The Games We Play - Chapter 238

Chapter 238: Final Strike

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.

Final Strike

I came back to my body with a crash, the power of Ohr Ein Sof leaping from my fingers in a rush of annihilating light. I saw it rush over Gilgamesh’s body, a thin line piercing through the center of his chest and the portal therein, before the blast expanded. It lost all semblance of shape as a beam as it expanded, growing into a wave of light that could have dwarfed mountains and devoured cities. It blotted out the world in front of me as if someone had taken an eraser to a whiteboard, clearing it of everything in sight.

When it faded, everything in front of me was gone as if cut away by a surgeon’s knife—and so were Malkuth and Gilgamesh.

Slowly, I let me hand drop to my side, the tension that had built up within me over the course of the fight easing as I relaxed, receiving what was perhaps the best possible confirmation I could ask for.

Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one!

I’d won.

I wanted to smile, laugh, cheer, and celebrate—but I didn’t. I couldn’t muster up the will to, in the end, couldn’t relax quite that much. Because even though things had gone well, even though they’d gone better than I could have expected or hoped…that had been close. Too close for even me to be comfortable with, to not feel just a little tired and worried. It wasn’t the fight, which had gone better than expected, all things considered, but what had come after; the negotiation between Malkuth and I. If I’d been wrong, if I’d made a mistake in my assumptions…everyone I loved would be dead right now, or in the process of getting there.

On a level, I’d known it would come to this—I knew better than to focus on an event to the exclusion of what came after. Defeating Gilgamesh and Malkuth was necessary to get to the computer and whatever laid within it, but even that was almost secondary to my real goal.

Buying time.

I had no other choice, when it came right down to it. I’d needed to find a way to forge a temporary armistice with Malkuth, because I’d known full well that if I let him out as I was, if I faced him at my current level of power…I’d lose. With Metatron active, it was possible I could have made it a fighting defeat, but I’d had no delusions about how that fight would have ended—I would have died, followed by everyone I knew and loved.

And I couldn’t allow that, not when I might have been able to stop it. But I’d also known that the moment I proved myself strong enough to do whatever it was Malkuth intended, he’d try to force my hand—to make me give him his freedom. I knew how far he could go to do it, too, and so there’d only been one way to go about doing it; putting us in a situation where neither of us could win, even if it meant gambling my life, with all of our lives.

But if I’d been mistaken about him, if he had been willing to wait, if I’d been wrong…

I hadn’t been I reminded myself. It was okay. I’d bought them, all of us, a bit of time.

How much time…that I wasn’t sure of. I wasn’t foolish enough to believe that Malkuth was going to stop being an asshole—sure, I could bend space and time to my whim, but I knew to keep my goals realistic. He wouldn’t have agreed to my plan unless he’d had something in mind as well, I just wasn’t completely sure what. Was he counting on Cinder’s plan? Death? Or something else? How did any of those play into getting one over on me and making me obey?

There was no way of knowing yet—and depending on what he was scheming, I might not see the knife coming until it was too late.

That was one of the downsides to this little arrangement of ours—neither of us wanted to obey the rules; we just wanted the others to obey them and didn’t want to suffer the consequences of breaking them ourselves. We’d both be trying to push the boundaries of the agreement, seeing which rules we could bend and which we could break. The only problem was that Malkuth was better equipped to skirt the edges of it than I was. His threat was that he’d start wiping nations off the map if I did anything, whereas mine was that I’d die fighting before letting him out. Sadly, he could do quite a bit without ending civilization, whereas I wasn’t going to make him give a shit by doing anything less than dying. The deal had been in his favor in that regard at least.

But then, it had to be. If he hadn’t been able to see some advantage to it, he wouldn’t have accepted the deal—and I stood to profit in other ways besides. It was unfortunate and less than ideal, but that was compromise, I suppose; everyone was a little bit unhappy. But I was happier then I would have been watching everyone die and however long I had, I’d just have to make the most of it.

I had to make the most of what I’d been given, by both life and my past self. Use this time to figure out a way to finish what I started.

It was almost funny, really. I couldn’t go any further without the knowledge within the computer—and to reach that knowledge, I’d had no choice but think of a way to survive just a bit longer. That was my life, I suppose.

For a moment, everything was silent, muted by the simple fact that just about everything capable of making noise was gone. It was only after several seconds passed and she saw me relax that Raven spoke.

“Jian,” She said. “Is it over?”

