The Games We Play

DISCLAIMER: This story is NOT MINE IN ANY WAY. That honor has gone to the beautiful bastard Ryuugi. This has been pulled from his Spacebattles publishment at threads/rwby-the-gamer-the-games-we-play-disk-five.341621/. Anyway on with the show...err read.

Splitting Up

My Aurora exploded into existence around us and immediately aspected towards water, taking form as a bizarre, personalized water spout. As Gilgamesh entered my range, I felt his presence as a swift moving object literally burning a path through the flowing wind and water, boiling anything that touched his skin with friction alone.

He was fast, more so than anyone I'd ever fought, and that made all the difference in a fight. Most of the Grimm I opposed were massive creatures and there was something to be said for that—but they were unwieldy, too, so massive that everything they did seemed almost glacial. It wasn't, truly; logically speaking, any of the Grimm moved at truly absurd speeds given their size. But to me? They were mostly just giant targets. Some of the Grimm, the truly powerful ones, had other ways around such things, but those that didn't…

Well, they were a big part of how I'd gotten this strong.

And Gilgamesh wasn't like them at all. If anything, he'd been built with their weaknesses in mind, leveraging the absurd physical prowess of the Grimm to even more absurd levels, without anything to hold him back. I wasn't foolish enough to assume that he didn't have anything else up his sleeve—my life was rarely that easy—but even without whatever he was keeping in reserve, he was on a different level than the Grimm I'd fought thus far. He was fast by my standards and with nothing but his physical stats, managed to move at speeds I could only match with layered skills and outright time manipulation. It was, quite frankly, kind of ridiculous.

But so was I.

I held my Aurora in place for only a moment, gauging his approach, and then Fluctuated, flickering away just as he cut through the space I'd inhabited. Even as I moved, I let Xihai slip from my flesh, her spiritual presence seeming to rise from my skin like water vapor—and while I disappeared, she remained just where she was, forming a forming a physical form from the surrounding water. That was part of the reason I hadn't put aside Varuna instantly, in fact; though I didn't consider it the best of my Elemental Embodiment skills, it did have a fair bit going for it, among them the casual ability to either summon or create water. Without any increase in cost, Aurora had generated a massive amount of water; enough to flood skyscrapers and more than enough to serve my and Xihai's needs.

As Gilgamesh hit the other side of the rough sphere my Aurora had created, he didn't pierce through—rather, the sphere distorted, a portion of it stretching out with him and turning it into an odd cone-like shape as water pulled at him even as he pushed forward, slowing him slightly. At the same time, the rough coils of the former water spout transitioned into actual coiled, complete with dark blue scales. It spiraled upwards, water swirling into a more definite shape as it gathered into the form of giantess with six arms who's body flowed seamlessly into the serpentine scales just above her waist. Even as Gilgamesh finally broke free of the water's grasp and literally exploded out of her back, she didn't so much as flinch, water shifting back into place ever as what was boiled away began to condensate. Instead, she simply looked at Gilgamesh with nine pitch-black orbs; two in her face, one at her collar bone, and one on each of her arms, just below where her shoulders merged. From each of the eyes came a steady stream of clear water, flowing into and feeding the rest of her body.

Of all the improvements I'd made prior to this battle, this was, while not the greatest, definitely one of the closest to my heart—my Elementals had made the jump from Lesser Elementals to True Elementals, with my Elemental Affinities all doubling in the process. More importantly than that, however, was the changes that had come to my friends.

"Stop, monster," Xihai said calmly, forming the sounds on her own as she watched her foe. "We won't allow you to do as you please any longer."

Gilgamesh stopped for a moment to simply look at her for a moment before making a strange sound, like someone clicking their tongue but somehow off.

"To be expected, I suppose," He said, looking back at me. "As per usual, you are startlingly divided for one meant to represent unity."

"You have no idea," I answered, shifting my feet slightly as I focused on gathering my power.

"We are united in all the ways that matter," Xihai declared, looking at Gilgamesh. "A creature such as you should understand that."

