15 Annuals, Chapter 3: The End Of The Ninja Bit Thanks To LOTS OF FIRE
Title: Fifteen Annuals With Her Gay Guardian Glitch (15 Annuals); CHAPTER 3, AKA The End Of The Ninja Bit Thanks To LOTS OF FIRE
Fandom: GUESS.
Rating: PG-13 because of the purpose of Ninja.
Warnings: PURPOSE OF NINJA: to flip out and mindfuck people.
Summary: Who needs Roboparents when a Queen's got an Advisor-Ninja to take care of their recently deceased daughter?
This Chapter: Az is scary and wants to get her some ninjas. ENTER YET ANOTHER GLITCH-PLAN OF DOOM! \o/
Previous Chapters:
Chapter 1: That Part Where Ambrose Gets Executed
Chapter 2: The Bit With The Ninjas
Fifteen Annuals With Her Gay Guardian Glitch
(aka 15 Annuals)
CHAPTER III:
AKA The End Of The Ninja Bit Thanks To LOTS OF FIRE
When DG’s tenth birthday rolled around, she could nearly pass for a born and raised Kage. Their sparring had gotten to a speed that, for Glitch, was a natural, easy rhythm, but one that would be insane compared to most children’s training. He attributed it to dealing with Hana along with himself, forcing the poor girl to do twice the amount of work as anyone else.
That wasn’t even including the magic lessons. Fifteen disks of recorded lessons from Toto were given to her, one at a time, every annual. At six she was spinning her doll and making it float for brief periods of time. At seven, she was picking it up along with the rest of the pack. At eight she was fully proficient at manipulating non-living things, and had learned the difference between using her Light on the living and a rock. At nine, with a fish tank Glitch had managed to provide for her, she was beginning to learn how to manipulate things that didn’t even classify as non-living, things like the water around the goldfish and the air she sat in and, to Glitch’s dismay, the fire beneath his improving attempts at cooking.
Her tenth annual would bring about the beginning of what Toto had almost refused to teach. He hoped she wouldn’t notice the bruise on the man’s cheekbone on the next ten disks.
He found himself in a bit of a conundrum with the Kage. During the day, when the girl every Kage knew as Hime was awake, he was Sessha or Nanashi or any degrading, shameful name they could think up. But at night, he was back to being the Spiral’s master, back to being one of the smoothest, fastest, and most potentially deadly fighters ever to grace their people. Kage exchanged bows with him before spars. People listened when he had a suggestion. His mother silently approved, and when he floored the infamous Pale Crane master in five moves, she smiled and he could tell she was proud.
After that, he wasn’t sure if he was training so hard to protect his princess or to make his mother proud.
Hana, to their horror, started to show her age. While her body was as active as ever, iron-colored streaks were slashing through her hair and she started missing openings in spars with DG.
One night, when the moon was full and the Upper Dagger’s master (most techniques were in fact close enough to that of their grandparents’ that they simply added an adjective on - Glitch hadn’t had anyone but his mother to fight against, making the Spiral completely new and confusing to the rest of the Kage) was picking himself up with a grin and a bow to Glitch, he brought it up. There was no way he could have brought it up when the sun was in the sky. It was moonlight or bust.
“It’s been five annuals,” she answered dryly. “I’m forty-three, and even if I was twenty you’d turn my hair gray.”
But she knew.
Life expectancy for the average female Kage was around fifty. DG’s bloodline would keep her living for a hundred annuals at least, no matter what training she went through, but his mother was completely Kage. She’d never been average, so he doubted she’d just drop like a fly when her fiftieth birthday rolled around, but it still loomed in front of them.
So he absorbed himself in learning to cook, in washing, in chores, in teaching DG anything and everything he could to physically defend herself and being thrilled by the surprises she would pull on him (until she accidentally bashed him with a rock using her magic - that wasn’t terribly fun for either of them), watching as he realized that she too was creating something unheard of in the Kage.
There were points where he could tell that she would have added a bit of her Light into the fight, points where she retreated only to twist towards him, palm splayed open and glowing just the slightest bit before she returned to the spar.
When the girl known as Hime was eleven, when she had learned to shield herself with her magic and was in the process of learning how to form a burst of Light that she could shoot from her palm, word finally came to the Kage that the Princess Azkadellia, usurper and sorceress, was coming to town, and she was looking to recruit.
---
The scouts said they had five days before the Kage were found and Azkadellia herself tried to ally with them. Glitch had given up on his duties as a servant aside from the cooking, instead taking sheet after sheet of paper from anywhere he could find it and planning in a furor that had both his mother and DG worried for him.