“Almost,” I said, opening my eyes again. “We still have to get what we came for.”

Raven nodded once, expression tight and hand still hovering by her sword; she was still expecting a trap, which seemed wise. I just wasn’t sure if it would be a physical trap.

Either way, we’d just have to deal with it.

Before that, however…as the items appeared before me, I snatched them up with my Psychokinesis and held them in the air before me. The exorbitant amount of money, I simple stored away, having no real use for it, but the others…a mask, a suit of armor, and one of those trange metallic plates like the one I’d gotten from my father.

You have obtained the item ‘Enkidu.’

You have obtained the item ‘Utnapishtim.’

You have obtained the skill book ‘Shutur Eli Sharri.’

I added them to my various collections as well and held out a hand to Raven, who took it.

Then, I gathered the power of Metatron around myself and slipped through the dimensional barrier that yet remained untouched, Trespassing with a simple act of will—and we entered the ancient city that had been left behind. In a way, it felt like venturing into the unknown, but in another…

It was like coming home.

Ozpin’s words hadn’t done it justice. The city was awe-inspiring, built to a scale that I had never seen. Building rose high, many of them towering hundreds of meters in the air, and they shined brilliantly in the light. The chaos of our battle thankfully hadn’t touched anything on this side of the barrier and neither, it seemed, had the passage of time. The sun lit up gleaming towers of steel and glass, reflections casting yet more light down to the streets far below. The buildings seemed as if they’d been arranged carefully, the streets and skylines somehow artistic in placement, and even on a personal level it was remarkable. The buildings were somehow colored by the passage of light through them, turned the colors of the dusk and dawn, whilst the streets and sidewalks seemed polished into mirrors of black and white.

From top to bottom, each structure looked as though it were the masterpiece of some architect—and the city hadn’t just been built up, but also out. There were thousands of buildings—no, that was understating it; there were far over a million, spanning everything from houses to factories to office buildings. The city seemed to roll over the land like grass over plains and hills, stretching out as far as the eye could see, and I was willing to bet that the artistic design applied to a bird’s eye view of it, too.

All told, it was enormous. Large enough to fit the inhabitants of entire Kingdoms in, maybe the inhabitants of all the Kingdoms—it was so large, in fact, that I had to catch myself as I started wondering what the point of it all even was, because it took me a moment to remember that at one point there had been people enough to justify such a thing. I’d known that mentally, of course, but even for me there was a difference between hearing talk of a civilization that had boasted a population of billions and seeing the truth of it.

At one time, cities like this had been all over the world, host to a Humanity that didn’t have to hide or struggle to survive, that could grow and expand, explore and reach, dedicate themselves to such things as this.

And then, of course, the Grimm had come.

Remarkable as it was, I braced myself for the trap. I reached out with my senses, sending them into and through the city walls. Flecks of light rose from my skin and leapt to nearby surfaces, shining through them even as they mapped out my surroundings, flowing through surfaces and into walls as they touched upon what was within. I scanned the area, flickering through my various senses to better determine if there were discrepancies between layers of perception. Did something appear in one that was invisible to another? Were there marks or remnants that shouldn’t have been there? Was there anything hidden and lying in wait.

I waited a moment, searching—and then frowned.

No. I didn’t see any hidden traps or enemies and what traces I could find were faded to the extreme by time. When it came to the city itself, it was foreign enough to me that I wasn’t sure what qualified as odd or unusual, but I didn’t see anything that struck me as wholly out of place considering the overall design.

And yet, it felt…hollow, somehow, and I finally knew what Ozpin had meant. This was real, yes, but it wasn’t alive. It was as if everything beneath the surface had been cut away, all the things that should have made this a city, a place for people, a safe Haven, simply gone. Everything that could have carried power had stalled and died, the water was still and stagnant, the air was stale, and wherever there should have been life, even if only that of plants…there was nothing. There weren’t even any signs of rot or decay, as if even those things had been halted. The city was perfectly intact, untouched by rust, overgrowth, or time, but it was like a piece of art—something beautiful to look at, but not meant for life or use.

The only question was, was that a natural part of whatever had created this barrier? Or the result of something else? The name Death sprang to mind, because if this place was anything, it was dead. A city this large, built like this…it could have been used as a shelter for people, a final bastion of mankind if everything went to hell—and if nothing else, I liked to thing I was pretty good at finding multiple uses for things. If I’d built this place, even if my primary goal had been to host and protect whatever was stored on that computer, I was fairly sure I would have gone the extra mile and made this place habitable. Why not, after all? It would have been a safe place for Mankind, a shelter for the innocent who may have suffered. Why not make that possible? There were have been downsides, risks, and concerns; there always were when you added the human element to the mix, even before addressing Auras and Semblances, but it would have been better that leaving them to die.

