Chapter 288

"I must have some of the worst luck in all of the Slane Theocracy." Raymond cursed, he was slumped over the table of his room, a mug of cheap ale at hand. 'One sentence. That was all it took. One. Gods. Damned. Sentence. And then she had questions…' The Cardinal slumped back in his chair, snatched his mug, drained it into his open mouth and then with a furious snarl he threw it at the wall. The sour flavor of the cheap stuff burned down his throat, and the mug shattered against the wall, scattering a rain of wooden fragments around the floor where they wobbled and slid to a stop when they ran into a wall, the chair where he sat, or disappearing under the bed on the far side of the room.

"Damn it all!" He hissed and slammed his fist on the table, it broke in half and thudded against his legs where he pushed it off to let it too fall to the floor with a dull thud.

Guilt rampaged through him, and not for the first time, he hung his head as shame mixed with anger. 'It's for humanity's sake. I'm not allowed to feel guilt. I'm not allowed to act on my conscience… there's larger stakes than one man's soul!' He tried to reassure himself, for all the good it did.

"Zesshi…" He muttered her name under his breath as if it were a prayer to a god, as if merely saying her name would make her appear before him, he thought back to their first meeting, her arrogance, her seeming indifference to everything around her…

"You look nice today." He said, unsure of what else to say when he saw the black and white haired woman enter the training hall.

"Whatever." She said, and shrugged, "So you're the new handler?" She asked and pulled the absurd scythe off of her back, "Let's see what you've got. Prove yourself, and I might even let you screw me."

Raymond went back on his heel at the blunt phrase, his face turning bright red, and the indifferent mask broke out into a smirk, "Shy one, that's cute." She said and leveled her scythe. "Come at me. Let's see if you can do any better than the last four."

The training hall of the Black Scripture was a massive thing, easily the size of a larger temple, it had numerous small environments set up for various exercises, from small buildings to practice clearing an area, to some phony woods meant to practice hunting in the wilderness.

But Zesshi and Raymond were using a simple roped in matted section. 'She's killed past handlers just by accident, so be careful…' The warning of the Pontifex Maximus came back to him from when Raymond got the assignment, and now facing against her, he couldn't see how.

Literally.

She moved so fast he didn't see her, one moment she was there, then she was gone. He dove out of the way by pure instinct and drew out his knife, the noise of destruction behind him when her scythe impacted the ground where he'd been and the stone shattered, he spun, sliding his back foot around and then pushing off to go on the attack.

Zesshi looked down, almost cutely befuddled at the fact that she struck nothing, the scythe was held in one hand, and she winked at him when she caught sight of his approach. "You really are a black scripture, aren't you?" She asked rhetorically and came up to meet his charge, his blood racing and his narrow, focused eyes seemingly fully intent on shedding her blood.

"Oh, spirit, good, even some of the black lose their will with my first strike, as a reward, I'll fight you at your level!" She said with mockery, she was a short thing, slight by comparison to Raymond, but her mockery was, in his eyes, immediately well placed.

He began using every trick in his arsenal of experience, and she batted away every strike, constantly on retreat, but it was she who was in control of the flow of the fight despite the fact that it was he who was on the offensive. 'It defies reason!' He exclaimed in his head and began using his martial arts.

She used none of her own as his strength doubled and speed went up with it. Raymond counted himself to be the best in the world with the long knife. Able to cut the wings off a wyvern before it noticed they were gone. His knife was so sharp that those he killed seldom even felt the pain of their deaths.

And yet here, this heterochromatic girl who appeared no more than a preteen girl, was keeping him struggling to match her with no effort at all? 'This defies all reason… I know she's supposed to be 'her' daughter, but this is madness!' He gritted his teeth, and Zesshi smirked again.

That was the grating thing, and the young man's pride could bear no more. One thing he could do, though he'd pay a price for it… Raymond drew on his inner spirit, not for long, but enough that it would shave somewhere from seconds to days off of the end of his life, and for one instant, he might as well have been a godkin. Blood spurted through his pores, wounds opened up, and everything about himself was more than doubled itself…

"The hell?!" Zesshi snapped as his grim and bloody smile came over his face and his hand moved faster than she was prepared for. Her lowering herself to his level, left her sloppy. His knife was already past her guard where she'd teasingly allowed him to be.

He grabbed the lightly held scythe by the bar and pushed it down, and his knife came in…

She moved her head, still easily avoiding the blow, but on the black and white sides of her head, holding her hair bunched up, were two curved and slightly armored pieces held only by leather strips. His knife struck the leather strip that held one of them fast, severing it away and causing her hair to fall loose.

She went from playful to serious in that same moment, she dropped her scythe, hit him in the sternum, and he tumbled head over heels over the mat, knocked the ropes down, and kept going clear into the wall. Raymond felt himself fall, halfway forward, hunched, coughing up blood, and in front of him she stood, breathing hard but clearly not tired.

Her narrow eyes leveled at him, the scythe was dropped to the floor with a crash and she was rushing to fix her hair. "Damn it!" She cursed, and he saw why.

"A… A half elf?" He sputtered out, blood blurred the noise, but she understood well enough and stalked over to him.

Slumped and on his ass, the slight half elf towered over him. "My father is the elf king, that's why I'm cursed with… these. Got anything to say?"

Raymond raised a shaky head, it was still wobbling a little, and he cracked a smile, revealing that he'd lost a few teeth during his tumble and said, "You look nice today."

He didn't see what she did after that, though he remembered the feeling of her scooping him up to take him to be healed up.

'Gods above, it's been over twenty years since then… and has a day passed that I haven't gone to see her? She never did admit to killing her past handlers on purpose… and maybe she didn't, but I wonder if any of them ever found her secret, and took a heavier blow than they could have survived as a consequence of their reaction. At least the one that Clementine accused of raping her was no loss…'

He left his memories behind and when the knock came, he rose to his feet and went to answer it. 'She'll be at the tournament, I know she will. She can't resist the chance to fight someone strong, and then I can…' The thought died, what to say to her, how to explain himself, he had no answer still. 'I'll find some way to talk to her, I have to.' He said, and swung it open.

"Cardinal Raymond?" A finely-dressed young human boy said, he wore bright red clothing, a formal doublet and vest over a white cotton shirt with the strings tied up to just below his neck, and a little round hat over his mop of blonde hair.

"Yes, are you from the King and Queen?" He guessed.

"Yes, you're being called on to attend an ur-urgent meet-meeting, M'lord, my Lord and Lady w-want you to hast-hasten, as a human Kingdom's wellbeing is on the line." The boy said in a formal style that sounded not at all natural, he clearly struggled, fumbling over his words along the way, but getting them out eventually.

[Lesser Stamina Boost] Raymond activated the martial art, and he was for all intents and purposes, sober. His constitution shooting up and thus reducing the effect of the alcohol, it was a shady trick many a scripture member used in the past. 'Especially the washouts who couldn't handle what we had to do…' He dismissed the moment of pity for those and said, "Lead the way, boy." Then shut the door on his way out as the boy did exactly that.