Over six annuals, he’d let his hair go back to its ratty mess, much to his mother’s mixed nostalgia and disapproval (which meant she frowned but didn’t shave his head in the middle of the night). He was still a wiry, skinny man, still had the same face, still walked and talked the same.
Azkadellia would recognize him. She would wonder why her mother hadn’t killed him despite the huge effort put into the staging of his execution to what was practically perfection. He’d met her, he knew she had been sharp as a knife even at eleven, and at seventeen she’d be even smarter.
And if she got a single look at DG, even a glance, short hair and pants or not, it was all over.
He wrote, he tried to plan, he tried to figure out some way they could get through this without endangering the Kage or, even more importantly, DG. A woman possessed by the Witch most definitely wouldn’t take a “No thank you” from them (which they’d undoubtedly give). It’d just be more fuel to the fire. She could possibly enslave them even.
…fire.
He twisted up the previous piece of paper and flung it into the fireplace. This time, his writing was the precise, elegant script of Kageri. DG couldn’t read it yet, but his mother could.
Ambrose had already died once. He could sure as hell do it again.
---
“Have you practiced with weapons?” Glitch asked, casually flinging his foot towards her knees.
Since he’d never spoken during a single sparring match after her seventh birthday, DG was surprised enough to be caught by the move, sprawling in the dirt.
“Oooh, ouch. Sorry, Deeg,” he pouted.
He loved calling her Deeg. He could only do it out here in the back of the valley while sparring, and he fully admitted it was a guilty pleasure to know that he was the reason for everything in her recent life, that he and his mother were helping her become as strong a woman as she would need to be.
Plus she knew it always helped to remind her that she was the Princess DG of the entire OZ sometimes. Responsibilities were important to remember.
Sometimes DG wondered if she was beginning to understand her Glitch a little too well.
“No, why?” she asked.
“The Trial can include them, and knowing how ahead of yourself you like to get, I don’t want you accidentally stabbing yourself in the foot,” he said with a smile. “If you’re willing, I already asked my…asked Hana if she’d be willing to teach you, get you out of the village for a little while so the other children don’t get any ideas about using sharp objects during their spars.”
“Really?” she asked, trying to contain her excitement. “I mean, you can probably tell with my sparring but I-”
“Definitely a staff,” he agreed, smiling and pulling her up from the ground with a quick wrenching movement. He paused, still holding her hand. “Think I’ll make you a collapsible one. Easier for travel. Plus I can just add on sections while you’re growing.”
DG just laughed, ruffling her Glitch’s ragged hair, getting a “heeeey!” until she hugged him tight, getting a light squeeze around the shoulders in return. “Best Glitch ever,” she smiled.
“Gee, thanks,” he said dryly. “I get to be your favorite mistake.”
DG just smacked him in the arm, used to the reminder that she didn’t know his real name and probably never would, and headed back towards their house. Hana was sitting in the kitchen, staring at a piece of paper, eyes wider than DG had ever seen them.
“Is it true you’re taking me out for training?” she asked.
“Yes, Hime,” she smiled.
DG didn’t need magic to tell something was up and that it probably wasn’t just weapons training that had her Glitch’s mother doing that stiff too-strong-to-cry thing.
“I’ll leave you two to planning it then,” she smiled back.
She knew something was up, but she knew it wasn’t meant for her to know. DG was smart enough to understand that some things, especially with the Kage, were not to be pried into. So she went into her bedroom, grabbed a pencil and some of the paper that seemed to be appearing from nowhere, and started drawing a man’s face with pale blue eyes as it stared out of a circle, the rest of the picture shrouded in darkness.
---
“You truly intend to go forward with this plan?” Hana asked the moment DG’s door closed. As long as they stuck to the more archaic, less-used Kageri words, the princess wouldn’t understand even if she were eavesdropping.
Glitch nodded. “The limitation of our time is four days. Failure would lead to the demise of many, and I have spent much time planning.”
“…but…but the Spiral has finally begun to reach its potential,” she said quietly, turning to put a tea kettle on the stove. Tea - the Kage equivalent of alcohol. They hated being impaired, so tea was the cure-all. “I will have no problem completing my task, but yours-”
“Is something only I could do, and you know it,” he snapped, immediately regretting it when her shoulders sagged. “Mother, I wouldn’t give anyone else that job. I wouldn’t trust anyone else with it, with her, or with this plan than who I have.”
“…You always were too smart for your own good, Tomo.”
He was too busy staring at the use of his birth name, a name he’d almost forgotten beneath Nanashi and Sessha and Glitch and Ambrose, to reply before his mother had quietly left for her bedroom, the beginnings of her tea left on the counter.
