning to bore me, you know that?”

Masamune slashed apart open air three times, sending several orbs of smoldering fire bee-lining across the walkway. Kefka mirrored the gesture, cutting the hellish globes into harmless vapor – feeding his fire, fueling his frenzy. The Lifestream demon jumped into a sprint, loosing bolt after bolt of jagged lightning. Sephiroth seemed at a loss to combat this type of sorcery, his already shellshocked physique overrun by nerve damage. Wracked by violent spasming, he toppled to his knees. Broken. Overcome . . .

Kefka’s eyes waxed victorious. He ran and leaped, the mystical blade moving as if independent of its own wielder . . .

The prostrate form of Sephiroth waited . . . not yet . . . almost . . . a little closer, and . . .

Body barrel-rolling, Masamune pinwheeling, the soldier found purchase, severing the tendons of his enemy’s sword arm!

Wailing, the bird of prey crash-landed behind him, a shadow of his former, wise-cracking self. A cloud of mako gas swirled about his form, making him look frail and almost intangible. The champion of Midgar was no more further from throwing in the towel than the Lord of Judgment, twitching and bleeding as he was from internal injury. A minute passed, then two. Five would elapse before either one returned to the fray. And yet they returned all the same, fighting death, fighting each other, fighting . . . to keep fighting!

Kefka parried, backhanding the soldier.

Sephiroth gave riposte, unleashing an ice spell.

Kefka feinted, dismissing the spell with his blade.

Sephiroth thrusted. Kefka dodged, kicking, hard . . .

And the soldier’s cry rattled the sixth and seventh frontiers of the city as a million and one crippled nerves in his sciatic area unleashed a galaxy of torment upon him. Masamune did not so much slip from his grip this time as it was wrenched out of his hand by his nemesis. This beast, this defiler, this source of all his pain.

Advantage: Kefka.

* * *

Rosalind picked her bloodied head up from the scene of shattered glass and wood splinters that surrounded her. Each breath she took was agony, the ball of ice having virtually caved her diaphragm in upon itself. She put it out of her mind. If she didn’t succeed with this mission, if the Turks didn’t succeed with this mission, then Terra and all of her Returner friends would have died in vain. She couldn’t let that happen.

She wouldn’t let it happen.

Hands fumbling blindly amidst the wreckage, the rookie Turk fought to find her cell phone. She only prayed that Reno would be ready for her.

* * *

Swipe! Swipe! Swipe!

Etiquette, if Kefka had truly entered this debacle with any whatsoever, was done away with by this time. Unbarring the last hole, pulling out the final stop, the former Imperial became absolutely relentless in putting the materia-eyed soldier away for good. In his left hand, Masamune pummeled Sephiroth repeatedly with a kaleidoscope of elemental spells. In his right, a notched Runic Blade fed the discharged mana back into Kefka’s body, allowing him to unleash a virtually infinite cache of destruction. And never for one second did either blade stop moving.

On the receiving end, Sephiroth fought to project his screaming, heaving mindset somewhere else. Anywhere else! Twisting back, jerking away, stumbling from delirium and pain, the military gigas was seemingly helpless against such an onslaught. One moment, his blood froze; the next it boiled. One blow would put his frayed nerves on excruciating edge, then the next would launch them into a dizzying sort of limbo with an out-of-nowhere Gravity spell. Piece by piece, Kefka disassembled him, rippling the black leather around his body into ribbons. Crimson life poured out and showered the iron-grid catwalk with gore, causing him to slip and lose footing.

“That all ya got?!”

Swipe!

“What’s the matter, champ?!”

Swipe!

“Can’t--”

Swipe!

“--fucking--”

Swipe!

“--hack it, huh?!”

Kefka jerked the half-conscious man upright, seized by his blood-soaked hair, tearing away what was left of his coat, intent on vivisecting his adversary with his own weapon. Naked chest rippling, Sephiroth barely mustered up the vigor to deflect an overhead slash. How long before he simply blacked out from the pain? Make it soon, he secretly hoped. Don’t make me conscious for this . . .

“You,” the Runic Knight crowed, harnessing a spell into both blades, “should have run. For you see, now . . .” Twin flames suddenly leapt to life on both weapons. “You’re well done!”

Masamune, glimmering in the radiance of Kefka’s waning lifeforce, came down, down . . .

Ahhhhhh!

Faltering . . . as Sephiroth took hold of the arm cradling the Runic Blade. A last ditch effort, perhaps all that was left to put this monster away for good, the other gloved hand came across to make contact with Masamune. Breath turning to white mist, the bare muscle and cartilege in Kefka’s forearm started to congeal and crystallize. The jester man grimaced, mouth spewing vaporous Lifestream as Sephiroth wrenched the frozen appendage completely from its socket. The sigiled broadsword tumbled down over the edge of the platform, accompanied by hundreds of shards of emerald ice. The compulsion to main and kill was suddenly overrode by the instinct to survive, to exist. Kefka would not be denied this, swiveling the emblazoned Masamune end over end and driving it home – point blank, into the soldier’s chest.