There was little reason not to make this a place that people could be safe in—and if people weren’t a concern, why bother with an entire city.

But perhaps it simply hadn’t been enough. Closing my eyes for a moment, I remembered what Conquest had said during our fight, about the things he and his brothers had done.

Then I started walking. I didn’t let go of Raven’s hand, carefully shielding her from our surroundings. While I knew Death was a soul-based weapon, I hadn’t the slightest idea of what form he might take. Would he register to my Third Eye, even though the Grimm itself should have been soulless? Was there a material component to it here somewhere, a physical vector? Was I missing some sign of him, even now?

There was no way for me to know. So far, Death was the only one of the Riders that I hadn’t definitely proven I could detect and until I did, I couldn’t take anything for granted. With my senses, I liked to think I would notice whatever was going on in my vicinity, but if this was the one time I was wrong and it completely fucked up everything I’d been working for and planning…well, that’d be both tragic and embarrassing.

Bring Raven along with me was a risk in that regard, but so long as she was close, we had options. With the power of Metatron, I should be able to enhance her portals with Trespasser, allowing us to put not only spacial but dimensional distance between us and any threat that appeared. That was one of the greatest powers Metatron granted me—control of my power and how it appeared. If Malkuth was the result, Metatron allowed me to adjust the equation. The core concept would remain the same, but the details…those could be adjusted with ease. I could manifest an attack in its normal form, layer it over a physical object, form it into a barrier or personal force field, fire it as a beam or sphere; I could even simply emit it as light, inflicting the effect on anything I illuminated. A skill like Trespasser that was normally either a personal transfer or a shattering effect, I could cover another with, form into a doorway, or whatever else I chose.

It was one of the things I thought I could depend on even against Malkuth—and I kept it at the ready here. Adjust the effects here and there to either touch or evade Raven and I could prepare to drop Longinus as a space-rending explosion. It should work as a first line of defense.

“This way,” I murmured to Raven as I sensed what we were looking for. We both moved with caution.

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The building the computer was housed in was at the exact center of the city and it towered over those around it, reaching up to touch the clouds. It looked like a cross between a skyscraper and a palace, made out of similar materials as the rest of the city but crafted in such a way that the light shining through it made it softly glow. The colors shifted and changed minutely, too small for a regular eye to notice, but I saw it slowly shifting in tune with the sky above. At dusk or dawn, beneath the light of the moon, or even when the sun was at its peak, I was sure it would have looked magnificent.

But I wasn’t here to sightsee and so I opened the door with an effort of will and entered the building.

Taking a look around, I quickly came to the conclusion that Ozpin flat-out sucked at describing things. Had I looked at it only from the outside, I might have expected something like a grand hall or even a throne room—but what awaited us within held more in common with a laboratory than anything. It was clean, sterile even by the standards of the city, and it looked as though it had once been full of things, from strange devices to odd stone tablets. There were what might have once been forms of storage, from glass tubes to screens, and an entire wall of what must have once been samples.

I say ‘once’ because while the rest of the city appeared almost bizarrely untouched, this place looked as though it had been ransacked and torn apart. All the items had been rent apart in a fury, torn to scrap metal and broken glass. I saw traces of what might have once been biological samples, through whatever had left them was utterly gone, as well as chemical residues. To one side, there was a reinforced but empty room that I assumed had been meant for containing experiments, but the door had been torn off and the viewing window shattered. The walls bore claw marks, as did the ceiling and floor, and I could see other things purely by their absence here, with items that should have been there and items of shelves simply gone.

It was a ruin—but for one area that was completely untouched. Near the center of the room there was a raised platform, empty of anything at all, but none of the chaos went anywhere near it.

I frowned for a moment, actually allowing the expression to show as I considered the room and what lay beneath the surface. This place was more than it appeared—or rather, more then it currently was. It was hard to describe, but from the way my power flowed through this place, it felt as if it wasn’t meant to exist like this, to be all in one place. Parts of it should have been separated by spacial and dimensional barriers, held continents apart but still connected. Things like that containment room were meant to be isolated from the rest of the world, so that behind a thin pane of glass, anything could happen. Want to test out what happens when you have a ping-pong tournament with matter and anti-matter? Do it inside the room to avoid fucking up everything else. Similarly, the entrances and exits of this room were meant to lead to more than just the next rooms over, but to connect this place to another through permanently twisted doorways.