---
The women of the house left at dawn, a put-upon pack horse behind them that DG had stared at for a while due to how much STUFF was on the poor creature coming along.
When the scouts, who seemed a bit surprised by how easily their Sessha had taken control of the Kage as soon as his mother was across the wooden bridge (and without any bloodshed no less), reported that the two were well on their way and that all the scouting parties had returned to the village, he gathered them together.
The sun was out, but they called him Spiral.
He explained the plan swiftly and efficiently, just the way any Kage liked it. They went to work, three fourths of them heading for the back of the valley with any bladed weapon they didn’t think they’d really need in case things went bad, and the other fourth throwing straw and oil around the outskirts of the village.
He remembered that once upon a time, DG had asked him why the houses looked like they did. It occurred to him as he lined the house he’d grown up in with anything flammable he could get his hands on that he’d forgotten to add that they were fireproof.
The bridge was rigged up, and that took the entirety of their remaining three days, with Glitch tinkering away and ruining the kitchen as oil and wire littered the area. He spent his nights getting as many willing members of the Kage to swarm him and he beat them back with a fierceness he’d never used before and they’d never seen before.
On the day Azkadellia was scheduled to show up, they started calling him Lord Spiral, or Spiral-Taichou, “Captain Spiral” in Kageri, when they thought he wasn’t listening. He’d never been happier for his plan when that started up, if only to avoid the sudden, disturbing insanity that their three-day hero worship of him of all people.
It was night when Azkadellia and her party approached. The scouts were scurrying across the bridge, every Kage back with their people nearly an hour before Glitch - or was he technically their ‘Spiral’ right now? - heard them rein up their horses near the bridge that led to the Kage.
He had his equipment. He was dressed. He was fully prepared for his part of the plan, and could only hope that a woman possessed by The Witch and looking to recruit the Kage would act like he anticipated.
“Sorceress,” one of the men in the leather said, and Azkadellia nodded,. She was grown and gorgeous, despite an impractical hairdo and a dress that looked like it weighed more than she did.
Glitch frowned at that thought, and realized how much of his Kage blood had honestly resurfaced in six years, whether it had been spent scrubbing floors or not.
“There have been no reports of the Kage scouting parties they’re famous for,” the man said, and she gave him a scathing look.
“I believe that is also one of the things they’re famous for,” she said. Glitch decided that, possessed or not, he kind of liked DG’s older sister. “Now, custom dictates that a potential business partner wait in front of the bridge, so if one of you touches a single plank of wood-”
He figured that was as good a time as any to start with the detonators, so Glitch pulled the first wire next to him. As arranged, the most experienced Kage were running out screaming with their fire-colored strips of cloth looking exactly like the flames. Then they’d collapse, as planned, when the fires were large enough to block them from sight.
The horses shrieked as he pulled the next wire, and the next, and the next, until it seemed the Kage would be nothing but charred remains by the time any of them crossed the bridge.
Which was, of course, his cue. Up the winding path, wearing the same exact clothes she’d last seen him in, hair as tidied as he could make it. The bottoms of his pants were singed though, along with the tails and cuffs of his coat, and he strode like the devil towards the single, unmoving figure and her horse on the other side of the bridge, a single torch in his hand.
Azkadellia was frowning at him, and he shed Sessha and Glitch (which he honestly was starting to like quite a bit more than any of the other names) and was Ambrose once again for the first time in a very long time. But he wasn’t AMBROSE, he was the traitor-that-hadn’t-been-and-she’d-known-it. An intriguing blip on her radar, at the most.
He was about to turn that blip into a looming time bomb. Nothing better than a possessed princess than one with an unhealthy bit of paranoia to go with it, after all.
“Your highness,” Traitor-Ambrose smirked, bowing slightly. “Lovely to see you again when I’m not drowning to death. It seems you’ve been doing well.”
Her eyes widened. “I know you.”
“Yes, you do,” he said casually, and took a step onto the bridge. It creaked under him, thanks to recent alterations. He motioned towards the village, where the diligent Kage were still ‘screaming to death’, only a few still running around in their fake flames. “So did they.” He paused. “Or at least they thought they did. Trust is an interesting thing, isn’t it.”
“You did this?” she asked darkly, clearly not pleased by the loss of the Kage.
“Technically I only started and finished it, but more or less,” he said, and widened his smirk. “Only a few more elements to go. Tell me, Princess, would you consider yourself the dark to your sister’s light?”
That made Azkadellia blink. It also made her horse instinctively back away a bit.