Red eyes, bathed in a murky, ethereal fog, tunneled through the encroaching shadows of oblivion, finding only mako eyes, wreathed in warm blood.

Hellfire dimmed.

Lifestream ebbed.

The winner was . . .

* * *

Rosalind plucked her PHS up at the last second.

“Reno, now!”

* * *

Already two steps ahead of the rookie Turk, Reno crouched down upon a nearby rooftop, a loaded rocket launcher poised on his shoulder ready to unleash its payload. Flicking his cigarette butt down over the ledge, he took careful aim upon the ruin of the two dying gladiators wrought upon the bridge, taking only enough time to scratch at the fresh scars seared into his face.

With a sly grin, Reno fired.

Ten seconds later, the catwalk vanished, taking the two heaving, smoking juggernauts with it.

* * *

“Hey, come on.”

Moaning, scarcely able to hear her assigned mentor over the dull ringing in her ears, Rosalind at last ascended from the rubble.

“Wait, what about--”

“Don’t worry,” said Reno, steadying her. “I got ‘em both. We should get you fed and washed. The president already has our next assignment all lined up for us.”

Already? After nearly getting herself killed on no less than four occasions in the one evening? Rosalind’s first impulse was to vent her outrage, then realized that she was not at liberty to. Risk was part of the game if she wanted to keep wearing the black and white. She was just going to have to get used to it.

“So, what does our next job entail?”

“A rival offshoot of human resources. Things have been acting up with the Shinra Electric Company and we have to get to the bottom of it.”

“Well, at least that’s taking it down a notch.” Her bruised, scraped fingers handled her sidearm somewhat unsteadily. “At least there won’t be any more problems with--”

She gasped, eyes losing focus. Reno followed her stare to back behind him, where a warped and twisted silhouette was ambling up over the mangled wreckage of the walkway. A seven-foot-long katana was clutched into the limping creature’s mandible, and Rosalind thought for a second that it was the mako-eyed soldier coming back to rejoin them. It was only when the haggard looking face of Kefka materialized before them that she realized the severity of their predicament.

“You--” Kefka rasped, face melting and swaying – a Lifestream abomination that was slowly losing cohesion. Masamune flew up. “You--!”

Kefka howled—as the Runic Blade sliced through his rib cage.

And it’s new wielder, Sephiroth—clutching precariously to the end of the platform.

Reno and Rosalind jerked back from the display: the silver-haired soldier plummeting back down the way he had come like a spent ammo shell; Kefka dropping to his knees like a prostrate cleric, the etched sword gradually eating away at his already badly dissolved body. He faded quickly, too quickly. Not quick enough.

Rosalind stepped forward, pushing Reno to one side as if he were an afterthought. Kefka raised what was left of his head, rapidly diminishing eyes held wide open as the nine millimeter pistol trained itself on the raggedy demon before her.

“Go ahead and scream,” she told him. “No one’s going to save you now.”

Bang!

And Kefka vanished, atoms scattering briefly on the wind before spiraling their way into the runes of a now wielderless weapon. Rosalind lowered her gun arm, blinking away the thrill of victory with tired eyes. Around both herself and Reno, Midgar burned, groaned, licked the wounds it had suffered, trying to awaken itself from the nightmare they had strayed into . . .

* * *

It took Rosalind three days to find the remnants of the town once known as Mobliz, the hamlet which history said Terra often spent her time. There wasn’t much to see of the place by the time she got there, only several patchwork cottages and a well that had run dry a very long time ago. The place appeared to be ancient, far beyond repair even in the materia age. She felt something of the history behind this place, remembered when she had first read the tale of Kefka tearing the city to pieces. How close those events had come to repeating themselves.

Some several hours later, just before dusk, her task was complete. The final cairn of rocks had been laid now, hardworking and caring hands laid to rest at last. It made her sad, though. She did not personally know this esper woman up until last week, and yet the last ones of her generation were all but extinct now. And what remained, but this monument of nonexistence? Such cruel irony.

“I hope you’ve found peace, Terra Branford.” She regarded the final resting placed of the rest of her friends out of the corner of her eye. “I hope you’ve all found peace.”

And at the center of the unadorned burial, standing watch in the customary Imperial fashion, rested the Runic Blade. For somewhere within that rusted hunk of metal, Rosalind knew there was a demon looking to escape.

She smiled, then dialed up the number for her Shinra escort. “I’m ready.”

* * *

He was ready. Beyond ready, even.

