chapter 24: The Lion and the Wolf III

One moment, Pausanias was commenting to Daizo about many things, among them the possibility of the commander seeing the family of yokai, to the point of forgetting about the broken mirror, the next he heard the screech of something metallic and Ayame screaming.

Startled, the young man turned around to see what did just happen, and saw something he most definitely didn't expect.

Ayame fighting a twenty foot-tall robot ( or rather, a twenty foot-tall robot that looked like a police car had decided to become a laser-shooting android) with nothing but her sword and speed. Fortunately, like any giant robot, it was slow and clumsy, and Ayame had super speed and reflexes on her side. On the other hand, she wouldn't be able to damage it, not with a simple sword and hardened leaves.

Unfortunately for it, Pausanias was near, and he didn't actually need weapons to tear it apart.

Not even bothering to ask Daizo for help, Pausanias tore his jacket and ran at full speed towards the machine, which had finally grabbed Ayame after she managed to make it drop its gun, and prepared to rip her in half. The machine didn't have time to turn towards the source of the screaming before Pausanias slammed himself into one of its legs, forcing it to the ground and allowing Ayame to escape its hold.

"Ayame!" He asked while helping her to stand up. "Are you alright? That thing nearly ripped you in half!"

Ayame nodded, a bit shaken by having been extremely close to death, but otherwise fine okay all things given. "A bit hurt, but I'll live. Besides I'm not the who crashed himself against a giant robot!"

Pausanias waved her off. "It's just metal, and believe me, I've been hit by worse before." He hadn't, but being hit by a training press had to be close enough. He then turned to look at the fallen machine. "Any idea of what is it?"

"I think it's a Destron." Ayame replied.

Pausanias turned to give her a puzzled look (he knew of The Transformers, but only by their english names, and even then the most he actually knew of them was that they were transforming robot), but before he could ask further the machine roared and stood up, grabbing weapon from the ground and glaring at them. "Let's scrap this thing."

Ayame nodded, and both charged at the Destron, not realizing that the tribe had gotten out of the trailer by the ruckus... and that Daizo was watching them from afar.

Ayame, being much faster than, only this time she made sure to stay well outside its reach, throwing her leaves at it to distract it, while Pausanias met its free fist with his own, blessed, trained muscle matching cold, hard metal. His idea was to lunge at the machine's main body, force it to the ground once more, and then rip its internal components to take it out, but all of sudden the robot became quicker on its feet, refusing to approach the warrior more than the necessary, even if he could take the punishment.

The Destron's other arm, the one the machine couldn't use against Pausanias, kept firing laser after laser at Ayame, each shot destroying a tree as it struck it. The she-wolf, though, was simply too fast for the machine's targeting systems.

Eventually, seeing that the fight was going nowhere, and not wanting the machine to forget about her and shoot Pausanias, Ayame raced once more at the it, but rather than attacking outright she instead climbed up its front and, screaming, threw several leaves onto its face, disabling its eyes and rendering it blind. This didn't destroy it, not by a longshot but it did make it impossible for it to see them.

That meant, by extension, that it couldn't see Pausanias imitating Ayame and climbing up its body, only this time to reach its head and rip it off with all his might.

It's body giving a metallic groan, the headless robot dropped to the ground in a heap, its chassis losing any color as it did so, and shaking the trees around it.

Pausanias, seeing that the machine would not move, crushed its head for good measure and threw it away before going to Ayame, who was panting due to both exhaustion and excitement.

"Ayame, you alright there?"

"Yeah, just tired. Never expected to fight a Transformer, let alone a Destron." She said before smiling at him. "And thanks for the help."

Pausanias returned the smile. "It's my duty remember?"

Meanwhile, several tribe members approached the downed robot carefully, not knowing if it would get up again. All sans one, that is.

"Is that a Destron?!" Ginta practically shrieked, no longer confined on his wheelchair but still covered from head to toe in bandages; at least he wasn't complaining about the heat they gave. "Did Ayame and Pausanias just kill a Destron?!"

"Don't get too close to it." One of his tribe mates warned him.

"Oh c'mon, it's dead! I mean, they didn't get its laser core, but it ain't moving either!"

"Wait." One of the wolves said before getting close to the fallen machine and sniffing it. "Does this thing smell like ink to you too?"

And then the downed robot, to the shock of the group, began to melt, not into molten slag as it logically should had, but into a black, viscous mass. Said glob of black slime, but instead of attacking them, it went across the group without even touching them, and moved towards the truck... or, more specifically, to Daizo, who for some reason didn't seem to care that a giant mass of liquid darkness was crawling specifically at him.

Had the blessed man known the truth at the moment, he'd tried to kill Daizo. Alas, he didn't.

Before Pausanias could warn him of the danger, the slime reached the detective, who raised his arm as it came closer... and then, to the astonishment of the group, absorbed it through the palm until nothing was left.