Ambrose, even without the mask of a villain on, had always been good at passive aggression. This was a little less subtle, but that suited him just fine.
He grinned. “I’ll take that as a yes, then, your highness.”
“How did you do this?” Azkadellia said in a voice that made him a bit tempted to screw the time-bomb part and just finish the job, but a villain never succumbed to another villain, especially when they wanted to be the other villain’s nightmare for the next ten years.
He walked another step forward. “You’re the Sorceress here. You should know magic when you see it.”
“Lies,” she hissed, but he could see the doubt in her eyes, just like he could see the disk where Toto had explained the summoning of flames, the exact requirements.
And the Kage had always had a passing resemblance to the royal family, after all. It was half the reason royalty often employed them as bodyguards.
“We’ll meet again then, cousin mine,” he said absently, and flung the torch onto the Kage-created web a meter in front of him, one that had the flames bursting forwards and down, giving him just enough time to grab onto the end that would hit Azkadellia’s side of the cliff and scuttle into the tiny box that would keep him slightly safer from the impact than if he’d had nothing else.
“We are leaving NOW,” Azkadellia snapped, practically roared, and he could hear the gallop of horses running after their leader.
Glitch applauded himself on putting all those extra-curricular acting classes to work, and managed to scurry up the remains of the bridge quietly.
He’d expected at least five guards to be waiting. He felt a little guilty when there were only two, so he kept the two knives sheathed and just beat them unconscious before heading for the small clearing he knew his mother and DG would be waiting at.
---
“And everything went as planned?”
They were sitting near the stream’s tiny waterfall, watching the cold water shoot down the gap in the rocks.
Glitch. He was Glitch again. DG had hugged him and called him her Glitch, and his mother hadn’t corrected it, so Glitch he was.
“The grappling bridge is in the packs? I’m not sure they’ll have the caves fully dug out, even with nearly four hundred of them and only a couple of meters between them and the Northest Forest-”
“I will take that as a yes, then,” she stated, eyes on a grinning DG as she swung a quarterstaff about with an uneasy but growing grace in the clearing not terribly far off. But he could still tell it was him her attention was focused on.
“I’m fine,” he stated.
“Everywhere you go now, no matter how much time passes, even if you do manage to overthrow the Sorceress, you will be hunted. Do you ever intend to tell Princess what you’ve done for her? Sacrificed for her sake?”
They were the only ones who knew that calling her ‘Hime’ was literal. He hung onto that thought. Even if something - well, something ELSE - possessed Azkadellia to return to the Kage, and she miraculously got information out of someone, they wouldn’t talk about DG. They would talk about Hime, maybe, but not DG.
He shook his head. “If I have my way, she will never need to know.”
His mother was quiet for a long time after that. She was silent even as she hugged goodbye to DG and pulled two of the bags off the packhorse, handing one to DG and, leading the horse, heading towards Glitch. Yes. He was Glitch.
She took a good, hard look at him, and he nearly jumped as his mother’s arms wrapped around him. “These long annuals have made nothing but your heart soften. And I think that was for the best.”
He wasn’t going to cry. He wasn’t.
“I love you, my brave, foolish son,” she said, and was already walking swiftly away, more than likely embarrassed.
For once, Glitch ran after her, hugging her from behind and locking her legs so she wouldn’t think it an attack and flip him into the dirt. “I’ll see you again, Mom.”
A Kage knew better than to make a promise, but the smile he got from his mother as she smacked his head with his pack from the horse was as good as one.
She’d be waiting.
---
“So where to now?” DG asked, completely nonplussed by the pack strung onto her back as she looked up at her Glitch. “I heard about these people called Guild Fighters or something. They could teach me more, probably.”
“Definitely not,” Glitch stated. Almost shouted, really. “We’re going to try and be normal for once. Plus you’re lagging in the book-learning, Hime. And it’d be better to polish your skills than add on something completely new. Hana gave you enough time to add that staff of yours into your style, right? Got a name for it yet?”
“You talk a LOT,” she said. “And no, but I’ve been trying to think of one.”
“It’ll come to you, Deeg,” he said, and ruffled her growing head of hair. “It’ll come to you.”
---
DELETED SCENE:
Glitch woke up frantically to the screams of DG, princess of the entire OZ, coming straight from her bedroom. He didn’t even think, just tore through the hallway, thinking FUCK the floor staying shiny as he kicked the door in and immediately twirled around, looking for any sort of danger.
Instead, the girl was crying, and was bleeding from her, uh.
…yeah.
“…I’ll go get Hana,” he muttered, bright red, and blushed even more when he realized there was no door to close anymore.