"Perhaps so," Gilgamesh allowed easily. "Nonetheless, it's interesting. Are you the same, beneath the surface? Or have you changed in death as well, spirit of water?"

"All things change," She said, as if the question was meaningless to her. "In life and death and time. I am not the same as I was, whether yesterday or a thousand years before—yet what does it matter? Whatever has been gained or lost, so long as you can continue on, that is strength."

Gilgamesh tilted his head and considered her, having to tilt his head back to do so.

"Well said," He answered, almost as if applauding the words. "But I would disagree somewhat. Even after all this time, at least my heart has not changed, nor my will. In my eyes, I consider that to be what makes me strong—that no matter what happens, I am still myself."

"I wouldn't consider it a matter of pride to cease to change," Xihai said. "That which does not change merely stagnates and that which is not added to is doomed to decline; these are simple facts."

"Spoken as a creature born of water," Gilgamesh mused. "It's a fair point of contention, however—shall we consider this a test of our resolves, then? Games are more interesting when there's something at stake besides our lives, especially as we are all so willing to face death."

Xihai looked at me for a moment and I shook my head slightly, indicating that I wasn't ready yet.

"Consider it what you will," Xihai decided. "But it seems pointless to me; our resolve survived even death."

"Ah, true," Gilgamesh agreed. "But that's what makes it interesting, no? That which sets us apart."

Apparently considering that the end of the sudden exchange, Gilgamesh flickered and Xihai deformed. As he came near her, he lashed out relentlessly with his blade, the strikes so fast that they left imprints in the water like open wounds, each of the marks in the exact shape of Gilgamesh's blade—and moments later igniting in their wake even as the water violently burst. Xihai exploded, her form shattered by the attack and scattered into droplets even as the rest of her form lost shape. I felt something odd through my connection to my Water Elemental and couldn't say I was surprised when it took her a moment to begin to reform.

As I thought, there was more to the material Gilgamesh was composed of than simple defensive ability. If Kavacha was something from above that shouldn't have existed below, than whatever he was made of seemed almost like its opposite—something created in Malkuth that was somehow divorced from everything else? I wasn't even sure how something like that would have worked, but it might have made sense. If I had to guess, the effect was probably the reverse of Kavacha's, too, being more effective against things based on MP than purely physical attacks. Then again, with stats like his, he probably didn't need to worry much about the purely physical.

Still, it was going to make killing him that much more of a pain in the ass.

I checked on the progress I'd made even as I kept an eye on Gilgamesh who, naturally, had turned his attention back towards me the moment the immediate obstacle was gone. I had a moment to decide whether to keep going or switch tracks—and made my decision quickly.

Whatever he had going for him, I wasn't worried—and I wasn't alone. Especially not right now.

Cover me, I thought. I need a little while longer.

At once, there was a flash and Gilgamesh aborted his approach, staggering slightly in the wake of the lightning strike. Vulturnus flickered around me, recoiling slightly at whatever resistance he'd felt, but it was a brief thing, not as bad as whatever had struck Xihai. Already, my Water Elemental was returning to her physical form, reconstructing it in the wake of whatever had disrupted it, and I didn't stop there. The earth buckled and the wind raged, groaning and howling even as the smoke filled air churned and a storm began to brew above us. I drew back as four of my Elementals rose, keeping only Suryasta and Crocea Mors close at hand, and waited.

I'd known from the beginning that something like this would be hard to pull off in the middle of combat, but…I trusted my friends. If it was just this, I'd be safe even in the middle of this battlefield.

Somewhere deep in my soul, my Hidden Heart started beating.