Daizo, seeing the astonished and even scared looks they were giving him, turned around to do something they couldn't see and then turned back towards them. "Damn, I guess the jig's up." He said in a humorous tone. Naturally, given the situation and what just happened, nobody laughed.

"I told you that bastard isn't human." Ayame whispered to Pausanias as she stood next to him, sword in one hand and magical leaf in the other as she glared at 'Daizo'. "He smells like one a bit, but there's something else there, ink I think."

"Anything else?"

Pausanias, hearing this and after watching the 'man' absorb a mass of ink that previously had been a murderous robot bent on killing them, and one that before that had been Daizo's car, reached a conclusion: that thing was not Uehara Daizo, and it had tried to kill them.

With a scream of anger, Pausanias grabbed the closest tree to him, and then threw it at 'Daizo', who didn't have time to dodge the makeshift javelin until it hit him and made him explode into a splash of ink. The thrown tree kept flying until it hit the other side of the road, leaving a small trace of ink on its way.

The tribe, Ayame included, stared at the spot where the greatest threat to their lives had been standing on mere seconds prior, frozen in awe, not believing that he had just been taken out so easily despite his reputation. Well, that and because they just bore witness to Pausanias' strength. They DID know that he was strong, but not that strong. In the meantime Pausanias, went back to the cab, not only to start the engine but also to get his helmet and weapons. After fighting a Transformer and killing a creature passing itself as commander Daizo, he wanted to be prepared for anything.

"Holy crap, you just killed commander Daizo!" One of the wolves cried the situation kicked in.

Pausanias, after putting on his helmet. "That thing was not the commander. Now stop gawking and get back inside, we must leave, now, before-" He managed to order before a voice interrupted him.

"Oh, already leaving, mutts?"

Everyone turned around to see something that froze them (even Pausanias to a point) with fear.

It was Daizo, standing next to the truck alive and well, wiping his jacket from dirt and still with that damnable smile on his face, as if he hadn't been liquidified mere seconds prior.

"Welp, I gotta hand it to you, you pack one helluva wallop." He said after stretching his arms after getting a tree thrown at him, even tipping his hat at Pausanias in respect.

"W hat have you done to the real Daizo, freak?!" Pausanias snarled as he crouched in a fighting stance, pointing his sword at the creature.

He felt a soft hand grabbing him by the sohulder. It was Ayame, who was had her pelts drapped on. Her gaze was too fixed on the officer. "Pausanias... I think that thing IS the commander."

The 'creature' recoiled at the tone, before sighing in annoyance. "Hell, never expected a wolf to actually be perceptive, and a goddamn spartan of all people to be idealistic. Son, the girl's right, I AM detective Uehara Daizo."

Pausanias stared at Ayame; a part of him didn't want to believe either of them, but after everything he had just seen, he knew they were telling the truth.

Which, by extension, meant he was most definitely a fraud, because Pausanias didn't know which term meant 'bastard who uses his powers to kill people and make himself look like a hero'.

"Yep, I'm a scoundrel, a dirty murderer, a disgrace to the Agency and a liar." Daizo said when he saw the glare Pausanias was sending him. "And unfortunately for you, I cannot let you leave with that knwoledge... or live, for that matter."

"Why did you do it." Pausanias asked, not thinking before speaking, angry as he was. The only thing stopping him from running at Daizo and chopping him in half was that he didn't know his full capabilities, only that he could shrug having a tree thrown at him and could control ink.

"What do you mean, exactly?" Daizo asked back. "Setting your furry friends up? Sometimes the crooks I catch are real so that people don't get suspicious, while others I make them when I go for the grandiose, what with being able to create anything. This time, it was time for the real deal. Helped that one day I found out about the yokai extirpation order from the Mikado himself."

"So, that's why you made up the 'man-eating dogs'?" Ayame growled. "Because you're a lazy bastard hellbent on genocide?"

Daizo chuckled. "More or less, yeah. You know, I think this is what supposed to happen: good cop reveals himself to be 'evil' and all that." He even airquoted when he said 'evil'. "I could tell you the story of how I, a simple painter from the feudal era, ended up becoming the most powerful sonuvabitch in Nippon, and even more. However..."

Daizo then extended his arms towards them, prompting the two to flinch. However, instead of attacking as they thought he would, Daizo instead began sprouting a veritable sea of ink from them, which then divided itself into several globs.

Said globs of ink stood up and took the form of tall, armoured robots with red lenses and guns attached to their arms. Pausanias had seen those machines before: the LexCorp drones from the zoo. Pausanias had already fought them before: their weapons were weak, their chassis easy to scrap, and their intelligence too rudimentary to make them little more than a nuisance.

Thing was, those things merely looked like robots, their guns were not a threat to Pausanias alone, and there were fifty of them instead of just three... and that number was growing by the moment.