---
And YES, next chapter will have porn. AND YOU ALL KNOW CAIN WILL NOT TOP SO STOP BEING SURPRISED BY THIS FACT.
Fandom: GUESS.
Rating: PG-13 because of the purpose of Ninja.
Warnings: PURPOSE OF NINJA: to flip out and mindfuck people.
Summary: Who needs Roboparents when a Queen's got an Advisor-Ninja to take care of their recently deceased daughter?
This Chapter: Az is scary and wants to get her some ninjas. ENTER YET ANOTHER GLITCH-PLAN OF DOOM! \o/
Previous Chapters:
Chapter 1: That Part Where Ambrose Gets Executed
Chapter 2: The Bit With The Ninjas
Fifteen Annuals With Her Gay Guardian Glitch
(aka 15 Annuals)
CHAPTER III:
AKA The End Of The Ninja Bit Thanks To LOTS OF FIRE
When DG’s tenth birthday rolled around, she could nearly pass for a born and raised Kage. Their sparring had gotten to a speed that, for Glitch, was a natural, easy rhythm, but one that would be insane compared to most children’s training. He attributed it to dealing with Hana along with himself, forcing the poor girl to do twice the amount of work as anyone else.
That wasn’t even including the magic lessons. Fifteen disks of recorded lessons from Toto were given to her, one at a time, every annual. At six she was spinning her doll and making it float for brief periods of time. At seven, she was picking it up along with the rest of the pack. At eight she was fully proficient at manipulating non-living things, and had learned the difference between using her Light on the living and a rock. At nine, with a fish tank Glitch had managed to provide for her, she was beginning to learn how to manipulate things that didn’t even classify as non-living, things like the water around the goldfish and the air she sat in and, to Glitch’s dismay, the fire beneath his improving attempts at cooking.
Her tenth annual would bring about the beginning of what Toto had almost refused to teach. He hoped she wouldn’t notice the bruise on the man’s cheekbone on the next ten disks.
He found himself in a bit of a conundrum with the Kage. During the day, when the girl every Kage knew as Hime was awake, he was Sessha or Nanashi or any degrading, shameful name they could think up. But at night, he was back to being the Spiral’s master, back to being one of the smoothest, fastest, and most potentially deadly fighters ever to grace their people. Kage exchanged bows with him before spars. People listened when he had a suggestion. His mother silently approved, and when he floored the infamous Pale Crane master in five moves, she smiled and he could tell she was proud.
After that, he wasn’t sure if he was training so hard to protect his princess or to make his mother proud.
Hana, to their horror, started to show her age. While her body was as active as ever, iron-colored streaks were slashing through her hair and she started missing openings in spars with DG.
One night, when the moon was full and the Upper Dagger’s master (most techniques were in fact close enough to that of their grandparents’ that they simply added an adjective on - Glitch hadn’t had anyone but his mother to fight against, making the Spiral completely new and confusing to the rest of the Kage) was picking himself up with a grin and a bow to Glitch, he brought it up. There was no way he could have brought it up when the sun was in the sky. It was moonlight or bust.
“It’s been five annuals,” she answered dryly. “I’m forty-three, and even if I was twenty you’d turn my hair gray.”
But she knew.
Life expectancy for the average female Kage was around fifty. DG’s bloodline would keep her living for a hundred annuals at least, no matter what training she went through, but his mother was completely Kage. She’d never been average, so he doubted she’d just drop like a fly when her fiftieth birthday rolled around, but it still loomed in front of them.
So he absorbed himself in learning to cook, in washing, in chores, in teaching DG anything and everything he could to physically defend herself and being thrilled by the surprises she would pull on him (until she accidentally bashed him with a rock using her magic - that wasn’t terribly fun for either of them), watching as he realized that she too was creating something unheard of in the Kage.
There were points where he could tell that she would have added a bit of her Light into the fight, points where she retreated only to twist towards him, palm splayed open and glowing just the slightest bit before she returned to the spar.
When the girl known as Hime was eleven, when she had learned to shield herself with her magic and was in the process of learning how to form a burst of Light that she could shoot from her palm, word finally came to the Kage that the Princess Azkadellia, usurper and sorceress, was coming to town, and she was looking to recruit.
---
The scouts said they had five days before the Kage were found and Azkadellia herself tried to ally with them. Glitch had given up on his duties as a servant aside from the cooking, instead taking sheet after sheet of paper from anywhere he could find it and planning in a furor that had both his mother and DG worried for him.
Over six annuals, he’d let his hair go back to its ratty mess, much to his mother’s mixed nostalgia and disapproval (which meant she frowned but didn’t shave his head in the middle of the night). He was still a wiry, skinny man, still had the same face, still walked and talked the same.