Levant took the form of a towering woman, though tiny compared to Xihai's massive form—only about three and a half meters tall or so. She'd changed at once the most and the least amongst my Elementals, with her features being much the same, if perhaps a touch older; a woman, now, instead of a teenager. What was different was…pretty much everything else. She'd traded her gown for what could briefly be mistaken for a white dress, until one noticed the feathers and realized she had wings. They were thin and sprouted from seemingly every joint and vertebrae, varying greatly in both width and length as they conformed to her body in layers, covering everything but her face; there were even wings growing from her wrists and knuckles, covering her hands with gloves. On the whole, very few of her wings were actually outstretched; the only real exceptions where a pair of wings that stretched backwards from each ankle and the ones behind her ears, which seemed to catch her hair between them. Otherwise, they did nothing but flutter vaguely as she wielded her power.

And wield it she did. Storms struck out at the battlefield, churning the smoke into dark vortexes. She kept me safe from her power and prevented it from spilling over onto my friends, but Grimm around us had to brace themselves to keep from being drawn towards than as the wind speeds climbed further and further into the hundreds. Gilgamesh didn't resist, however, instead stepping forward, piecing cleanly through the first storm like a bullet, using his own speed to keep him safe. Vulturnus trailed after her, his form unraveling into a thousand streamers, reaching out towards the rushing Grimm and striking the moment their paths crossed.

Unlikely last time, however, Gilgamesh wasn't caught by surprise and he didn't so much as flinch, simply taking the hit and hit and moving to counterattack. His sword flicked out the moment Vulturnus struck him, taking advantage of the brief period between one lightning strike and the next, and sheered through the Lightning Elemental's almost shapeless mass with a bizarre sound somewhere between a hiss of a cat and the tearing of paper. Vulturnus exploded into sparks, ironically stunned, and Gilgamesh turned his attention to his next opponent.

Ereb promptly hit him with a boulder the size of a small house, bringing it down upon him in a massive fist. Ereb was perhaps the most changed, rising from the ground as a titan of earth and stone. Traces of his human form's features were still apparent, but they were tined by earthen ridges and his skin was the color of weathered rock. His proportions were all wrong, too, with his arms and legs far thicker than they would have been on a human, and hackles on his back that looked like a mountain range. He was enormous, too, with Xihai perhaps being longer from head to tail but barely coming up to his waist as she was. His warped hands, now changed to look like brutal stone claws, melded with the boulder as he tried to hammer Gilgamesh into the ground like a nail. For a moment, it almost looked like he'd succeeded.

A moment later, however, the stone trembled and shook, cracks spreading across its length as Gilgamesh pushed back, overwhelming Ereb with simple main strength and knocking him back. My Earth Elemental fell until the back of his head nearly touched the ground, before stopping oddly, his body held parallel to the ground by his bent knees. His remaining hand grasped at the earth as if clawing for something, and then his body flung itself back upright, pulling a jagged stone sword from the dirt. From pommel to hilt, it was half-again Ereb's size and looked as rough as a cliff side, but he swung it through the air with casual ease and brought it down with enough force to shatter the ground for fifty meters. Gilgamesh raised his own sword to catch it, but the smaller blade simply cut deeply into Ereb's, leaving it to crash down on his shoulder and stagger him slightly. He flicked his wrist once, the gesture somehow seeming chagrined, and the stone sword was cut cleanly in two, along with most of Ereb's upper body.

Ereb seemed to sway as his remaining arm fell to the ground with a tumultuous thud, though the fact that his head had been split from his right temple to the left corner of his forehead seemed like the more serious wound. Unlike Xihai and Vulturnus, however, his form was not dispelled, despite how disorienting the meaningless wound seemed; a benefit of his solidity, perhaps? Whatever the reason, it seemed like he'd have an easier time recovering, given a moment to recover.

Needless to say, Gilgamesh didn't allow him that chance; he leapt into the air to strike him in the chest, sending cracks rippling outwards before twisting once to shatter him like a statue. Gilgamesh landed calmly, shaking away the dust and dirt, before focusing on Levant.

There was a flash, a flicker, and he pierced through both a wall of wind and Levant's chest, crashing to the ground right in front of me. I didn't flinch as he rose, meeting his eyes without fear.