Professor Hojo kept silent vigil over the broken, bloodied Sephiroth in his laboratory. How absurdly convenient the whole experiment had been. So, it would appear that Hojo’s methods of creating the ultimate soldier had proven superior after all. Not only had his creation triumphed over a greater evil, but Sephiroth also suffered none of the initial flaws of early experimentation. Mako splicing, combined with Jenova-cell re-sequencing, kept the subject’s sanity completely intact.

The professor smiled a wiley sort of smile then, tapping on the sensory regeneration unit with amusement. The naked body of Sephiroth neither spoke nor stirred, comatose as the suspension fluids and dermoplasts fought to repair his mangled physique. Hojo seemed all the more impressed with himself and his prize-winning project.

“You are perfection, my boy. Just you wait and see.”

Father left son to his own devices then, allowing him the time he needed to fully heal. To regenerate. To begin anew. Unbeknownst, however, to the smug young scientist, the invincible soldier’s bloodstream had contracted something sinister in the wake of his gruesome showdown, something beyond imagining. Sephiroth twitched in his dreams that night, wincing and stirring amidst the firestorm of his mind. All in eyeshot burned and crackled in chaos and confusion. But something about this carnage allured him, enticed him even. There was no putting his finger on this feeling.

Even here, in this place, he could hear his mother’s voice giving praise and offering him guidance. He paid the voice no mind this time, however. The burning was simply too beautiful to ignore. In the distance, a one-winged angel stirred from the ground as if mortally wounded. An angel he recognized, an angel he abhorred. And yet, at that very moment, it was a soul he seemed asynchronous with, one perfectly in tune with Sephiroth’s own hatred toward the insects holding dominion over the planet.

Kefka’s smile mirrored his own.

Sephiroth never smiled…


~ THE END ~

This post has been edited by Lothar Goldfist on 17th July 2006 22:36

--------------------

You are not your username. You are not your avatar. You are not the number of posts you have. You're not your signature. You are the all-typing, all-chatting crap of the Web. --Friend of a Friend

A very intresting story, and an intresting clash of the titans. It's also an unusual sort of crossover, in that not only has it not occurred simply from something like a magic amulet or a zone eater, but merely from the passage of time. Even better, I find myslef not midning too much about all the possible plot loops from FF6 becoming FF7's world and just regarding it as a sort of AU-like situation.

The characters work well in this setting, and you've made Hojo even more of a calculating bastard than the game did by having him set this up just to see which experiment works better. The Turks are just as I expected of them, and the older Terra is as I think she'd be.

The actual fight between Kefka and Sephiroth is gripping, and not too clichéd in my view. The travel-in-time moment is a nice touch, though it's pretty clear safety was not guaranteed.

The whole thing is naturally very well written and I think that this is pretty much ready to be included in the next fanfic update, probably in the FF7 section as most of it is set in FF7's world.

The ending, being slightly ambigious in that it's likely Kefka still is not dead, is what I prefer. Lack is always more fun than resolution because it means there's a possibilty of [i]what next[i]?

I have to question the moment that a GLOCK is pulled out though. There's no Austria to produce the company in FF7's world. Seems rather iffy to me when you could just make up another gun or say 'nickle-plated pistol'

But other than that one wee firearms niggle, this was perfect. If only more crossovers were like it rather than just hero X helping the cast of Game y do what they did in the game...

This post has been edited by Del S on 11th July 2006 20:41

--------------------

"Only the dead have seen the end of their quotes being misattributed to Plato."
-George Santayana

"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here..."
-Abraham Lincoln, prior to the discovery of Irony.

Hey, thanx a lot!

Yeah. Problems with holes in the plot was a big concern when I wrote this one. As one who never much got into FFVII, I typically came to rely on the knowhow of others to get the nuances down (I'm old school, what can I say? ). I'm glad someone picked up on the Glock bit. I guess I was just getting really tired of constantly saying either 'firearm' or 'sidearm' and was looking for another word. Didn't even realize it was an Australian until you mentioned it. Won't be making that mistake again!

Anyways, that all sounds great. I'll keep dusting it off for errors then. Thanx again for the feedback!

--------------------

You are not your username. You are not your avatar. You are not the number of posts you have. You're not your signature. You are the all-typing, all-chatting crap of the Web. --Friend of a Friend

So this was one of them? Well I'm glad you had a second, Zaph. Having a quality author disqualified without a backup just isn't sporting.

As for the crossover, I'm not one to read them typically. Still, it was entertaining and drew me in (however reluctantly). Good stuff, your ability to spin a well-told epic in such a relatively small space makes me jealous. Nice tie-in's to FF7 as well, though my knowledge of that world isn't anywhere as complete as would be necessary to fully grasp everything you have referenced.

It seems to me this is somewhat of a prequel to the FF7 world we know of. Is this true? I haven't kept up with the recent games, so I'm only going by my aging knowledge of the original.

--------------------

Visions of Peace - Four Generals, One Empire, and the Returners caught in the middle.