Azkadellia would recognize him. She would wonder why her mother hadn’t killed him despite the huge effort put into the staging of his execution to what was practically perfection. He’d met her, he knew she had been sharp as a knife even at eleven, and at seventeen she’d be even smarter.
And if she got a single look at DG, even a glance, short hair and pants or not, it was all over.
He wrote, he tried to plan, he tried to figure out some way they could get through this without endangering the Kage or, even more importantly, DG. A woman possessed by the Witch most definitely wouldn’t take a “No thank you” from them (which they’d undoubtedly give). It’d just be more fuel to the fire. She could possibly enslave them even.
…fire.
He twisted up the previous piece of paper and flung it into the fireplace. This time, his writing was the precise, elegant script of Kageri. DG couldn’t read it yet, but his mother could.
Ambrose had already died once. He could sure as hell do it again.
---
“Have you practiced with weapons?” Glitch asked, casually flinging his foot towards her knees.
Since he’d never spoken during a single sparring match after her seventh birthday, DG was surprised enough to be caught by the move, sprawling in the dirt.
“Oooh, ouch. Sorry, Deeg,” he pouted.
He loved calling her Deeg. He could only do it out here in the back of the valley while sparring, and he fully admitted it was a guilty pleasure to know that he was the reason for everything in her recent life, that he and his mother were helping her become as strong a woman as she would need to be.
Plus she knew it always helped to remind her that she was the Princess DG of the entire OZ sometimes. Responsibilities were important to remember.
Sometimes DG wondered if she was beginning to understand her Glitch a little too well.
“No, why?” she asked.
“The Trial can include them, and knowing how ahead of yourself you like to get, I don’t want you accidentally stabbing yourself in the foot,” he said with a smile. “If you’re willing, I already asked my…asked Hana if she’d be willing to teach you, get you out of the village for a little while so the other children don’t get any ideas about using sharp objects during their spars.”
“Really?” she asked, trying to contain her excitement. “I mean, you can probably tell with my sparring but I-”
“Definitely a staff,” he agreed, smiling and pulling her up from the ground with a quick wrenching movement. He paused, still holding her hand. “Think I’ll make you a collapsible one. Easier for travel. Plus I can just add on sections while you’re growing.”
DG just laughed, ruffling her Glitch’s ragged hair, getting a “heeeey!” until she hugged him tight, getting a light squeeze around the shoulders in return. “Best Glitch ever,” she smiled.
“Gee, thanks,” he said dryly. “I get to be your favorite mistake.”
DG just smacked him in the arm, used to the reminder that she didn’t know his real name and probably never would, and headed back towards their house. Hana was sitting in the kitchen, staring at a piece of paper, eyes wider than DG had ever seen them.
“Is it true you’re taking me out for training?” she asked.
“Yes, Hime,” she smiled.
DG didn’t need magic to tell something was up and that it probably wasn’t just weapons training that had her Glitch’s mother doing that stiff too-strong-to-cry thing.
“I’ll leave you two to planning it then,” she smiled back.
She knew something was up, but she knew it wasn’t meant for her to know. DG was smart enough to understand that some things, especially with the Kage, were not to be pried into. So she went into her bedroom, grabbed a pencil and some of the paper that seemed to be appearing from nowhere, and started drawing a man’s face with pale blue eyes as it stared out of a circle, the rest of the picture shrouded in darkness.
---
“You truly intend to go forward with this plan?” Hana asked the moment DG’s door closed. As long as they stuck to the more archaic, less-used Kageri words, the princess wouldn’t understand even if she were eavesdropping.
Glitch nodded. “The limitation of our time is four days. Failure would lead to the demise of many, and I have spent much time planning.”
“…but…but the Spiral has finally begun to reach its potential,” she said quietly, turning to put a tea kettle on the stove. Tea - the Kage equivalent of alcohol. They hated being impaired, so tea was the cure-all. “I will have no problem completing my task, but yours-”
“Is something only I could do, and you know it,” he snapped, immediately regretting it when her shoulders sagged. “Mother, I wouldn’t give anyone else that job. I wouldn’t trust anyone else with it, with her, or with this plan than who I have.”
“…You always were too smart for your own good, Tomo.”
He was too busy staring at the use of his birth name, a name he’d almost forgotten beneath Nanashi and Sessha and Glitch and Ambrose, to reply before his mother had quietly left for her bedroom, the beginnings of her tea left on the counter.
---
The women of the house left at dawn, a put-upon pack horse behind them that DG had stared at for a while due to how much STUFF was on the poor creature coming along.