"A valiant effort," He said. "I've always considered Elementals to be worthy foes and their very nature can make them seem unsurmountable, for even the complete destruction of their physical forms accomplishes nothing. But…that's only if one is unaware of how to deal with them. I hope you didn't expect me to be caught off-guard by such a thing; there are benefits to several millennia of experience."

"So I can see," I mused, hiding my worry. None of my Elementals seemed injured as such, but whatever he'd done to them had come as a shock. I guess it was probably the first time any of them had felt pain and I didn't like seeming them that way.

"Do you have any other Elementals you wish to summon?" He prompted. "Or perhaps to merge into some greater forms? Or are you alone now?"

"You'll find I'm very rarely alone, I think," I replied, casting a glance around. "My apologies for keeping you waiting, however; I was a bit preoccupied."

"Were you now," Gilgamesh answered dryly, looking me over once before chuckling to himself. "Very well; I'm away this is a trick of some kind, but I'm curious, so I shall play along. Let's continue our game, Archangel."

I didn't so much as blink as he swung his sword towards my head, Fluctuating quickly to the side. In that same moment, I took a breath and the world around me erupted into flames, Agni setting my renewed Aurora on fire. I fanned the flames quickly, activating my other techniques to turn the area around me into a hell for anyone caught inside.

It should go without saying that I made sure Gilgamesh was standing right next to me at the time.

The ancient Grimm actually flinched once, recoiling at the sudden rush of flames. He didn't evaporate as lesser Grimm had, didn't even start to immediately burn—but I saw his armor heat and glow and knew it must have hurt. He recovered quickly, however, lashing out at me with one hand without the slightest care about entering the core of my flames and—

Um. Well, technically, what he did was grab my head with one hand, lift me off the ground, and slam me back down—but when Gilgamesh was doing something like that, it was the type of thing that was best described with words like 'smite.' The already broken ground shattered for another few hundred meters as he plunged me straight into the field of molten earth my presence was creating, driving me down until I hit something solid. I reached up reflexively to grab his wrist, instinctively trying to leverage him off, but in a contest of pure strength, Gilgamesh probably had more in his fingertips than I did in both arms. He held on and made it clear he wasn't letting go as his grip tightened on my skull, other hand pulling back to strike me in the face, pushing me further and further down.

All his attention was focused on me now, which was technically what I'd wanted, but I admit this wasn't quite what I'd had in mind.

But oh well. I'd long since accepted that improvisation was what I did for a living. And Gilgamesh was right about one thing—it was a trap.

As Gilgamesh pulled back a hand to strike me again, clearly intent on pummeling me a few hundred feet deeper into the ground, he abruptly flinched once, a spear of gleaming white piercing cleanly through his chest. Unlike me, it seemed he had a bit of trouble seeing clearly beneath a forty meters of molten earth, but to his credit he didn't question it—he just moved, throwing himself away from me with enough force that the miniature lake I'd created all but exploded outwards, leaving me behind.

A moment later, however, a hand reached out to me and I took it gratefully, letting someone who hadn't just gotten smote pull me out of the lava.

"Are you okay?" A voice asked as I coughed slightly. The damage wasn't too bad and most of it was stopped outright by Agni—but I'd swallowed some lava while I was getting punched in the face and it tasted pretty horrible.

"Of course," I said, shaking my head slightly. "It's me after all. I couldn't look myself in the mirror if I couldn't shrug off something like that."

"True," The voice said, helping me to my feet. Or helping me upright, rather, as we were both floating in the air at the moment. "We good to go then?"

I nodded and looked up at him, smiling slightly. Gilgamesh hadn't noticed what I'd done when I Fluctuated away from his attack—or rather, he hadn't noticed that I'd Fluctuated twice.

I suppose that couldn't be helped, given what he didn't know; after all, I'd left the same place both times.

"Hey, Jaune," I said to myself. "Still looking sexy and amazing, I see."

"Damn straight I am," I replied easily as I scanned the surrounding area. "You too, Jaune."

By raising The Hidden Heart to level 99, you have gained the skill 'Thaumiel.'