Jacques Dussault
'Mantle'
There is nothing waiting for you in the future.
Proclaiming that truth as the absolute that it is, that mass of dark thoughts, an endless shadow that was both a true stranger and the most intimate companion has absolutely no doubt as to the outcome of this little struggle. It is an insignificant struggle, a thing that Jacques Dussault loses with an accuracy rating of 100%; to those souls that have given up, it is a story with which they can empathize, it is sad, to come up against ones fate only to realize victory was impossible from the start, and thus they offer the sweet peace of oblivion, a sleep from which none of them would have to awake.
One in which this farce of a world would finally close the curtains on it's endlessly repeating tragedy.
Yes.
That's right, Jacques Dussault cannot defeat the darkness; of that they are positive.
There is no reason to fight for a future that does not exist.
And yet...
Why...?
The young man continues to resist.
Bearing the failures of hundreds of thousands of lives, sins and pains too numerous to count, the hand that clenches the stone does not do so in pain, no...
What lies in that clenched hand, is a limitless resolve.
Not just his own, but that of many others.
Why go on...? There's nothing for you. Nothing...!
He's not going down.
They're not going down; even confronted with the truth, the heart-wrenching truth that cut deeper than any form of lie, the one that had never resisted to this extent before now, puts pressure into his fist as crimson light pours forth from cracks in an unbreakable gate to darkness.
That's right.
There's nothing waiting for them in the future, even so:
This struggle wasn't meaningless; a future with nothing in it simply had to be filled with something, they were certainly selfish enough to believe in that. There was no way out, they had been backed into a corner from so many different angles, they had lost so many times before this, but...
That struggle, that sense of knowing futility that always gave birth to the "will to carry on regardless..."
That struggle was the pursuit of hope, to challenge fate and make things that were impossible reality, it was-!
A human struggle, the one that they had always been the most suited for; this resistance wasn't to make a point to anyone in particular. Ultimately, they had just decided to live like this because it suited them, because there were too many wishes left in the past for them to simply give up on the future now, no matter how grim things looked, or how bad they had been in the past-!
Even if all it accomplished was one last struggle before the end, as human beings, they wanted to make that struggle count, hurt their enemy as much as they could, and-
In spite of everything saying that it's impossible...
They wanted to run into a future that wasn't set in stone, one molded by the actions of those that existed within it.
To do that... They simply cannot...
Lose here.
Even if the odds of that loss are 100%.
Even if they can't win, they have to win.
That futile struggle gave meaning to everything, it was what it meant to be human in the first place.
"Ah..."
It seemed like they had forgotten...
Challenging destiny was natural to humans. There is no such thing as a Messiah, this desperate, foolish last stand from a young man and the spirits that had chosen to follow him is one that most of the darkness does not see; but a fragment has come here to claim this body, even if he changes the minds of a few thousand, it is not like the distant monster will stop just because of that, but-!
That shameless, pointless struggle.
One borne of blood, sweat and tears from a young man who had failed just as much as anyone else, who had simply admired a smile that could appear even in the darkest of places, and had decided to try to continue on even though he was drowning just as much as the others, because he was carrying someone else's hope, because he believed in the few beautiful things that lurked in such an ugly, grim world...
"Well then... It seems this is..."
Hundreds of smaller cracks join the first as those who have forgotten how to fight, who to fight, and why it is that they must fight at all take one step back from the pitch black darkness and enter a more gray space... It is not a method that will work on every soul, darkness is a cage that bears many forms, but humans are, at their heart, creatures of an empathetic nature...
If you call out into the dark, someone will always answer; a single call to fight can lead to many voices joining in on the chorus.
To take out one of nine unbreakable stones... This...
It's not the work of a Messiah, but...
"...Our loss..."
Simply a small miracle born from human efforts.
A discharge of crimson energy gives birth to a sudden surge of azure as the young man loses consciousness, only to be found by someone who had once tried to kill him, and then by many others, a crowd of living people.
A Dark God pauses as many souls vanish from his Sea, but the Goddess of Life gives him no space to ponder the impossibility.
A tail of the Kyuubi breaks away to nothing, as a mass exodus of souls leaves only seven of them behind to fight.
And a wraith that had been stubbornly clinging to the material world...
"That's right... That's the way..."
Lets it go with a smile, and comes to rest in a familiar sea of blue.
---
Jacques Dussault
Warehouse
When you come to, the whispers in the back of your mind are joined by a chorus of voices in reality.
While you had passed out all alone, victimized by your breaking of a Bane Stone, the surroundings you find yourself in now is one that is positively filled to the brim with people. Scared but alive people, all shivering along with the roars and screams and crashes of the distant monster fighting what must have been a group of particularly stubborn heroes, and while you had half expected for your Eclipse Powers to have faded away due to the limits of time...
Strangely...
It doesn't seem to be pressuring your body as much as it normally did; there is a different sort of warmth radiating out from your core, a feeling that reminded you of a certain white-haired friend of yours, but-
"You woke up. Good. Mina was starting to freak out."
-more than anything else, you notice...
That Gisela was sitting right next to you, eyes fixed on a nearby doorway.
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