Daizo then overlooked his army and then harrumphed for some reason. "I think it's a bit unfair, don't you think? I mean, there are too many robots, all of them armed with machine guns, and only two of you are able to fight them." He then snapped his fingers. "I can fix that."

The drone army became ink once more, and Pausanias actually hoped that Daizo had decided to fight them himself... only for the mass to turn into another army, only this time it was an horde of monsters: orcs, goblins, zombies, dragons and giants bigger than his truck, demons just as big as the aforementioned behemoths, human barbarians that nonetheless clearly fit amongst their peers... and, maybe not incidentally, wolves the size of horses.

Daizo chuckled when he saw the terrified looks of the yokai and the greek. "I gotta give it to the americans, they know what to make to inspire me. It's a quirk of mine, really." His jovial voice became even more jovial, which only made him seem even more unnerving. "How about giving you a five minute start before my army straight out of Wizardry, magic included, hunt you down, uh?"

Pausanias kept staring at the army. He knew he could all of them on, but only one on one, not an entire army of them. An army that for all he knew could get even larger.

And that, of course, not taking its creator himself in account.

"Pausanias, what do we do?" He heard the horrified voice of Ayame's grandfather ask him.

Pausanias stayed quiet, still thinking.

Again, he felt the touch of Ayame's hand on his shoulder. "Pausanias?"

Against that kind of power, there was only one thing they could do.

"Run as fast as possible."

..........

He should have known they were being herded until they encountered the cliff. After all, dragons could fly, and theorically so could demons.

Or the fact he was fighting ink. Ink that could just recover from any slash and chop from his sword, or even reconstitute into something else. That said, even if he had known that critical piece of information before, he would had still fought them.

He and the adults of tribe were more than capable of climbing up the thirty-foot stony face, and Ayame could even clear it in a single bound, but the elders, he children and those in wolf fom could not, they could not just get around it in time... and the horde was dangerously close. He actually pondered on the possibility that Daizo had planned all of this ahead... which both infuriated and scared him.

He only saw one solution: stay behind and fight Daizo's horde so that the tribe could get away. To where, he didn't know, but anywhere else would have been better than being killed, or worse, by ink monsters.

It had been stupid of him to expect the tribe to leave without him after everything he had done for them, but at the very least they didn't try to get themselves killed helping him fight the horde.

Even in after losing his sword and getting overwhelmed, half dead and getting the life beaten out of him by dragons and demons the size of houses, Pausanias refused to yield, to beg for mercy, and not just because it wouldn't have changed anything.

Until Ayame came screaming at Daizo with her blade raised. Just as quickly she was defeated and then set upon by the ink creatures.

He didn't bother to shout at Daizo to let her go: he knew the monster was bent on killing the entire tribe.

"Imagine the headlines: the commander wipes out the man-eating dogs from Hell and their Spartan master!" Daizo said as he raised his arms, ala a film director, as the largest of the ink creatures continued kicking Pausanias, all the while Ayame screamed her heart out and struggled to escape the monsters holding her in place. "Of course, I'll have to make up a reason for you for being here, but that'll be easy to-uh?"

Whatever made Daizo stop talking also made Pausanias' torturers to stop attacking him, letting him

A somewhat round object that Pausanias recognized as one of the many weapons he had made for Ares alongside his father.

A hand grenade.

He simply couldn't mistake it for anything else, since it looked too much like the ones used by the U.S military, pin ring and everything only more... futuristic, for lack of a better term.

And then the ring, defying everything Pausanias knew about grenade parts, pulled itself out of the bomb, as if pulled by magic. Pausanias didn't have time to ponder on this because he was laying just a meter away from the grenade.

And then it started beeping.

'Shit!'

Gathering the little strength he had left, fueled by fear-boosted adrenaline, Pausanias took advantage of the momentary distraction to get up from the grass, run up at Ayame and throw the two to the ground... just as the explosive detonated, creating a explosion so powerful it utterly annihilated anything within a radius of five meters.

Had Pausanias raised his head at that moment, he would have seen that the creatures within that radius simply ceased to exist, and those close enough exploded into black-coloured gore, instead of ink. Instead, he was busy making sure Ayame (and his hearing, for that matter) was alright.

And then, as the smoke and dust cleared and he finally looked up to see the results of the explosion, Pausanias saw, standing right in the spot where the grenade had gone off like a spire of green steel, the most awesome and relieving sight he could think of.

Doom Slayer himself.

..........

It seems Doom Slayer has decided to get personally involved on this... which makes sense, given Pausanias' brave but futile performance against Daizo. Never said anything about the SI not delivering the weapon himself.

If the fight with Barricade seems sloppy to you, it's because (I think) it is: sometimes I'm just not good at writing fights. Fear not, though, because the next chapter's fight will be better written (or at least, that's what I hope).