When the scouts, who seemed a bit surprised by how easily their Sessha had taken control of the Kage as soon as his mother was across the wooden bridge (and without any bloodshed no less), reported that the two were well on their way and that all the scouting parties had returned to the village, he gathered them together.
The sun was out, but they called him Spiral.
He explained the plan swiftly and efficiently, just the way any Kage liked it. They went to work, three fourths of them heading for the back of the valley with any bladed weapon they didn’t think they’d really need in case things went bad, and the other fourth throwing straw and oil around the outskirts of the village.
He remembered that once upon a time, DG had asked him why the houses looked like they did. It occurred to him as he lined the house he’d grown up in with anything flammable he could get his hands on that he’d forgotten to add that they were fireproof.
The bridge was rigged up, and that took the entirety of their remaining three days, with Glitch tinkering away and ruining the kitchen as oil and wire littered the area. He spent his nights getting as many willing members of the Kage to swarm him and he beat them back with a fierceness he’d never used before and they’d never seen before.
On the day Azkadellia was scheduled to show up, they started calling him Lord Spiral, or Spiral-Taichou, “Captain Spiral” in Kageri, when they thought he wasn’t listening. He’d never been happier for his plan when that started up, if only to avoid the sudden, disturbing insanity that their three-day hero worship of him of all people.
It was night when Azkadellia and her party approached. The scouts were scurrying across the bridge, every Kage back with their people nearly an hour before Glitch - or was he technically their ‘Spiral’ right now? - heard them rein up their horses near the bridge that led to the Kage.
He had his equipment. He was dressed. He was fully prepared for his part of the plan, and could only hope that a woman possessed by The Witch and looking to recruit the Kage would act like he anticipated.
“Sorceress,” one of the men in the leather said, and Azkadellia nodded,. She was grown and gorgeous, despite an impractical hairdo and a dress that looked like it weighed more than she did.
Glitch frowned at that thought, and realized how much of his Kage blood had honestly resurfaced in six years, whether it had been spent scrubbing floors or not.
“There have been no reports of the Kage scouting parties they’re famous for,” the man said, and she gave him a scathing look.
“I believe that is also one of the things they’re famous for,” she said. Glitch decided that, possessed or not, he kind of liked DG’s older sister. “Now, custom dictates that a potential business partner wait in front of the bridge, so if one of you touches a single plank of wood-”
He figured that was as good a time as any to start with the detonators, so Glitch pulled the first wire next to him. As arranged, the most experienced Kage were running out screaming with their fire-colored strips of cloth looking exactly like the flames. Then they’d collapse, as planned, when the fires were large enough to block them from sight.
The horses shrieked as he pulled the next wire, and the next, and the next, until it seemed the Kage would be nothing but charred remains by the time any of them crossed the bridge.
Which was, of course, his cue. Up the winding path, wearing the same exact clothes she’d last seen him in, hair as tidied as he could make it. The bottoms of his pants were singed though, along with the tails and cuffs of his coat, and he strode like the devil towards the single, unmoving figure and her horse on the other side of the bridge, a single torch in his hand.
Azkadellia was frowning at him, and he shed Sessha and Glitch (which he honestly was starting to like quite a bit more than any of the other names) and was Ambrose once again for the first time in a very long time. But he wasn’t AMBROSE, he was the traitor-that-hadn’t-been-and-she’d-known-it. An intriguing blip on her radar, at the most.
He was about to turn that blip into a looming time bomb. Nothing better than a possessed princess than one with an unhealthy bit of paranoia to go with it, after all.
“Your highness,” Traitor-Ambrose smirked, bowing slightly. “Lovely to see you again when I’m not drowning to death. It seems you’ve been doing well.”
Her eyes widened. “I know you.”
“Yes, you do,” he said casually, and took a step onto the bridge. It creaked under him, thanks to recent alterations. He motioned towards the village, where the diligent Kage were still ‘screaming to death’, only a few still running around in their fake flames. “So did they.” He paused. “Or at least they thought they did. Trust is an interesting thing, isn’t it.”
“You did this?” she asked darkly, clearly not pleased by the loss of the Kage.
“Technically I only started and finished it, but more or less,” he said, and widened his smirk. “Only a few more elements to go. Tell me, Princess, would you consider yourself the dark to your sister’s light?”
That made Azkadellia blink. It also made her horse instinctively back away a bit.
Ambrose, even without the mask of a villain on, had always been good at passive aggression. This was a little less subtle, but that suited him just fine.
He grinned. “I’ll take that as a yes, then, your highness.”