But instead…it was here. All of it was present in this one time, this one place. It felt wrong, somehow, even if all the pieces seemed to fit together seamlessly; there was a kind of feedback.

Even so, it didn’t keep me from feeling what lay beneath and around the platform. Circuitry, of a sort, though the connections twisted and broke oddly, seeming to go nowhere. Yet were everything else was dead, I could feel something within it.

This was the ‘computer.’

I hesitated before I approached. If there was ever a time to spring a trap, it was now. That was how I’d do it, at least, conceal it as best I was able and make sure to strike when the target’s guard was down. Whatever was inside the computer, it seemed safe to assume it would be distracting one way or another, and as soon as the target’s attention was elsewhere, I’d strike.

But I couldn’t sense anything. I scanned the room with my senses, sent out waves of searching light, glowing softly as I altered the way my senses manifested, and more, but I couldn’t find a thing. Were my opponents that good at hiding or was there truly nothing there?

Either way, I had work to do.

Gently squeezing Raven’s hand in a signal, I let go of it and stepped away. She let it fall to her side but kept her fingers open, ready to lift it to her sword in an instant as she watched over me as I made my way towards my goal. Remaining calm as ever, I strode up to the platform, stepped atop it, and knelt in a place where I saw vague traces of something.

The moment I did, I felt something wash over me, the feeling somewhere between that of distant attention and the touch of cold air. It ran over my skin, looking at me, and I felt it touch my Aura as if to analyze it. The circuitry that had seemed to go nowhere was lighting up, filling with the patterns of my own Aura as it used me as a power source and I could see where another person standing in the same place might have created a different configuration. Whatever the results were for me, they seemed to appease it, but instead of doing anything it seemed to wait and grow colder until a feeling like ice seemed to fill my veins, my head.

For a moment, I was uncertain—because this wasn’t what I’d expected when it came to computers and passwords. If anything, given how everything was arranged…it was like the user served as the computer.

Ah, I realized, lowering my gaze to the floor. And with a sensation like the tap of a keyboard, I remembered what it had been like to learn my true name—Metatron. The memory I had inherited with Arcana, the feelings that had gone with it, everything.

And with a sensation like the final keystroke on a computer, I felt a lock give way and a doorway open—and with a sensation like breaking glass, time stopped.

“Hello,” A voice said. “You must be me, then.”

I would have blinked once, had my body not been halted as well. I tried to hone in on the source, but found that my senses weren’t working as they were supposed to, failing to reveal anything out of the ordinary—but then I mentally clicked my tongue, understanding what was happening. Slowly, carefully, I stood up from my own body, Projecting myself but differently, letting Metatron color the results. My spirit left my body behind and I closed my eyes for a moment before turning around and opening them.

As I did, I saw a figure who didn’t appear to any of my other senses, because he existed only in my…not quite my mind, as such, but within the system I was now a part of. He had no physical presence, no spirit, beyond what I created with a self-imposed illusion, but as I crafted the Delusion it slipped from my hold in an odd way and the figure began to move in his own right. He was about my height, perhaps a little shorter, with hair somewhere between auburn and blonde and lightly tanned skin. We didn’t look much alike build-wise, either; I was taller and built stronger, while he was more…honestly, the only word I could really use was statuesque. He looked like an actor to my warrior, which probably wasn’t a coincidence given our natures, and I wondered absently precisely how much was defined by our powers. It must have been at least a few things, seeing as our eyes were the same color.

Exactly the same color.

“Hello,” I greeted, smiling slowly. “That would be me, yes. Should we bother with introductions seeing as we’re the same person or just skip the formalities?”

“I wouldn’t consider it a bother,” He said. “Unlike you, my knowledge of the situation is somewhat limited. It’s rather difficult to prepare for something so far in advanced. By now, you no doubt know me as Keter, seeing as you must have already remembered our true name, and it’s hopefully safe to assume you’re my reincarnation, unless I failed and made some dramatic oversight. May I ask for your name, then?”