“How did you do this?” Azkadellia said in a voice that made him a bit tempted to screw the time-bomb part and just finish the job, but a villain never succumbed to another villain, especially when they wanted to be the other villain’s nightmare for the next ten years.
He walked another step forward. “You’re the Sorceress here. You should know magic when you see it.”
“Lies,” she hissed, but he could see the doubt in her eyes, just like he could see the disk where Toto had explained the summoning of flames, the exact requirements.
And the Kage had always had a passing resemblance to the royal family, after all. It was half the reason royalty often employed them as bodyguards.
“We’ll meet again then, cousin mine,” he said absently, and flung the torch onto the Kage-created web a meter in front of him, one that had the flames bursting forwards and down, giving him just enough time to grab onto the end that would hit Azkadellia’s side of the cliff and scuttle into the tiny box that would keep him slightly safer from the impact than if he’d had nothing else.
“We are leaving NOW,” Azkadellia snapped, practically roared, and he could hear the gallop of horses running after their leader.
Glitch applauded himself on putting all those extra-curricular acting classes to work, and managed to scurry up the remains of the bridge quietly.
He’d expected at least five guards to be waiting. He felt a little guilty when there were only two, so he kept the two knives sheathed and just beat them unconscious before heading for the small clearing he knew his mother and DG would be waiting at.
---
“And everything went as planned?”
They were sitting near the stream’s tiny waterfall, watching the cold water shoot down the gap in the rocks.
Glitch. He was Glitch again. DG had hugged him and called him her Glitch, and his mother hadn’t corrected it, so Glitch he was.
“The grappling bridge is in the packs? I’m not sure they’ll have the caves fully dug out, even with nearly four hundred of them and only a couple of meters between them and the Northest Forest-”
“I will take that as a yes, then,” she stated, eyes on a grinning DG as she swung a quarterstaff about with an uneasy but growing grace in the clearing not terribly far off. But he could still tell it was him her attention was focused on.
“I’m fine,” he stated.
“Everywhere you go now, no matter how much time passes, even if you do manage to overthrow the Sorceress, you will be hunted. Do you ever intend to tell Princess what you’ve done for her? Sacrificed for her sake?”
They were the only ones who knew that calling her ‘Hime’ was literal. He hung onto that thought. Even if something - well, something ELSE - possessed Azkadellia to return to the Kage, and she miraculously got information out of someone, they wouldn’t talk about DG. They would talk about Hime, maybe, but not DG.
He shook his head. “If I have my way, she will never need to know.”
His mother was quiet for a long time after that. She was silent even as she hugged goodbye to DG and pulled two of the bags off the packhorse, handing one to DG and, leading the horse, heading towards Glitch. Yes. He was Glitch.
She took a good, hard look at him, and he nearly jumped as his mother’s arms wrapped around him. “These long annuals have made nothing but your heart soften. And I think that was for the best.”
He wasn’t going to cry. He wasn’t.
“I love you, my brave, foolish son,” she said, and was already walking swiftly away, more than likely embarrassed.
For once, Glitch ran after her, hugging her from behind and locking her legs so she wouldn’t think it an attack and flip him into the dirt. “I’ll see you again, Mom.”
A Kage knew better than to make a promise, but the smile he got from his mother as she smacked his head with his pack from the horse was as good as one.
She’d be waiting.
---
“So where to now?” DG asked, completely nonplussed by the pack strung onto her back as she looked up at her Glitch. “I heard about these people called Guild Fighters or something. They could teach me more, probably.”
“Definitely not,” Glitch stated. Almost shouted, really. “We’re going to try and be normal for once. Plus you’re lagging in the book-learning, Hime. And it’d be better to polish your skills than add on something completely new. Hana gave you enough time to add that staff of yours into your style, right? Got a name for it yet?”
“You talk a LOT,” she said. “And no, but I’ve been trying to think of one.”
“It’ll come to you, Deeg,” he said, and ruffled her growing head of hair. “It’ll come to you.”
---
DELETED SCENE:
Glitch woke up frantically to the screams of DG, princess of the entire OZ, coming straight from her bedroom. He didn’t even think, just tore through the hallway, thinking FUCK the floor staying shiny as he kicked the door in and immediately twirled around, looking for any sort of danger.
Instead, the girl was crying, and was bleeding from her, uh.
…yeah.
“…I’ll go get Hana,” he muttered, bright red, and blushed even more when he realized there was no door to close anymore.
---
And YES, next chapter will have porn. AND YOU ALL KNOW CAIN WILL NOT TOP SO STOP BEING SURPRISED BY THIS FACT.