“Jaune Arc,” I said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Keter. I assume you’re a record of some kind? Not quite an AI, but—”

“Not quite a person,” He finished, smiling. “Yes. There was only so much I could do on short notice, especially with so much uncertainty involved, so I borrowed this trick. To make things simple, you could consider me an interactive daydream of sorts; I contained what I could within this place, keyed it to parts of our soul as tightly as I could, and…here we am. I’m not an independent being, per se—if anything, I’m just a projection of your soul upon itself, drawing from what was locked within this.”

He tapped a foot on the platform and I imagined it making a sound.

“Interesting,” I mused. “We couldn’t rely on our own memories, so we hid them somewhere else—somewhere Malkuth couldn’t risk tampering with.”

“Precisely,” He agreed. “Though memories might not be precisely the right word. Matters of the soul do have a tendency towards the complex, ours in particular. In a way, it’s more like I locked some of our time away. Our past and future history? Our life? I apologize; I don’t think there’s a word in your language for it.”

“I figured a few things might be lost in translation,” I told myself. “Don’t worry about it—whatever the case, I’m glad for this chance to finally see myself. I was a bit worried, you see; as you probably expected, I don’t remember much about my previous life—and I remember more of the early days than the later ones. Death’s work, but you obviously suspected much.”

He nodded in understanding.

“It wouldn’t make sense for Malkuth to leave us with much, given the chance to take things away,” He said. “It’d leave us with too many advantages, after all, too much knowledge of how things work. Returning to our full power would still have taken time, but vastly less than he would have liked. Luckily, it seems you didn’t have too much trouble making progress—I hope you didn’t have too much trouble on the way in.”

“I had to fight Gilgamesh,” I said before shrugging. “And Malkuth, through him. I managed.”

“That’s good to hear,” He replied. “And Death?”

I sighed, shoulders falling slightly.

“Not here, as near as I could tell,” I answered and at that, the memory looked surprised. “Unless he has some means of hiding extremely well that I couldn’t counter, which could be bound. I take it he was supposed to be here?”

The image of Keter hesitated.

“I don’t know anything for certain, of course,” He began, musing as much to himself as to me. “I wasn’t active for any of the intervening time. But…I’d suspected he would be here.”

I nodded, having figured as much myself. Having seen this place now, knowing more about it, things didn’t add up. It didn’t make sense for Malkuth not to leave anyone inside, just in case. It was always possible, after all, that I might have snuck in without Gilgamesh or his cronies noticing, so it only made sense to have someone stand watch within, to sound the alarm if nothing else. That was, in part, why I hadn’t tried to sneak in—the last thing I needed was to run into one problem, have them say a word, and end up as the meat in a Grimm sandwich.

And if it were to be anyone, I’d thought it would probably be Death. The one who’d scrubbed me clean last time—if I were to learn of anything untoward, something Malkuth hadn’t expected and couldn’t handle, it made sense to have him on hand to make sure I didn’t get a chance to use it. Failing that, Death seemed pretty much bound to be the greatest of the Riders and the most likely to still be able to ruin the day of someone who made it past a small army of super Grimm. It even fit with the general state of things here, the emptiness and lack.

And yet, there hadn’t been anyone waiting for me. It had been suspicious as all hell from the very beginning, leaving only a small handful of options.

The first was that it was a trap—which was still a possibility. Death could be lying in wait, positioned somewhere I couldn’t see even with Metatron active. That’d take some pretty serious space-time fuckery at the very minimum, but Malkuth probably could have managed it if he’d had a chance. If so, I could expect unpleasantness as soon as I left this dream sequence.

As much as I dreaded the possibility of that happening, though, I almost hoped it was the case—because the second was, if anything, even more worrying, though for different reasons. That Death simply wasn’t here, that something had convinced it to leave its position, something that changed things. But Death was a Rider and must have had a host, and I knew of one person who might have served that purpose. Was this the proof I’d needed to prove Ozpin’s true nature? The inconsistencies, the lack, everything?

Maybe. I really, truly hoped not, but maybe.

If there was ever a time for me to be wrong, though, I’d really like for it to be now.

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Either way, though…I’d have to deal with that as I came to it.

“I’ll handle Death, one way or another,” I said. “For now…you know what I’m looking for.”

He looked at me for a moment and then smiled, lifting an empty hand.

“It may not be what you wanted,” He warned before lifting the other as well. “But it may be what you need. Would you like to know? The reasons behind it all and…the nature of Metatron’s Cube?”

I nodded and reached out to grasp his hand—and the world dissolved beneath my feet.